The self-anointed defenders of democracy are at it again, seeking to snuff out the presidential campaign of Green Party standard bearer Jill Stein. Her crime? She has committed the cardinal sin of potentially impacting the presidential election via her attempts to offer voters an alternative to the Democrat-Republican duopoly.
As a champion of the fashionable climate change narrative and other progressive shibboleths, Stein threatens to peel ballots away from Democrats on November 5. Unsurprisingly, Republicans thus want to see her active in as many states as possible. Yet the failed 2016 candidate claims her reason for running goes beyond a mere “spoiler” role. Stein believes both major parties are ultimately controlled by corporate interests, making them indistinguishable from one another in the long run.
For Democrats who stand to lose more votes to Stein than the GOP, the fact that the Green Party is so small means it should not be allowed to ripple the waters of the exclusive red and blue tiled election swimming pool. “In relative terms, the Green Party represents an exceptionally small percentage of the electorate. But its outsized impact in modern presidential races has made it a boogeyman among Democrats,” dominant media outlet Politico observed on October 3.
And they are going after that monster under the bed. Democrats are conducting openly hostile unconventional political warfare against the Greens.
Spies and Dirty Tricks?
“This cycle, the Democratic Party is determined not to get caught sleeping by underestimating the Greens’ support like they did in 2016,” Politico notes. “The national party has built an operation across the country that takes a proactive and ruthless approach toward stopping third-party threats, including employing communications professionals whose entire jobs consist of attacking third-party candidates.”
This apparently included recruiting spies to infiltrate Green Party events. “In May, the Democratic National Committee posted and then quickly deleted a job posting for an ‘Independent & Third Party Project Manager’ whose job description included attending third party events, reporting back on activity and recruiting volunteers to do the same,” the news site relates.
Despite the shenanigans, the Greens have made it onto 38 state ballots – and Democrats aren’t happy about it. They’re pulling out all the stops to remove Stein in key battleground states. The Democratic National Committee in August failed in an effort to oust Stein from the Wisconsin ballot, while a Nevada challenge turned exceedingly ugly last month.
“In case you missed it, the [Nevada Secretary of State] gave the campaign the wrong forms to use to get on the ballot,” Stein accusingly wrote on September 11 in a blistering X post. “Then the dirty Dems used that technicality to sue us off the ballot – we won in lower courts, only to lose in the Nevada Supreme Court. We have also recently discovered the Chief Justice in the case is a DNC donor.”
Is she paranoid? Well, consider this: Democrat-aligned activists are making no bones about their position that Jill Stein should not have a right to run for president.
Jill Stein: The ‘Impact’ Is the Problem
“These third-party candidates are being presented to voters without a full picture of their views, their financial backers, and the impact they would have on the election,” Joel Payne, chief communications officer for powerful PAC MoveOn, told CBS News on September 17. What’s that last part again? Payne is arguing that the possibility that third parties can negatively affect a major political party is grounds for disqualification from the White House race.
Pollster and political scientist Larry Sabato complained recently that the Greens are too much like the Democrats to justify their existence. “It’s been a story of complete failure,” Sabato irritably told UK newspaper The Guardian, decrying the Greens’ spoiler role in previous elections. “Normally the Greens aren’t important but they were in 2016, they cost Hillary Clinton a couple of blue wall states, and they were in 2000,” Sabato said. “Why vote for them when Democrats are also concerned about climate change? All you’re doing is helping Republicans. Without them we might not have had the Iraq invasion, we might not have had Donald Trump.”
Question for Sabato: Why can’t the American people absorb all these arguments and more and then decide for themselves whether or not to support the Greens?
And, when all other lines of attack have been exhausted, prominent figures are conjuring that same evil specter so prevalent in their information war: Russia.
“Jill Stein is a useful idiot for Russia,” DNC spokesman Matt Corridoni declared in an official statement on September 3. “After parroting Kremlin talking points and being propped up by bad actors in 2016 she’s at it again. Jill Stein won’t become president, but her spoiler candidacy – that both the GOP and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin have previously shown interest in – can help decide who wins. A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.”
Just as with their bogus assault on “disinformation” online, the ruling progressive establishment ultimately desires to limit citizens’ choices. The fewer sources of news the American public is exposed to, the easier it is to control. The fewer options available in elections, the harder it is to ever enact real change.
