By Diane Sare, an Independent Candidate for President of the United States, and Founder of the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus
The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) organized an online forum on March 2, 2026, titled “Epstein and the Bottomless Depravity of the Elites – Urgent Need for a Cultural Renaissance!” Diane Sare held a speech there that is documented below.
I would like to thank Helga Zepp-LaRouche for convening this gathering and thank everyone who is here and who is listening to each other and what we have to say.
I think right now we are confronted with a situation, perhaps the inverse of Friedrich Schiller’s discovery, perhaps, of the failure of the French Revolution. We’re in a pre-revolutionary moment in the West, in the United States in particular, when many things that people have believed for a very long time are being challenged, and that is accompanied by a collapse in the standard of living and the affordability of life. But the population as it stands now would not be qualified to remedy the situation.
We talk about a line where you say, well, that would cross the line and people would react. I thought this line would have happened when the photographs from Abu Ghraib of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, emerged, but instead Bush got re-elected. And then I thought of, I think it was Caligula who said, let them hate me, but let them fear me. Why would people vote for anyone who would commit such atrocities?
We saw this with the American arming of Ukraine, that there was not a bottom. President Biden said, “Well, we are not going to send tanks,” and then we sent tanks. “Well, we are not going to send fighter jets,” and then we sent fighter jets. “Well, we are not going to allow them to launch long-range strikes into Russia,” and then we allowed that and provided the guidance for such strikes.
So, I’d like to, in part, sound an alarm, a wake-up call; because at the moment in the United States, it is my belief that there is not a bottom that we are going to hit. Perhaps one thing that would wake people up would be if many Americans would die in this war. But who could wish for such a thing? And therefore, I think we have a challenge to remind Americans of our identity. And I want to thank the speaker in the first panel who brought up the principles of the American Revolution, saying that the United States of today bears absolutely no resemblance to those people who declared their independence from the British Empire, listing a long train of abuses, most of which our government is now perpetrating itself.
So, I think we have a tool in this fight to wake up the American people, which is our history. It’s our 250th anniversary, and perhaps we can remind Americans that there was once a dedication to liberty. There was a statement that all men are created equal, even though we have not embodied that, and some of our Founding Fathers did not embody that. That is a true principle upon which our nation and our government are based.
Now, let me just say a couple of things about the American population that people may not be aware of, which is one of the problems we face here. We have a crisis of literacy. I’m sure Professor Falk is aware of this. Today, only 35% of high school seniors can read on a high school level. 54% of the American population cannot read above a sixth-grade level. For anyone who has learned a second language, and many of you here have, unfortunately many Americans do not speak a second language; although with immigration, of course, that’s changing. You will realize that your ability to have a profound idea, a complex idea, depends very much on your ability to express it. I experienced this when I was an exchange student. Starting a few months in, I found I was thinking in the language of the country I was visiting. And I noticed that my level of thinking was less than when I was thinking in English. Our thinking, our ability to even contemplate profound ideas is limited by our use of the language. If you have a culture, a society which has no use of a language in which to express profound thoughts, you will have a great challenge in organizing that society.
George Washington said in his Farewell Address that given that the American people have so much freedom and so much power in our government—which we still do but we don’t use—one had to be very careful of the education and the culture and the religion. You had to protect the culture of the American people to ensure that they would act for the good of their union. He was very much concerned about this, and I think we see why today. This is in part why I wrote a statement not too long ago called “Make Crazy, Crazy Again,” because we have become so debased that we have come to accept things which are outrageous as normal behavior, such as kidnapping a head of state in Venezuela, and bringing him and his wife to the United States. This is beyond the imagination. Try to think what John Quincy Adams would have thought of such an action.
And so I have said that the Epstein case is a litmus test of whether the United States will survive, because if our entire Congress is incapable, while having access to the documents and some of the unredacted names of the perpetrators, of launching a single criminal investigation, a single indictment of any of the perpetrators of these crimes who are listed there, then we will see that the United States has lost the moral fitness to survive, and this is why we can countenance and perpetrate genocide against children.
So, in thinking about how to remedy this state of affairs where there seems to be no bottom, and since we are talking about a renaissance, I think that we urgently need a cultural renaissance in the United States. Now, if it is necessary to have a dark age in order to have a renaissance, I think we have met the first requisite, so we don’t have to worry about making a worse dark age. We have that.
I was thinking about the loss of language. Do we have time to get millions of Americans at a proficient level of literacy so they can act to stop these horrors? I was reminded of a conversation I had with Lyndon LaRouche not that many years ago, a few years ago, because I was reading Shakespeare plays with some of my younger colleagues and some young people, and I was somewhat taken aback by the monotonous tone of the reading. And it became clear not only that they didn’t understand the words, but they somehow lacked the empathy. They lacked the ability to emotionally connect with what was happening. And he said, “Why don’t you have people listen, instead of reading Macbeth? Why don’t you watch the opera by Verdi? Let people associate the emotion with the music of a great artist, so that they begin to develop a personal connection of the emotional quality of empathy that goes with the text, and then return to the drama.”
So, I think that gives us a kernel, and I don’t say this to say it is hopeless, but I do say it to warn that we cannot be passive. We cannot say that there is some atrocity which is going to wake people up in the United States. We saw hundreds of thousands of young people moved by the genocide in Gaza. I think that gives an intimation that there is hope; that people can be moved. But I think we have to take it upon ourselves to very much elevate the way people think. And I appreciate the words of the sculptor prior to myself, because I think, as Schiller said, it is through beauty that one proceeds to freedom, and I think we urgently need this, and I think Helga Zepp-LaRouche is one of the experts in that. So that is what I have to say. Thank you.