On Monday evening, March 9, the Diane Sare for President independent campaign convened an online forum to provide a framework of action to pull the U.S. out of the grip of the war policies, which, with the Trump-Netanyahu assault on Iran, have pushed the world into accelerated strategic and economic breakdown and heightened the danger of nuclear war. More than 1,000 people viewed the event live on various platforms, and 15 hours later the number of views topped 5,000. Garland Nixon, prominent talk show host, moderated.
Jose Vega, running for Congress in the Bronx’s 15th Congressional District against incumbent Rep. Ritchie Torres, identified several themes shared with many of the other speakers: “As Friedrich Schiller said, a great evil provokes a greater good.” That’s the meaning of our candidacies, he said; “There’s never a wrong time to tell the truth.” Among the truths: “The situation could go nuclear overnight.” Josephine Guilbeau, Former U.S. Army All-Source Intel Analyst Served for 17 years; cybersecurity expert for U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) & Cyber National Mission Force, who spoke out forcefully against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians throughout 2025, said she had not wanted to touch the nuclear war issue before, not wanting to be a “fearmonger,” but now she is compelled to say it clearly: “We are approaching the possibility of nuclear war.”
The courage it takes to publicly call out the war party was exemplified by Brian McGinnis, a former Marine running for U.S. Senate on the North Carolina Green Party ticket. McGinnis denounced U.S. collusion with Israeli genocide in Gaza from the floor in a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing last week. As Capitol police were pulling him out of the hearing, U.S. Senator Sheehy (R-MT) forcibly grabbed McGinnis to shove him out of the room, breaking McGinnis’s arm in the process. McGinnis’s participation in the Sare forum was his first public appearance since he was released from George Washington University Hospital after treatment.
McGinnis’s running mate in North Carolina, Lt. Col. (ret.) Anthony Aguilar, Green Party candidate for Congress in the 13th district, has been a prominent thorn in the side of the war party since he resigned from a position in the mis-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in mid-2025, and provided devastating first-hand testimony on the GHF collusion with the Israeli military to turn food distribution sites into killing fields. He made it clear in the Sare forum that he viewed the war on Iran as further evidence that the U.S. fights for Israeli, not U.S., interests.
Aguilar, together with Guilbeau, was thrown out of a U.S. Senate hearing last summer for raising the genocide issue. The need for these kinds of citizen interventions was stressed by Vega, who has made such interventions a hallmark of his activism for the past four years.
Keaton Weiss, co-host of the Due Dissidence show, noted that “no matter who you vote for, you get Epstein.” Hence, the importance of these candidacies of conscience. He noted how Vega, though loud and determined in his interventions at political events, is passionate about dialogue, not violence. The theme of non-violent direct action was a consistent point of emphasis throughout the evening.
Diane Sare, in concluding remarks, stressed two points: First, “it would be a terrible mistake, if you think you know the effect of what you do.” The news media and even social media, are such a distorted picture of reality, that you are lost if you think you’ll see your effect registered there. As an example, she noted the report from an independent candidate in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia. When Trump recently went to campaign in his heavily MAGA district, the activist reported, only 100 people showed up to hear him at a manufacturing facility, and only 40 at a coffee shop. No one reported this, she stressed, but it shows the yawning gap between media-induced perceptions and reality. This is the gap,” she said, “which makes the mid-term candidacies of opposition voices so important. If you tell the truth, it liberates others to tell the truth.”
Second, “Fight evil with passion,” but know what to do when it cracks. She stressed the economic recovery policies she learned from over 35 years of close association with economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche. These policies, she said, focus on generating productive credit through a renewed Glass-Steagall banking framework and a rechartered Federal Reserve as a Hamiltonian national bank, and embarking on vast water, transport, and energy projects to rebuild the country and collaborate with similar efforts worldwide.
