Feb. 24, 2026—Independent presidential candidate and long-time LaRouche associate Diane Sare delivered her own State of the Union Address via livestream video on Monday night, Feb. 23, preceding that given by President Donald Trump by 25 hours. A retired Pentagon official described it as follows: “Measured, which made the shockingly irrefutable, inescapable, undismissable. Makes ‘unimaginable’ vision a necessity, especially for kids seeking room ahead for themselves.”
The full text of Sare’s remarks is below:
Good evening. Although I am not yet the President of the United States, I believe the American people deserve to hear the truth about the status of our nation, the relationship of our nation to other nations around the world, and what must urgently be done to dramatically improve it.
I have low to no confidence that the current occupant of the White House understands the situation in which he and we find ourselves, and by that I am absolutely not implying that the previous President or his Vice President, had she become President, would have been capable of understanding the crisis or expressing it in English.
The American people deserve better. That is why I am speaking with you now.
My remarks tonight will be divided into three sections:
First, the economic and cultural collapse as it is manifest inside the United States.
Second, our relations with other nations on the planet, including the danger of thermonuclear war.
Third, what must be done to ensure that our precious republic enters its 251st year in a position to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity for the next 250 years (which is by no means guaranteed at this moment).
First, what is the condition of the American people?
Americans are currently holding the greatest amount of personal debt ever in history—close to $19 trillion. The average American household is carrying $105,000 in debt. The national debt is rapidly approaching $40 trillion!
President Trump’s tariff boondoggle, which has correctly been overturned by the United States Supreme Court, not only did not decrease our trade deficit, but helped to increase the trade deficit to a record $1.41 trillion.
As a result of that failed policy, and others embedded in the decades-ago shift to a post-industrial economy, accompanied by Nixon’s tragic 1971 decoupling of the value of the dollar from gold, 4.2 million young Americans will experience homelessness for some amount of time in 2026.
During the abnormally cold days of January, in New York City 19 people died, unsheltered, on the street.
Over 20% of Americans who purchased a new car in the 4th quarter of last year are paying more than $1,000 per month for their auto loan, and 3 million cars were repossessed in 2025.
25% of all student loans are in arrears.
14 million American households were behind on their utility bills in 2025, with 4 million households projected to have one or more utilities off by the end of last year.
We spend more than twice as much per capita on health care as Japan, Canada, and the U.K., but our life expectancy at birth is 2-5 years lower than it is in any of those nations. Maternity wards are closing in rural hospitals across the nation, and many hospitals are closing, too.
Our physical infrastructure is a disaster. You are aware of the shameful conditions of our roads, railroads, and bridges, as well as our inadequate and insecure power grid.
Due to a lack of upkeep of water management systems and crazy green financier takedowns of dozens of dams during the Biden administration in particular, much of our farmland is jeopardized by floods and droughts, or windmills and solar panels. Mega corporate monopolies are being deployed to eliminate the family farm, making our food supply vulnerable and insecure.
According to 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress data, only 35% of U.S. high school seniors are proficient in reading.
In 1776, the literacy rate in the United States was close to 95%. Today, two-thirds of American high school seniors could not read Thomas Paine’s “Crisis” pamphlet.
According to the National Literacy Institute, over 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level, and over 25% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
This means that the American people are suffering, physically, due to lack of shelter, food, transportation, and adequate medical care; psychologically, due to anxiety related to the rising cost of living and the collapse of society, which is evident everywhere; and, on top of these hardships, the American people are unprepared to mobilize themselves in their own self-interest, because they have been robbed of a literate form of language and an education that would enable them to understand the issues that are plaguing the nation and hold their government accountable.
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison were able to rally the people of New York to support the newly drafted U.S. Constitution by writing and circulating the Federalist Papers. Today, most Americans could not even read them, let alone understand them.
Our foreign policy is equally bankrupt, if you believe that peace and stability are the objectives of American diplomacy, which apparently no longer exists.
I cannot blame only Donald Trump for this, although the Roy Cohn approach to foreign relations is not helpful. The British Nazi Synarchist takeover began immediately upon the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Winston Churchill was planning a nuclear first strike against the then-Soviet Union before FDR’s body was lowered into the grave.
While many of us are rightly concerned that we may be in a major war against Iran in the coming hours and days, the war we are currently waging against Russia may be the more ominous. The recent strikes from Ukraine on Russia’s missile-manufacturing site at Votkinsk, following on the 91-drone attack on President Putin’s Valdai residence in January, are a dangerous escalation. The CIA has admitted involvement in the targeting of energy infrastructure inside and outside of Russia and, apparently, also the 91-drone attack on Putin’s residence. Russia presented the evidence to the American military attaché in Moscow just days after the attack.
The United States, under the direction of an Epstein-client-infested cabal of billionaires and Anglo-Zionists, appears to be intent upon starving the tiny island nation of Cuba into submission and is plotting to build fancy resorts and casinos over hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinian bodies.
Were it not for the iron nerves of President Putin, and the 5,000-year-plus civilizational outlook of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their close collaboration, the world might have already plunged over the abyss to nuclear Armageddon. Ambassador Mike Huckabee might believe that that’s a Biblical approach.
We have a drug cartel destabilization of Mexico to our south—anyone remember Obama’s “Fast and Furious”? We have to ask, who arranged for the narco-terrorists south of the border to be flown to Ukraine to be trained by pro-Nazi battalions in the use of drones and other NATO tactics?
I must be very blunt: If these policies are allowed to continue, you won’t need to worry about electing me. We will have ceased to exist long before November 2028.
I hope I am scaring you. I think many of you are already scared. Your own personal hardship has nearly paralyzed many of you. Many of you are just praying that President Trump is working off a blueprint in the invisible domain to “Make America Great Again.” I hate to break it to you: He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And his hand is being forced by some very evil elements that go back to the 9/11 coup against our nation. Do not look to the fascist Democratic Party to bail you out. There are not two sides in this matter. If you’ve learned anything from the release of the Epstein files, you should have learned that there is one slime mold-type blob of perverted billionaires seeking to divide the rest of us, and get us all focused on fighting each other, rather than looking behind the curtain to see the handful of people manipulating us all.
Therefore, I know we can defeat them. They know we can defeat them. That is why they resort to extremist tactics, stoking violence and terrorism. So let’s start with the great gift we have been given: The Epstein files—and the radioactive Kryptonite which is the name and policies of Lyndon LaRouche, who was and still is, even after his death, the most-feared adversary of this cabal.
We have a handful of Congressmen and -women, led by Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, pushing to release the names of the Epstein collaborators and bring these individuals before the Congress. It is not a coincidence that Khanna and Massie are also trying to prevent a war with Iran—and here I must warn you about the duplicity of the Democrats: My former opponent, career politician Chuck Schumer, is trying to get Trump to go to war against Iran (which Schumer also supports, but is pretending not to), because Schumer knows that if we are in a protracted war with Iran in the period leading into the midterm elections, the Republican Party will lose both the House and the Senate to the Democratic Party, which, by the way, has the exact same policy; but Schumer will make more money if the Democrats are in charge. That’s it! Can you imagine being prepared to sacrifice the lives of thousands, maybe millions, of people for your personal advancement? That’s what the Epstein class is. This is why the first step toward restoring our republic in our 250th year is bringing these evil billionaire perverts and their clients from the halls of power to justice! Don’t be fooled by the temporary jailing of former Prince Andrew or even the arrest of Peter Mandelson. They’re expendable table scraps to divert you from the big beef—King Charles, Tony Blair and the stinking British Monarchy. In the United States, we need to look at Howard Lutnick, who merely had his toes tickled in a Congressional hearing, Steve Bannon, and many others whose names are in those files. Peter Theil, Brock Pierce, the Silicon Valley tech and crypto crew—gives a new meaning to Tales from the Crypt-o.
If you allow your neighbor to say, “No one will ever be held accountable” for hideous crimes against thousands of innocent children and women, and millions of people who suffered and died as a result of the policies of the Epstein coterie, our republic will end in its 250th year.
If, instead, we clean house, we can join the civilized nations of the global majority, who deeply wish that their American brothers and sisters would come back to the land of reality and contribute to global progress from the wellspring of the principles of the American Revolution.
Some of you may be familiar with the speech delivered on October 31, 1936 by President Franklin Roosevelt on the eve of his reelection. He said of his first term:
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
The hatred of these financiers for FDR was to be later surpassed by the hatred of the Epstein class for eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. His exoneration and the adoption of his policies, which made him the most hated, slandered, and vilified target of the billionaire elites, provide the key to the revival of our republic today.
In July of 2007, LaRouche gave a public webcast that could have been delivered this evening, except Dick Cheney’s name could be swapped out with that of Bibi Netanyahu, or Marco Rubio, or whoever it is that is pushing Trump into war with Iran.
“We have a military force, naval and others, stationed off the Indian Ocean region, which, contrary to all nonsense from idiots in the U.S. community, is a preparation for Cheney to unleash war against Iran, in terms of massive air attack. You don’t move B-52s into the area, you don’t move four task forces into that area, you don’t do the other things that are being done unless you’re prepared, while Congress is away, to launch war. The consequences of launching a war are unbelievable. This would be a different form of World War III; you could not put this back in the bottle. There are too many things that are unstable.
“First of all, this occurs at a time when the world monetary financial system is actually now currently in the process of disintegrating. There’s nothing mysterious about this; I’ve talked about it for some time, it’s been in progress, it’s not abating. What’s listed as stock values and market values in the financial markets internationally is bunk! These are purely fictitious beliefs. There’s no truth to it; the fakery is enormous. There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none! It’s finished, now! The present financial system can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on, and it will be unstoppable! And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get. And there is no one in the present institutions of government who is competent to deal with this. The Congress, the Senate, the House of Representatives is not currently competent to deal with this. And if the Congress goes on recess, and leaves Cheney free, then you might be kissing the United States and much more good-bye by September.”
So I think you can see why they hated him, and why I am proud to have been associated with him and his organization for over 38 years.
What did LaRouche propose be done, besides removing Dick Cheney? Maybe we should remove every elected official and non-elected bureaucrat who ever visited Epstein Island … couldn’t hurt!
We have to put the whole Anglo-Dutch financial system through bankruptcy reorganization. The $2.4 quadrillion bubble of speculative obligations can never be paid! It doesn’t matter if you raise the interest rates, lower the interest rates, print money or stop printing money, increase tariffs or abolish tariffs. It isn’t about money.
Money has no intrinsic value! Alexander Hamilton, co-author of the Federalist Papers and our first Treasury Secretary, understood this. So did Ben Franklin, so did other American System economists like Mathew and Henry Carey, Henry Clay, and Friedrich List. Abraham Lincoln used this approach in getting the transcontinental railroad built, FDR used it to build the TVA and thousands of infrastructure projects all over the nation. John F. Kennedy was probably the last President who understood this approach—Lyndon LaRouche mastered and advanced that system, for which he spent five years in federal prison and was prevented from holding office, and I represent that method today.
There’s a certain young Congressional candidate in the Bronx, Jose Vega, who also represents this policy.
So what do we do? Wipe out the garbage! Let it go! We don’t have to save the ill-gotten gains of the predators. We do have to save the people and the nation, and not merely our people and our nation, but others, too.
First we need to break up the big banks with a new Glass-Steagall Act. Keep the pickpockets out of your savings account. Don’t let your savings and loan or commercial bank engage in speculation. Investors can speculate, but under a separate roof, where they are responsible for their losses and gains, and don’t get to be bailed out by the taxpayers.
Put the Federal Reserve through bankruptcy, clean it out, and establish a Third National Bank of the United States. Maybe it will be a National Infrastructure Bank, but we need accountability and issuance of credit, as our Constitution stipulates under the direction of our elected representatives, not a private pack of pedophiles!
Then, how do we increase the productive power of our workforce, which will lead to a massive increase in the purchasing power of the family income, raising the standard of living, and making life affordable again?
We must issue trillions of dollars of new credit, not for bailouts of big bankers, but to invest in major infrastructure improvements:
Water management, transportation—42,000 miles of modern high speed rail, new bridges and roads, new modern hospitals and health care accessible to all. Obviously we need a massive reform of the entire educational system, which will become apparent as we begin to build everything we need, including dozens of new cities.
Our public school education upshift will be fueled by the inspiration of a space exploration and colonization program led by NASA in collaboration with other nations like Russia, China, and India that are already making major strides.
None of the major improvements will be possible unless we make a leap in energy security and generation, which means building at least 200 new nuclear power plants in the United States and a crash program to develop thermonuclear fusion power, which we would have had decades ago, but for the assassination of Kennedy and the silencing of LaRouche.
My remarks here, today, are not intended as a promise of what I’m going to do after I become your President in 2029. I don’t believe we have that much time. What I am telling you is what is needed to be done now.
There are international organizations, like the Schiller Institute, founded by LaRouche’s widow, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, which seek to organize international support for the policies I’ve outlined here. Every nation needs a sovereign economic system and its own national bank and banks separated according to Glass-Steagall principles.
We need a new international security and economic development architecture, which respects the sovereignty of each nation equally, not a system where some nations are “more equal than others.”
There are promising developments among the BRICS-Plus nations, and their cooperation is in no way a threat to our security, but actually makes the world more stable and prosperous. Our nation and our people would only benefit through economic cooperation with the BRICS, while attempting to punish them for leaving the colonial order merely puts the entire world at risk.
The principles of the American Revolution, as expressed in our founding documents, the equality of man, and the right of every single person, as a child of God, to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, as Leibniz meant it, are not merely American principles, but universal ones. Given our historical legacy, the most natural thing for us to do, and the thing which would bring the greatest relief to the rest of the planet, except for a handful of arrogant elites, would be for us to return now, in our 250th year, to our founding principles, and move forward from here.
Thank you for listening.