“Pastreich leaves the Green Party presidential race”
Hrjoje Moric Show TNT Radio
“Pastreich on leaving the Green Party presidential race”
Hrjoje Moric Show
TNT Radio
October 10, 2023
https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/emanuel-pastreich-on-the-hrvoje-moric-show-10-october-2023/
Hrvoje Morić:
Returning to the Rebel Transmission is Emanuel Pastreich, the sole presidential candidate who speaks the truth and demands long-term strategies for the real dangers we face.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Hrvoje Morić:
The first time I had you on my podcast, we talked all about COVID, among other subjects. We talked about the election here on TNT the second time. A lot of things have happened since then. You recently left the Green Party; and then Cornel West left the Green Party. Tell us about what’s going on there.
Emanuel Pastreich:
It was a very interesting couple of weeks. Cornel West and I were the only two candidates who were up there on Wikipedia as candidates for the Green Party because we both had substantial backing within the Green Party, and sophisticated websites and speeches. But the situation was a bit bizarre because there was Cornel West on TV, being interviewed by everybody, and being presented as the only candidate in the Green Party. I did not exist, except for, of course, among a substantial group who live in an alternative reality that does not exist for the acceptable “alternative” media.
I wanted to give my thanks to you. You are the first person to interview me since the seventeen days that I was the contender in the Green Party. I got another offer of an interview just yesterday. But the “alternative” media, was silent. The inconvenient fact for the “self-crowned left” that there was another candidate for president in the Green Party who had legitimacy and a following, who had started his campaign back in 2020, had a reasonable education, was also a professor, and also wrote many books on diverse subjects had to be covered up.
Although plenty of people in the Green Party saw me as being on a par with Cornel West as a candidate, a decision was made somewhere back behind the scenes that I didn't exist.
Hrvoje Morić:
It's interesting some of the dynamics here. You cite this petition launched within the Green Party “Remove the U.S. Green Party’s Conflict of Interest Leadership” that describes endemic narcissism, possible COINTELPRO-like operations, I.E the US government and its agencies like the FBI infiltrating and neutralizing opposition within the Green Party.
Emanuel Pastreich:
I would say Homeland Security is probably the likely agency using an “anti disinformation” budget.
Hrvoje Morić:
Or DHS. So, what are your thoughts as to what's going on with the Green Party itself?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Right. So there are movements taking place at two levels in the Green Party. One move is to make the Green Party a part of the Democratic Party, and ultimately, Cornel West who was selected from the startas the candidate ended up taking the Democratic operative Peter Daou as his manager in the Green Party. That final blow reduced the Green Party to just a greener branch of the Democratic Party, slightly more progressive, slightly more aggressive on minimum wage, and some other issues, but not addressing any serious topics like COVID-19 policy, or the most essential issue, which is the rule of large parts of the United States by secret governance via private intelligence firms and private security firms employing secret law and classified directives—and of course, behind the curtains, rule by global finance, State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock, and others--and behind those a small number of billionaire families pulling the strings.
We can have different opinions about the ultimate structure of that form of governance, but basically, the Green Party is not interested in that discussiono. The have declared, “We will lap up identity politics but we are not going to touch the elites.”
I don't get classified updates from Homeland Security about their programs, and Homeland Security programs has been outsourced to Booze Allen Hamilton, CASI, and other private intelligence firms lately, but I know how it works. They have these funds that they give to particular operatives who work in the Green Party, who are progressive on 70% of the issues, but when it comes to the serious matters, like COVID-19, for some reason they find an excuse to do nothing, or to be in opposition to real action.
That's what sunk Cornel West. He was surrounded by these operatives.
When Brother Cornel appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show, and he was asked pointed questions about the COVID-19. At first he didn't have anything to say, but then he offered a positive spin, saying, “Well, we should have some sort of truth commission in the future date,” with no details. Dore liked that, but then, when he pressed West for details, West responded, I don't really think the vaccine issue is that serious, there are more important issues like prisons, or whatever, that we should focus on. I'm not going to focus on COVID.
West suggested that COVID truth was a matter of personal taste and preference.
This is a ridiculous position since COVID-19 is linked to private prisons, is linked to the military. It's all part of the same monster that West supposedly opposes.
Hrvoje Morić:
Yeah, I saw excerpts of that interview with Dore, and it didn't go down well for Cornel West.
Do you think Cornel will have any success as an independent?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Regarding Professor West, I have no personal hostility to him. I sent a copy of my book “Fear No Evil” when I ran as independent in 2020 and he sent me a kind email response saying that he received it. I've seen some of his interviews where he talked about important issues where I agree with his position.
The problem was his limited hangout, “think left, live right” Starbucks attitude. That is to say that he thinks we can just take off the table, cordon off, these sensitive issues related to the take-over of governance by this combination of finance, the military, intelligence, and multinational corporations and we can just say to ourselves, “We'll just ignore all that unpleasant stuff, and we'll just talk about race, civil rights, living wages, and healthcare.” For me, that attitude just does not make sense.
People have different interpretations of West’s decision to leave the Greens, and I want to be agnostic about his reasons. It could be that he was fed up with the Green Party and he wanted out, especially when he saw all the corruption.
It's also possible that he decided to run as independent so to say he's not a real candidate anymore. He'll be on TV of course, but he is not going to take the next step towards being a serious candidate because it was getting dangerous. He was getting up to polling at 4% or 5%, and it wouldn't surprise me, from my own experience, if he started to get threats at that point, with people pressuring him, and saying bad things are going to happen.
Cornel West is a decent man, but not very brave, and perhaps when things started to get rough, he wanted out.
Running as independent is essentially is like running your own show. It's a variety show; it's not taking the bulls by the horns.
Hrvoje Morić:
I know you continue your “Fear No Evil” campaign which I think is great. Will you continue as independent or will you focus on this “Fear no Evil” campaign?
Emanuel Pastreich:
The main group in Green Party that supported me is the Green Liberty Caucus, an effort to bring together conservative and progressive groups to address state crimes. That is not to say state crimes are the only issue, but they argue that state crimes should be on the table, be something to be discussed. The Green Party has a significant block of people who are committed to this view of politics and who believe in a dialogue with what we might call libertarians or constitutionalists, which is quite healthy. Green Liberty supported me and backed me, and so we got all the way up to being one of only two candidates who were seriously considered.
So, what to do now? Well, I resigned because it was clear that I couldn't raise any money within the Green Party and they were going to block me out of everything. I'm not independently wealthy; I can't run a campaign on my own. I had no choice but to pull out.
Our vision right now, myself and Chuck Hall of the Green Liberty Caucus, is to run Green Liberty as a political action committee, but to devote ourselves to building a movement that will advocate for truth, build up independent local communities, and rebuild politics from the bottom up. That vision is popular among a large number of people in the Green Party, and people across the country.
My position is that I'm happy to be president if asked, but I'm not going to waste my time going through all the hoops to become a president in the current process, i.e., spending hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars to get signatures, which are essentially being bought.
Hrvoje Morić:
What about RFK Jr. going independent? He made an announcement today that was very fiery, balls to the wall stuff, much in the vein of what you're doing with “Fear No Evil.” He's speaking out on COVID, on the deep state, deep politics. Do you think he'll have success as independent?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, I certainly hope so. He's trying to pass through the eye of the needle, saying to himself,
“I can work within this broken system. I can compromise on COVID-19. I say that there is a COVID-19 virus, while I suggest that vaccines are dangerous. But I supported all vaccines, except for COVID-19, when I ran as a Democrat. I'm not going to look at the real Israel or what the deep state machinations that set up Israel so as to force us into a world war. I'm going to pass over all these things in silence. But if I can get elected president, then I'm going to do lots of good things.”
Maybe this strategy will work. I mean, human history is twisted and sometimes people have to do unpleasant things in order to succeed.
I'm obviously not going to cross that bridge. You could say it was never an option for me since no one will put me on TV, as opposed to Kennedy who can appear on mainstream TV.
Therein lies the tragedy of Robert Kennedy, who I think is a decent soul. He worked hard on a lot of issues that I agree with, striving bravely for decades, but in order to get through the hoops (in the Democratic Party, or as an independent), he was forced to collect money. We saw Dennis Kucinich on TV boasting about how many millions of dollars they'd raised. I just couldn't get enthusiastic about them raising millions of dollars because I know that money is not free.
So yes, maybe there's an opportunity for him, but I'm very skeptical. I think we're witnessing a larger invisible process of institutional and civilizational decay, and collapse, in which all the institutions, whether it's the Democratic Party, Harvard University, the New York Times, even the progressive critical newspapers, are essentially falling apart in an epistemological sense. Words no longer match up with things.
People engage in garbled debates because of intellectual fog induced by the trauma of 9/11 and COVID. They're just trying to protect themselves from facing too much truth. It's hard to imagine that you could follow that beaten path to the presidency, become president, and do something meaningful at that point. It is more likely that the Oval Office would become a cage.
Hrvoje Morić:
I think your analysis is spot on. I didn't want to ask too much because you've mentioned Homeland Security.
Shout-out to the DHS for banning me from PayPal last year forever!
The cover of Newsweek last week shouts “The Enemy Within” suggesting that they are now coming out in the open, just one step away from rounding people up.
The say to our face that the intelligence agencies, the full brunt of the American government, will target Americans, just average Americans who love the Constitution, who are patriotic, and a lot of them labeled as “conservative.” We see DHS and FBI now free to go after dissidents in America.
For 20 years I've been calling the USA the “USSA,” the “United Soviet States of America.” One of my favorite TV shows was based on Philip Dick's novel, “Man in the High Castle,” an alternative history of World War II where the Nazis and the Japanese win and take over North America. Do you have any thoughts on the significance of that Newsweek cover and its implications?
Emanuel Pastreich:
The Russian author Dmitry Orlov wrote a fascinating book entitled “Reinventing Collapse” in which he describes the parallels between the United States and the late Soviet Union.
Hrvoje Morić:
Yes, I have interviewed Dmitry Orlov.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Orlov sketches out in detail the parallels. When I saw the zombie apocalypse of Trump versus Biden, it reminded me immediately of the end of the Soviet Union when we saw governance by the decrepit--it doesn't seem to be a total accident. The decay was not the result of aged people ruling, it was a result of ideological collapse.
Although the ideologies of the Soviet Union and United States were not the same, both were founded by a revolution in which a certain ideological position was put forth as the foundation for the government, which had its pluses and minus on both cases. The United States lasted longer than the Soviet Union, but it's following the same trajectory.
Let us step back; I'm being a professor now, not a politician, if you'll forgive me. The bottom line is that it's nothing personal.
Any empire that lasts, going from republic to an empire, for 250 years, is doing pretty good. These sorts of institutions do not last forever. They start to generate internal contradictions that bring them down.
The tragic part that we're seeing here is the result of what happened in 1944 and 1945, which is that the United States elite, specifically the Roosevelt administration, but also a lot of others, bought into the idea that they could inherit the mantle of the British Empire, just take it over.
That thinking was going on earlier, but it really was in 1945--I would say the bombing of Dresden was the turning point, when the United States Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force bombed Dresden in this incredibly brutal manner. They were following imperialist policies like the British Empire in India and South Africa, and not the anti-fascism that drove the first half of the war. They were making it clear to Germany, and then, with the atomic bonds, they made it clear to Japan, how things were going to be run in this empire.
That was the tragedy because before that the United States, although not a perfect country, had a tradition of anti-imperialism dating back to the American Revolution when it rejected the British East India company, and many Americans supported the Republic in Spain in the 1930s. We were committed to anti-fascist and anti-imperialist movements. But everything shifted after the war.
We don't have historical perspective these days, all being addicted to our smartphones, so we don't realize that this process that took place over 70 years, is, in historical sense, quite fast.
Hrvoje Morić:
Before I had you the first time on my podcast, I read your Substack analysis of COVID-19 and almost fell off my chair. It was one of the best. I shared it everywhere I could because I thought it was one of the most insightful analyses of what really went down in COVID 1984, as I like to call it, or COVID 9.11.
First, let us finish off the election stuff, we discussed the Green Party, Cornel West, RFK Jr., and yourself. Do you have any thoughts about Trump, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
It seems like Trump will be the Republican nominee, and I've got no idea what's going to happen to the Democratic Party. Will we have Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden again, or “Bernies” as we call him. Some people question whether there will even be a 2024 election. Might we see some force majeure events?
Emanuel Pastreich:
We don't know what's going to happen. And recent events in Israel, which I interpret as a push to start a war with Iran, a war that would be linked to the war with Russia, means we do not even know what's going to happen over the next couple of weeks.
I hope we can avoid a world war, but that Hamas event is going to play into this election. For the extremely corrupt governments we find in the United States or Israel, in Biden or Netanyahu, war serves two critical purposes. First, it reinforces the power of the state, gives them legitimacy when they did not have it before. This process we saw in the First World War; it's almost identical this time.
Secondly, the war creates consumption and demand. You can make fighter planes, and they'll all be destroyed, or whatever manufactured munitions the same. That props up the broken economy for a while. The possibility of a further expanded war will affect the election.
In the case of Donald Trump, I would say that today he is a different character than he was in 2020. In 2020, and this is not that talked about in even the alternative media, there was a substantial group of people in the United States who were disgusted with COVID and who backed Donald Trump, including people in government. They felt there was some hope in Trump’s campaign.
That movement didn't have much to do with Trump himself, except for the fact that he has a bit braver than most politicians, as corrupt as he may have been. He started to say and do some positive things in the 2020 election. Then he was put under house arrest with COVID-19. He “came down with COVID-19” and the whole election was shut down from that point on.
I never recognized Biden as being a legitimate president. It doesn't mean that I think Trump was a good president either, but Biden was not illegitimate.
This time, however, I think Donald Trump has been captured at a profound level.
I think he's probably living under house arrest, told what to do by his detail from Homeland Security (The message goes out through Secret Service). They probably tell him what to say and do. He is being set up as a false alternative, to suggest to the people that there is some possibility of opposition to this totalitarian corporate state when there is not.
Trump is going to be a little bit against COVID-19, but he is not going to say no to vaccines. He is going to be a little bit against the oppressive government, but he is also going to push for war with China.
This is what we call the baited gambit. I find very discouraging. But in a way, what Trump offers is still better than what we saw in the debates between the other Republicans, which I thought was a comedy show. Basically, all of them are bought and paid for.
Trump has is a pro-wrestler, or a pro-wrestling fan--a bit unpredictable. He has a bit of mafioso decency. He held up certain values, certain principles. He's was marginally better than Biden or the other Republicans, before. But now I don't have any expectations.
Hrvoje Morić:
I agree with you that whatever black swan card Trump may have held, although there was some hope that he could do something no one expected and that could be good, that is over now.
Regarding the Israel-Palestine world war issue, a number of analysts are saying that the combination of the Ukraine situation with what is happening now in Israel-Palestine is already World War III underway. This is just a new front of that global war that is unfolding.
In my podcasts I encourage my guests to create “evergreen content,” material that lasts for the ages. I was reviewing an interview I did in 2020 with Dr. Francis Boyle. We were talking about all about the Middle East.
Emanuel Pastreich:
He is also at University of Illinois, where I taught, so I know him personally.
Hrvoje Morić:
Boyle said that the end game is war with Russia and China and Iran. Like you suggest. He said it is all about starting a war with Iran, then dragging in Russia and China. Those countries are the final holdouts against this Western American empire.
Emanuel Pastreich:
I would add that it is not simply an American empire that is against Iran; there is a class element to it. There is a handful of billionaires in Israel, in Russia, in the United States, in China who see this as a way to make money, to play nations, peoples, against each other. I think what is happening is similar to what happened at the start of the First World War.
Before the First World War, we started to see organized resistance in France, and in Germany, to the extremely corrupt governments that were bought and paid for by multinational corporations and banks. It was a different group of banks controlled by the Warburgs, Rothchilds, and the Goulds, but basically it is the same structure as what we have now.
The bankers wanted to take a few incidents, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand being the most prominent, and use them to create a war. Domestically that war created absolute authority for the central government which was so corrupt as to have no legitimacy. There was, and there is today, a need for a world war at the domestic level. As Clauswitz said, “war is an extension of politics”—national politics.
I would not give blanket immunity to Russia, China, or Iran. I will not say that they're pure and that this evil American empire's going after them. They suffer their own internal contradictions, billionaires are pushing those countries, those governments, towards war as well.
Hrvoje Morić:
I wouldn't disagree with you. Actually, in my last interview with Boyle we were focusing on COVID but he offered the same view as you do, that it's a class issue and that it's the elites in all of these countries who are basically working together against us.
Emanuel Pastreich:
I want to say to people, “You find yourselves in this impossible situation that looks perilous. The answer is, know your neighbors; talk to your friends. Start to create your own independent local economy, because that's what's going to save you. You can share things with neighbors. You can grow food together and prepare to resist, because we're going to have to.”
The infection is so deep. It is not just the Democratic and Republican Parties, but the entire government, and all institutions. The cancer has it's gone to the bone. We're going to have to build up from the bottom. That doesn't mean that we have to throw everything away, but we have to bravely set forth and rebuild the republic in the United States, and for that matter, in a lot of countries.
Hrvoje Morić:
I've had other people say similar things. We need to get to know our neighbors, to work locally, as you do in your “Fear No Evil” movement in the Green Liberty Political Action Committee, building momentum and building movements from the bottom up.
I enjoyed what you wrote recently on your Substack “Saying that “climate change is a fraud”. You made many points things that I agree with. You say the fact that geoengineering is used to alter the climate, the fact that directed energy weapons and arson are employed to send off forest fires that are then blamed on climate change must be addressed first. We had the Hawaii incident recently and some people explained it in terms of directed energy weapons. That same week I saw mainstream news articles discussing how the Pentagon already has directed energy weapons and they're working to accelerate deployment of those weapons.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are set up to target the entire world. He's now held up as a hero by some people, which I really think is tragic.
Let me say a word about climate change: first we should be scientific.
I don't assume that I understand climate change. I'm totally open to an open discussion on what it is. I think it's a complex phenomenon. It is not the result of one thing. It's not just carbon dioxide. But I think we can say that long-term the spread of deserts, the pollution of our waters, and rising temperatures in some areas (it's not universal) is something that is serious and that deserves scientific inquiry. But I don't buy into any agenda about handing power over two multinational banks and corporations.
Even if petroleum did not affect the climate at all, it's an addictive substance that forces you to give up a large part of your income to multinational banks because you are forced to use cars by corrupt city planning. And petroleum is hidden in plastic which is equally offensive, and dangerous.
Microplastics are found in the deep sea these days. People assume that plastic is fine, it’s recyclable, it's inevitable. But we pay a steep price for every piece of plastic. Plastic is a way for corporations to force-feed to you petroleum.