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This interview was conducted on June 5, 2023.

Chuck Fall: My name is Chuck Fall, an activist at Green Liberty Caucus. We are following up on our recent interview with Emanuel Pastreich concerning his run for president, which he launched in 2020, and truth politics.

We here at Green Liberty Caucus found Emanuel to be a champion for all the things that we value and believe in. Today, we’re going to discuss Emanuel’s manual “How to take down the Billionaires” in eleven chapters.

Emanuel, the topic is incendiary! Let us conduct a rapid-fire summary review of the 11 chapters as an elevator speech and give an opportunity for our guests to pose questions.

Why have you have written this 11-chapter manual and what is society’s predicament relative to the billionaire class? What is going on?

Emanuel Pastreich: To start with, we live in a profoundly controlled society wherein the rapid concentration of wealth over the last 20 years, and especially over the last 5 years, means that a very, very tiny number of wealthy individuals and families have an almost absolute decision-making power over many policies in the United States and around the world.

I wanted to articulate in this book how we can take down the billionaires, in a practical manual of 11 chapters. I discuss what specifically we need to do to rectify the situation and to create a transparent democratic and egalitarian society.

Chuck Fall: Chapter One is titled, “Assessing our position in the middle of the battle.”  You describe what we the people confront in this plutocracy.

Emanuel Pastreich: We have to start the battle by first fully comprehending what we’re up against. Who is included in this group, who are the special interests. We need to know who the families like the Waltons, the Kochs, or the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, are.

We have to consider what they’re trying to achieve using their various networks and the banks and funds, the private intelligence firms, the consulting firms and media firms that they employ.

We also need to consider where we are as individuals, and as a group. Although we outnumber the billionaires vastly, we have been fragmented. Also, we have sauteed in this narcissistic, self-centered, culture for the last 50 60 years, that makes it difficult for us to pull ourselves together and make a long-term plan. Many thoughtful intellectuals are more concerned about their family vacation in Italy than about risking their lives to defend the rule of law.

Finally, we’ve tended to outsource advocacy to other people. We think to ourselves that someone else is going to do the hard lifting, not me. The result?  Although our numbers are far greater, and we have greater assets, we’re not necessarily winning this battle.

Chuck Fall: In an in a nutshell, why is the billionaire class such a problem?

Emanuel Pastreich: If we read between the lines, we can observe their intention to reduce us to idiocy, by using technology in the form of social media, pornography, games, memes featuring fat cats and cafe lattes to dumb us down and make us passive and reactive.

They then slowly strip away our ability to participate in the decision-making process in our community, make the political parties dictatorial by nature so that there is no way to participate in them, or influence them, and make us dependent on multinational corporations for energy or food, and even for the means we use to communicate with each other such as Facebook, Twitter, or Zoom.

There are declassified reports from RAND, DARPA and elsewhere that explain the concept of mass control. Essentially the plan is to make the United States into an entertaining Disneyland with secret police and torture chambers.

We need to assess, to be honest with ourselves, as to where we stand, what we’re up against. Then we can make concrete plans that can be implemented.

A presidential election is a great way to get attention, but it’s not what we’re ultimately about. If I am elected, but the manner in which the rules of the game have changed is not challenged, it will be a meaningless election.

Chuck Fall: There was a movement back in the nineties to oppose corporate domination. Fighting the billionaire class is not a novel idea. We saw that struggle in the Occupy Wall Street protests. You’ve moved beyond that, homing in on the 0.0001%.

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, that distinction between the 1% (which was the target of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the puppet masters 0.0001% is a subtle one.

Bernie Sanders who ran a pay-to-play “liberal progressive” role in the Democratic Party, used that expression “the 1%” all the time—while he secretly sucked up to the big corporate money and made himself a tool, a cardboard messiah.

Yes, we need to identify concretely the .0001% and go after them.

At the same time, we need to grasp that there are two aspects of the domination of capital, and the control over policy. On the one hand, there are the 0.0001%, Koch, Walton, Rockerfeller and other families in the US, and around the world, who control billions of dollars in assets.

There is also a group of people who see their interests as aligned with those guys. I am taking about investment bankers at Merrill-Lynch, Goldman- Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Vanguard. These players are lawyers, managers, technicians and others who make things work.

You can think of them as a swarm of flies buzzing around the rotting dead pig’s head.

That second group is the 1%, and they are also plenty dangerous.

Ultimately, in this battle, the super-rich will have no hesitation destroying all those people who trusted them, who thought that they were on the same side. This is a war.

Chuck Fall: Chapter two is titled “the weaknesses of the billionaires.” Here you endeavor to demythologize the billionaire class. I wonder though, whether the American people generally kind of like their billionaires. Do we not internalize the possibility that maybe someday, we can rise to that level of accomplishment and achievements. We do not want to deny ourselves that opportunity to rise to that level in the future.

We do not want to diminish their accomplishments. You’re challenging that. And you’re saying that the billionaire class is parasitic, is fundamentally a threat to our culture, to our society.

There is one part in your book that is hard to follow: You argue that the wealth of the billionaire class is a fraud, that they have no money. That sounds paradoxical.

Also, you talk about how the billionaire class uses super computers—how? Finally, you argue that we the people need to change the rules of the game in this struggle.

Emanuel Pastreich: I see the struggle against the billionaire class as the equivalent of war.

That is why I invoke the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu whose writings I know since my field is Asian studies. I studied classical Chinese, so books like “The Art of War” are very familiar to me. “The Art of War” stresses understanding who your enemy is, what their nature is, what their desires are, and what they’re striving for. At the same time, it demands that you understand yourself, know your own weaknesses, your own misperceptions, your own indulgences.

The implication is that if you can grasp both, who your enemy is, who the person you’re struggling with is, and who you are, then you are on the road to success. But if you don’t get the second part, if you don’t understand who you are, or if you don’t understand who you’re dealing with, then the situation is quite dangerous.

The billionaires have spent, billions of dollars over a long period of time, on research from back in the 1960s on how to make people stupid, over time, using TV, movies, pornography and games. They conducted a lot of research on mass manipulation, as I mentioned regarding the work of DARPA on this subject. Basically, the effort has been quite successful.

It is true that many people look up to the billionaires. Elon Musk or Bill Gates are glorified because they promote themselves, spreading myths about their start as entrepreneurs creating their business in their basement, or in their garage. Supposedly, thanks to their genius and the American way they became billionaires. And so could you if you were only a bit smarter.

This narrative is a clear fraud. These billionaires rise to wealth was fixed. It wasn’t about technology; it was about access finance.

There was some brilliance in people like Mark Zuckerberg. The way in which he played various investors against each other to keep Facebook under his control was smart. But that was not his brilliance in technology or his vision for humanity-just his greed and cunning. Anyone could have built the Facebook if they had access to 50 billion dollars in loans that they did not have to pay back anytime soon. The key was the use of global finance and the leveraging of the use of supercomputers to manipulate people.

These days, money is calculated by supercomputers. Most of those supercomputers handling digital currency are not accessible to third parties. The parasite class can get billions, or trillions, of dollars by just cooking it up, using derivatives and other financial mythical beasts that live in super computers.

Supercomputers are also used to track us, anticipate our actions and manipulate, “nudge” us into making decisions that are not in our interests.

This part of the conspiracy is left out of most alternative media.

Using super computers, multinational corporations get access to extremely detailed descriptions of all of us that allow them to track us as individuals, as groups, or as communities all over the whole world: hundreds of millions of people in real time.

They use this information to anticipate what we will do. And they float all sorts of false news, concepts, ideas, and initiatives—the test runs you get in the Washington Post that is owned by Jeff Bezos—in order to test us, manipulate us, shock us, and to lull us into a state of passivity and mental disorientation that allows, assures, that no effective resistance will be organized. This mass manipulation via profiles of just about everyone and customized information fed to individuals and populations undermines the whole sense of governance.

The bottom line for us is not uncovering the latest fraud. It must be forming meaningful, organized, long-term, planned resistance that will take them down step by step by step.

Chuck Fall: So, leads into Chapter 3, “Formulate a Comprehensive Strategy.”

The Billionaire Class is a problem because in effect they have their tentacles in every aspect of society, especially with the emergence of a national security state that has since morphed into a full-blown surveillance state as a consequence of the 9/11 Patriot Act.

Emanuel Pastreich: One aspect of what is happening today which is not understood is the historical similarity between what was done during the German occupation of Eastern Europe and Russia after 1940 and what is happening now.

At that time, there was a plan to eliminate a large number of people to make room for the German population. The mass killings were headed by a separate command than the war effort—then as now.

If you read what the World Economic Forum says, or what people like Bill Gates or Elon Musk say off the cuff, you can see the traces of such an agenda.

And the Eastern front was not the first time. The same project was undertaken by European settlers moving into South and North America from the seventeenth century on. They systematically destroyed indigenous civilizations and then reduced the survivors to slavery—or killed them.

Their campaign against us is extremely serious. These guys are not playing a game. They have no interest in softball democracy.

Chuck Fall: They’re not playing softball democracy. Everyone on this call agrees with your sentiment. We are all opposed to the emerging globalist, techno- totalitarian program. We are in solidarity with the call for the US to exit the World Health Organization.

Chapter Three is a call to formulate a comprehensive strategy. You invoke Martin Luther King and the movement he was building. But you go further and speak explicitly about seizing assets; locking up criminals. On what grounds do you make such a demand?

Emanuel Pastreich: Regarding the comprehensive. Strategy, I’m not here to lecture you. I think that other people in this group probably know many of the historical details better than I do. My purpose here is to try and bring us all together, and not to tell you what to do.

I welcome your contributions to our long-term strategy. Regarding the strong language I use—it should be obvious.

If you or I made up a plan to kill off millions of people using bogus vaccines, or, if we blew up a major skyscraper and used it to start 20 years of foreign wars, thereby killing millions of people, what would happen to us?

This is pretty simple stuff, right? I can tell you what will happen to you. If you survive, you’ll be in jail, and all your assets will be seized.

That’s what happens. I am not taking a radical position. We’re, we’re basically advocating that these billionaires are citizens of the United States, or citizens of their countries, and they are subject to laws just like everyone.

They do not enjoy a special off-limits that creates a safety zone for billionaires.

At this moment that’s exactly the case, there is a safety zone that has been created for them over last 50 years, a space in which national law doesn’t apply. And this trend has entered hyper drive with the COVID-19 operation from 2020.

The first step is to say, “You guys are going to jail and these are your crimes.” I am not alone in my criticism of the Billionaire class.

Other people are pursuing this goal in parallel, and that’s welcome. I have no interest in dominating others.

My unique role is to declare, “I’m a candidate for president, and billionaire malfeasance is at front and center in my campaign. That alone goes far beyond what Robert Kennedy says, just stating that vaccines are unsafe.

I say that if Blackrock and the multi-billionaire families hiding behind Blackrock funded and planned the Covid event, then all their assets should be seized, just as my assets would be seized if I engaged in massive manslaughter in an effort to make a profit.

Chuck Fall: Green Liberty Caucus supports the calling out of state crimes, and that part of our movement demands that we explicitly identify these crimes. The covering up of these events has given a free pass to the billionaire class. I am reminded of the book “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot. He relates the story of Allen Dulles who served the Billionaire class when he worked at the firm Sullivan and Cromwell back in the day.

Next is chapter 4: “Stop complaining.” You’re telling people, don’t complain; Instead organize, file legal motions at the local level. Talk about what you mean by “stop complaining” and getting active. What does that mean?

Emanuel Pastreich: I find current politics extremely frustrating. People invite me to discussions, to talk on their online broadcasts, and such. I hear people complain to each other in great detail there about what’s wrong. Much of what they describe is correct. But that discussion ends up being a distraction from taking actual action.

Action would be organizing groups of people who like us who are closely tied together, who are willing to take risk coordinating their efforts in concentrated way for both a long-term goal and a short-term action. That team has to be asking every day, what are we going to achieve in the next battle? If you don’t have that that sort of discussion, nothing will get done. The old phrase comes to mind, “Don’t complain. Organize!”

We need to get away from, complaining and organize. That means breaking out of the narcissistic, self-indulgent “cult of self” in which one just complains when something is wrong.

Instead, make a plan; build a team; get to work. If we throw ourselves into it we will get to the point where Green Liberty Caucus has much more legitimacy than the Federal government.

And that’s where we want to head, to form an institution that is legitimate, that represents the people, and that follows the Constitution. Those other agencies that call themselves Homeland Security, NSA, or whatever, those institutions are not legitimate and ultimately, they are not the government.

To put it simply, we should take the position that if institutions do not follow the Constitution, then have no legitimacy. They are the puppets of this elite class, not the government. We have numbers of people on our side.

Chuck Fall: Chapter four is titled “End government secrecy’”

You open the chapter with an appeal to JFK’s speech of April 1961 to journalists which opens with the line, “The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society.” Green Liberty Caucus. is founded on accountability, transparency, protection for whistleblowers, and the need for an independent media (although I don’t mention the last so much in writings).

Why you why you’re highlighting secrecy as a problem. And why do you appeal to Kennedy?

Emanuel Pastreich: Kennedy was inspiring for me.  I was born eleven months after his death. Even as a child, I had a sense of myself as being “post-Kennedy.” I didn’t really understand it, but I felt that JFK had a vision. I felt sympathy later in my career since he, like myself, started from an establishment background, and was pushed to take a more radical position by the forces he encountered in his career.

You learn how things really work when you take a stand.

Secrecy casts a long shadow over our democracy. I am disturbed that much of the alternative media, and even the conspiracy websites, don’t discuss the core issues of secret governance in the United States.

Let me do so here. There are three primary tools, as I describe in book.

The first is the use of classified directives, a practice that has expanded enormously over the last 15 years, but especially over the last 4 years.

These days it is not just the CIA and Department of Defense that serve people with classified directives, but also the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services—and other agencies that have nothing to do with security.

So, you can be served at any time with a classified directive that tells you what to do, even if you do not work for the government, and you are not allowed to tell anyone about it.

This secret governance, often carried out by multinational firms on contract with the government, has gutted the entire political system.

The second tool in the box is secret law. Secret law is passed by the Congress. The existence of secret law is not a secret. What is unique about secret law is that although it has the same legal authority as Federal law, you can’t disclose it. You can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for violating secret law. Nobody knows that that the strange statements you make as a politician, or lawyer, or journalist, is a result of the secret laws you are subject to.

I am not a lawyer and cannot give great detail about secret law, but I have encountered it and I would say all political figures in the US run into secret law and classified directives on a daily basis.

The third tool of secret governance, and the most prevalent, is non-disclosure agreements.

So nowadays, if you’re subject to some evil act by a corporation or the government, you are forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement that declares that what was done is a secret forever.

Nobody knows what was done to you. For many jobs you must sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement that says that you can never discuss the illegal and unconstitutional actions that you are involved in.

I want to say something about whistleblowers, people like Snowden or Assange, who dominate the corporate media. These guys are not representative of the struggle against secrecy, nor are they central.

Most people in government or corporations who encounter state crimes and put down their foot, speaking the truth, are just eliminated without a trace.

They are not necessarily killed, but they will spend the rest of their lives teaching part-time at community colleges, their careers will be destroyed. This is how government works in the US and it is now about laws but secret law and classified directives.

Chuck Fall: The Department of Commerce is subject to a law that specifies that anybody employed (that covers everyone from air airline pilots to the engineers that wrote the NIST report on WTC Building 7) have no whistleblower protections and they are not provided protection under that law. You’re raising an important element in in our struggle, and that the need for transparency in governance. We are not getting that in our current national security government now hyped-up after the Patriot Act.

Emanuel Pastreich: It all goes back to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 coming out of the Civil War and Reconstruction whereby Congress said the military cannot be used domestically to handle civil disturbances. There have been serious incursions into domestic affairs by the military even after the Federal troops left the South in 1876 as part of the settlement of the Rutherford Hayes / Samuel Tilden electoral count dispute. Today, that separation of powers is in the trash. Homeland Security is setting up fusion centers in Southeast Asia, in Central Asia, in in South America. We have the FBI signing agreements with contractors to information for profit. The military is authorized to infiltrate and to engage citizens. Much of it has privatized so as to serve multinational corporations and billionaires, using classified directives a to shut up, and shut down, people.

Chuck Fall: That is a big and serious problem. You are the only one on the Presidential campaign circuit addressing this issue in such detail.

Robert Kennedy is speaking a truth politics, and I’m proud of him for raising truth issues in his campaign. But you are definitely going further.

Moving on, “Chapter 6. Don’t outsource the movement.” What do you mean?  By “don’t outsource the movement” are you suggesting that people need to step up, to take responsibility, to take control of our liberation?

Emanuel Pastreich: We face the moral equivalent, literal equivalent, of war. Of course, it’s not war in the sense that we are used to.

Look at these NGO’s that bombard you with email and letters.

You donate to them on the assumption that if you give the money they will do the hard lifting for you, they will solve the problems for you. That advertising is a fraud.

Most of the money for these NGOs come from a handful of rich people who follow a corporate agenda (even those who pose as anti-corporate).

And then there are the little fish like you who send in $25. They completely ignore you.

These NGOs function as a distraction from the real crisis in our society and they siphon off money from, and draw attention away from, actual change.

The only way to organize real opposition that’s capable of taking back the government and restoring the Constitution is to organize ourselves tightly and to rely on our internal cohesion and collective efforts. We need to rely on people whom we trust in our group and then to expand that group. I think that this group, those in this discussion, about 10 people, is an excellent start. I mean, it’s more than enough to build a movement.

Chuck Fall: In Chapter 7 you call for forming independent communities. I want to point out that at the Green Liberty caucus website we have a section on libertarian municipalism. You and others in the movement, both left and right, are calling for the decentralization of power into communities. Are independent communities realistic? Explain your vision.

Emanuel Pastreich: I am not a romantic who extols the glories of agrarian America. It was great that American agriculture all organic, but there were lots of problems in rural America. Humans are flawed animals from the beginning,

We must recognize that we have lost our self-reliance, especially since the end of the Second World War. We’ve been made dependent on energy in the form of oil gas, coal, and foods, processed, factory farmed and imported.

Before, most farms were able to produce energy using windmills and water mills, human and animal labor. Now we are dependent on corporations for energy just as we are dependent on corporations, and on the Federal Reserve, for money.

In the nineteenth century, even early twentieth century, people were much more independent. Many families didn’t need to use money unless they went to town. You could barter, or use other means, to support yourself from your farm and from the farms of your neighbors.

This loss of independence, the growth of corporate and state dependency, makes us depend on auto makers, distribution and logistics companies, and supermarket chains. City planning it designed to make automakers and oil companies happy. If you are a good parent, care for your neighbors and grow organic food, it means nothing. If corporations build thousands of automobiles that no one wants, it is called “growth.”

By creating communities in which we can grow our own food, make our own furniture and tools, help each other—and most important of all make sure the money stays in the community and is not syphoned off by multinational corporations—that will make us independent.

We cannot do this tomorrow, and not all of us are going to be able to do it.

It is the correct direction.  The intention of the other side is clear. The intention of the other side is to dumb us down, to restrict our access to energy, to degrade the quality of food, and set lay out a path into the invisible prison that they have prepared for us. And we will accept that prison ultimately because it seems more comfortable than freezing in the dark.

Chuck Fall: Chapter 8 is titled: “End the cult of the self and stop corporate corporations from inducing narcissism.” Speak briefly about that topic.

Emanuel Pastreich: We face a systematic effort, based upon research conducted back in the fifties, manipulate people by inducing narcissistic, self-centered behavior.

If you notice that youth are more self-centered today than was the case before, that is because they have been brainwashed by the corporate culture around them—it is not a natural change.

That is how we’re controlled. Milton Mayer’s book “They Thought they were Free” describes how under the Third Reich in Germany citizens were convinced that they were entirely free through advanced psychological manipulation in media and entertainment, in music and art. The advances in technology make the assault even more dangerous today. We are not free at all. We are deeply manipulated people.

Chuck Fall: Chapter 9, “Take control of the economy” demands fundamental banking and monetary reform. You suggest that money is created out of thin air, and that the billionaires employ the banks, intelligence agencies, and other institutions with authority to create artificial wealth. What do you mean by, “Take control of the economy?”

Emanuel Pastreich: You probably have a better understanding of economics than I do. I’m proud to say I didn’t take a single economics class as undergraduate, and I believe it’s a false science. I think bloodletting is maybe a little bit more effective than economics as a science and astrology has its charms.

But I take no offense if you studied economics. I would be happy to learn from you.

Money belongs to the people and we need a monetary policy that is determined by the people.

If we are focused and we develop a plan, we can implement it systematically and build out so that citizens slowly take control of our local economies, and then, building up from there take back the national economy.

We need, above all, to build a grass-roots local economies focused around food production.

Chuck Fall: Chapter 10 discusses the role of the intellectual, and how to reestablish meaningful education, build out independent journalism. The title is “The Treason of the intellectuals.” That seems to be a very critical perspective on the intellectual leadership of our country.

Emanuel Pastreich: I’m a card carrying intellectual, and even could be called an establishment intellectual as I studied at Yale and Harvard.

I acknowledge my part in the establishment, and I have profoundly sorry for how we have failed you.

It’s always going to be true that citizens are dependent on a group of highly educated people. It’s a fact that not everybody can gain specialized knowledge in all fields, and be able to judge what information is reliable.

Working people are not going to be able to understand national security issues, economics, semiconductors, energy production, etc. They are going to be dependent on the honesty and the integrity of the intellectual class, on its willingness to speak truth to power.

What went wrong in the United States? I think it has to do with the end of the Cold War—but I am not sure. It is a fact that over the last thirty years increasingly intellectuals saw their interests as aligned with those of the rich, essentially standing on the side of the establishment and against ordinary citizens. They did so often while employing coloration that made them appear “progressive” and “diverse.”

I watched the growing influence of the wealthy on the college environment. I was a professor at University of Illinois, starting teaching in 1997, and I watched the process by which the money increasingly ran the show. The universities, and the professors in them, were no longer interested in society. In the end, when I said, “we should talk to citizens,” people thought I was insane. They told me, “You should be publishing articles that can get you grants and thus secure your tenure at Harvard, or wherever. Play the game.”

So, we lost the intellectual class and it with went education.

Now, education has become a coronation. You receive this degree, a crown, that allows you to get a job working at Goldman Sachs. You don’t actually have to learn anything. You just have to jump through the hoops. We witness education being boiled down.

At my alma mater, Yale University, there has been profound drop in the quality of education for students. The facilities are beautiful; all the ivy league colleges are lovely these days. They’ve been spruced up like resorts; they polished all the wood and there are beautiful rose bushes that are carefully trimmed. But the quality of education has gone down. There are no serious questions being asked and lots of taboo topics.

The students are prepared to follow orders and trained to enjoy an indulgent, self-centered life. The idea that somehow you have an obligation to country and society, or that you have an obligation to know the truth, these quaint ideas have vanished. There is no sense that receiving that education, which others cannot, involves a moral obligation to serve society, or even to know the truth. But I do not think it is okay to be fuzzy about what COVID-19 is.

Journalism is an extension of education, and it’s more important than schools because many people rely on reports in the media who do not get quality educations.

We see now the beginning of a renaissance of journalism. There are people who write independently, who engage in thoughtful, journalistic writing. And I’ve been impressed by this development because such journalism was not there before. I spend so much time just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world.

It’s a puzzle. You have to read all these different sources, and apply your critical reading skills, check for plausibility, and to read between the lines, in order to know what they’re saying, what the vested interests are trying to achieve. As J. P. Morgan said famously, “There are always two reasons behind a political decision: a good reason and a real reason.”

Journalism as a whole has died, has been absorbed into advertising. I noticed this trend when I was teaching at Berkeley in 1995. When the New York Times went from black and white to color, suddenly it because sensationalist and impressionistic.

Of course, the New York Times had problems way back but it had certain sort of standards for reporting and for presenting a diversity of opinions. The New York Times became an advertising medium for selling an an upper West Side lifestyle of café latte at lavish bookstores to the masses, Integrity went out the window.

We are here now trying to talk to a general audience, about real issues. I write speeches, which are articles that inform ordinary people about what’s happening in our country.

Chuck Fall: Chapter 11 is titled “Taking the Billionaires down one step at a time.” You emphasize here that we cannot take them down until the steps described in the prior chapters are attended to, especially secret governance. You envision multiple organizations to push forward these efforts, including, possibly a provisional government. You say we must name names, calling out malfeasance.

Emanuel Pastreich: Chapter 11 is sparse on details because we will have a lot of different people involved with different approaches. I want to say that we cannot take these people down overnight. If Bill Gates is arrested tomorrow, I will not consider that to be a victory. I would think that the powers that be behind the scenes said let’s just scapegoat, Bill Gates so we can go on with the party.

The only way that we can establish a more democratic, more transparent, and more egalitarian society is using a slow, step by step, process—which is what they used against us.

First, we take back the foundations. The foundations would be, above all, spiritual and intellectual independence. That means we establish a society in which the citizen is able to comprehend the world, and to think for herself, for himself. Next, we need independence in terms of community, and an economy over which you have control over. That means stopping the money that is flowing in and out from multinational investment banks behind the scenes. They have taken over local banking for much of the country.

We need to get the word out to the people about how we will take them down. Getting accurate information out is the next step after we have some solid communities.

These efforts are already taking place, and not my brilliant ideas. My manual is based on things that I have heard from others, or that I saw others doing.

My role was to bring it together. Bringing things together at this transitional moment is critical.

I want to make it clear to everyone that power is not my goal. I’m willing to take considerable amount of risk but I have no financial interest in this. No one’s paying me to do this, and, in fact, like Mark, I have taken considerable financial damage for the effort to articulate another view.

Tom Rodman: How do we get these people out of their comfort zones, get them to wake up?

Emanuel Pastreich: Waking people up can be tricky. My language is not always so friendly, and I’m not good at kissing babies as a politician. I ran into enormous problems concerning climate change. There’s now a large number of people who are taking secret kickbacks to say that climate change, the environment crisis, is all a fraud made up by the World Economic Forum. They don’t even touch on biodiversity, on real science.  Clearly there is money for people in the alternative media to say that it’s all made up.

But I was there. I saw people in academia, and in government who were dismissed from their jobs, or denied funding because they spoke out about climate change and the collapse of biodiversity. We were not paid, but punished.

But these days if you say that COVID19 was a fraud, and 9.11 was a false flag, everyone expects you to say climate change is also made up. I am not going to bow before that false idol.

Chuck Fall: Thanks for your insights. We will come back to this topic and transhumanism in the future.

Jon Olsen: I think we’re all pretty much congruent with the views that you’ve expressed to your manual. I want to note that I am disturbed by the current conflation by so many of fascism with communism. Fascism is totalitarian systemin which I command and you obey, or else. There is no real ideology or philosophy involved. No intellectual content.

Communism, by contrast, has rich history of ideology and political philosophy. It was committed to the empowerment of the working class. We need to keep that tradition in mind.

Our movement resembles the little boy who says that the emperor has no clothes.

I watch the mainstream media on occasion for reconnaissance purposes, to see what those guys are saying. What we need is for thousands of us to say publicly what we know privately, that we do not believe those lies. We have to take down the media of lies that is part of the foundation of the empire.

Chuck Fall: Judith, what comments or questions do you have?

Judith Osterman: You have studied past rebellions and revolutions. I wonder what lessons you’ve drawn from them. Perhaps you can talk about strategies that you admired, that we might imitate from the past.

Emanuel Pastreich: That’s a fascinating question, and I hope we can have another session to discuss what we can learn from other revolutionary movements, what was successful and unsuccessful in the American Revolution, the Civil war, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Mexican revolution, efforts in the Spanish Republic or the New Deal.

The bottom line is getting uncompromising revolutionary change done is always difficult. We will start with a small number of people who are committed intellectually, have the ability to organize and carry out these changes. At the same time, we have to make a broad appeal to everybody.

What worries me is that when the people trauma induced by COVID-19 and 9/11 that there will be such revulsion and anger against the establishment, including those among my classmates who betrayed the people. It is going to be difficult to take the next step in a rational, democratic manner. People will want blood. That’s my greatest concern at this moment.

Perhaps the Russian Revolution is a good parallel. In 1905 there was hope of some sort of democratic process, a progressive politics.

But the scale of the betrayal of the people in the First World War by the ruling class, the pointless slaughter of farmers and workers following secret diplomacy in Russia, that pushed the entire discourse to an extreme. Perhaps the response made sense, but it limited what Russia could do after the revolution.

Judith Osterman: I have heard that the power elites plan to create a severe global economic crash that will force to adopt a digital currency. Clearly that has already started. What do you think?

Emanuel Pastreich: I think the enactment of digital fascism has not gone as fast as they were hoping because people are finally starting to organize. There are people like us even in the Green Party.

I guess people were not as stupid as they postulated in their DARPA scenarios. The billionaires and their advisors underestimated the ability of people to organize resistance under complete ideological assault. Some people were not wasting all their time watching memes on Facebook.

But they got a lot right. The vast majority of people were totally asleep, let them advance this level without resistance. It is sad for me to see my friends, extremely educated and previously political committed people who have bought into this COVID19 fascism out of cowardice or exhaustion.

Most are not thinking about digital payment systems as a form or war. They are unaware of the possibility that another 9/11 would result in all their money just vanishing. We still have a lot of work to do.

Marvin Sandnes: I saw this YouTube video last week of a graduating class that was presented with a twenty-foot screen featuring the face of Zelensky.

The whole graduating class was wildly cheering.

I’m sure that 90% of those kids embrace the vaccination campaign. I’m sure that 90% of those kids accept the story that terrorists, Muslim enemies, were behind 9/11.

We need to work with people first with those who think like us. We need to work with young people who work with their hands, who understand what needs to be done. Most of the kids at universities are lost.

But where to start? There is no organization that helps us to reach that vast group of youth who are far more intelligent than these college graduates.

Your effort to reach out is commendable, but sadly we tend to focus on people who in college, or college graduates.

Chuck Fall: Good point, Mark. How do we reach people? Of course, we have to reach people in college. Be we need to reach more people than that. I think it is valuable to stop at truck stops and talk with truckers while they’re eating or drinking having coffee.

Emanuel Pastreich: I’m there. I’d be happy to do a tour like that.

Chuck Fall: You talk about the importance of education and journalism

We have to rely on the first amendment, on our ability to speak, to protest, to assemble and petition grief.

That needs to happen on multiple levels and we need multiple points of engagement by well-organized grassroots, organizations. That is the core, no, of your proposal?

Emanuel Pastreich: Absolutely. The Constitution is central to this project, to this battle. It’s going to come down to this in the final scene: we will say that we follow the Constitution and since the Constitution defines what the United States of America, and is not, what government is, and what it is not. If we run into some clown who works for a transnational IT firm, a corporate intelligence consultancy, we will say, “You may think that you have a contract with DoD that allows you to call yourself the “government,” but, in fact, you are illegally meddling in governance. Get out of here.”

That is why the Constitution is so critical for us; we need some sort of compass to guide us through this maelstrom.

Mark Goldman: We need to have more of these conversations in order to consolidate our approach and focus on what’s possible. I think there is plenty that possible.

The crisis is so deep today that these problems you have identified are now visible to many for the first time. We now know who the people are behind this and what the problems are. We know the secret history of the elite of which most were previously totally unaware.

A big part of our effort must concern educating our children. Marvin suggested that our children are lost, and I have to agree.

We have lost our way because we failed to teach them, to tell them why have a constitution? What does it mean to have freedom? We will must do if we lose that freedom?

We must start, not with major donors and corporations, but with the truth, with dignity, compassion, courage, and love. That is what will transform the nation, not a series of commercial advertisements. Most of us were never taught these fundamental values.

We need a common foundation, an affirmation of what is important in life.

Truth is our most powerful weapon. We should tell the truth no matter what we are up against.

The commitment and the understanding of how important truth is will make the difference. Emanuel suggests some strategies.

I don’t know what all the strategies must be, but we must start by fundamentally reevaluating what is important in life, and what we are morally obligated to create through our efforts.

Chuck Fall: I say Amen to that. An excellent concluding remark from Mark. I am Chuck Fall of the Green Liberty Block; we support the efforts of Emanuel Pastreich in his run for President, and his efforts to advance a national conversation, and to be a leader in truth politics. We are building a movement for truth politics and invite everyone to join us.

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.