The Bitter Tonic Known as Truth: Selected Speeches 2024 Campaign for President

This collection of inspiring speeches by Emanuel Pastreich from his fearless campaign for president in the 2024 election touches on literally every critical aspect of the crisis faced by the United States. Pastreich suggests, quite literally, that the only meaningful medicine for such the spiritual and institutional illness our nation suffers from as a republic possessed by the evil spirits of ancient empires, is the bitter tonic known as truth. A glance at just a page of this book will make it obvious to the most casual reader why Emanuel Pastreich was able to garner such support even as he refused to take a penny from corporations, billionaires, and lobbyists, even as he spoke the truth about 9.11, the Federal Reserve, and operation COVID-19 to a degree that other candidates did not dare do even in their guarded luxurious homes. Pastreich writes, "We face together similar challenges at the political, the economic, the cultural, and the spiritual levels. The pressures and the threats seem overwhelming at times because the traditions in America we thought were made of solid marble have grown soft and mushy beneath our feet in a culture of indulgence and greed. But for all the hypocrisy and selfishness that sadly blinds our neighbors, our friends, and even our families, we can sense that truth and justice are leading us forward even as our foes seem so overwhelming. The truth is, as I heard it said somewhere, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and it waits for you to unlock it and thereby to transform our nation. What is required is the bravery to confront the truth, the compassion to find commonalities with our neighbors, the righteousness to stand up for what is decent even when the corrupt and sick is promoted everywhere, the tenacity to carry on the battle for months, years, and decades until those who were blind start to see what we stand for, and the decisiveness to realize today what others thought will take centuries. We Americans will not let this nation be reduced to a moral wasteland. We will not allow a handful of the rich to employ banks of supercomputers, running sophisticated algorithms, to manipulate and to dumb down our people, to use hidden persuaders in movies and dramas that induce narcissism and self-centeredness in our children, to run mass media campaigns to distract us from the current crisis by obsessing over the insignificant, to fabricate financial crises that destroy our lives, nor will we allow them to launch false-flag operations that will herd us into a Gaza of the soul. We will not permit them to wall us in on all sides with economic bankruptcy, institutional collapse, cultural banality, spiritual depravity, intellectual barbarism, or physical slavery. We will not follow the cardboard messiahs that they have prepared carefully for us backstage, nor will we use the flawed logic they feed to us through their public intellectuals and talk shows so to confuse us, nor will we fall for the cultural, racial, or identity conflicts that they have stirred up in order to divide us against each other. Nothing will stop us from coming together, e pluribus unum, coming together to build a new nation, one that is built up from the basement of solid moral fiber, that follows exactly the plans that we have all agreed on; a mansion for the people that is built, not out of money and debt, not out of pornography, social media, and games, not out of weapons systems and surveillance technology, not out of offshore trusts and billionaire funds, but built out of the stuff of the human soul, and build by our people, each and every one of us, gathering together to write a new contract which binds us together as equal partners for the common good within a new nation state that follows the spirit and the word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."