Jill Stein is Making Democrats Squirm. Good.

Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate Dr. Butch Ware have made the Democratic Party establishment very nervous...

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who each day furthers her transformation into a monstrous Democratic Party shill, has been taking to social media in order to attack Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein:

If you’re running for president, you’re the de facto leader of your party…and if you run for years and years and years in a row, and your party has not grown and you don’t add city council seats and you don’t add down ballot candidates and you don’t add state electeds, that’s bad leadership. And that, to me, is what is upsetting, because if you have been your party’s nominee for twelve years in a row…and you cannot grow your movement, pretty much at all, and can’t pursue any successful strategy, and all you do is show up once every four years, to speak to people who are – justifiably – pissed off…you’re not serious. To me it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.

Stein was quick to reply:

I just wanted to thank “AOC Pelosi” so very much for her very authentic concern for growing Green [Party] Power! Clearly AOC is the attack dog du jour and the Democrats are running scared. And they should be, because who wants to support a genocide? Who wants to vote for a genocide? And if there’s anything that’s “predatory” here, it’s saying that your candidate is “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” when actually they are actively funding and arming genocide and refusing to even consider an arms embargo which would bring the genocide to a screeching halt.

This delightfully sarcastic response was a reference to AOC’s shameful speech at the Democratic National Convention, where she claimed that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire” – a whopper so blatant that even AOC’s fellow “squad” member Ilhan Omar harshly criticized her for it. Absurdly, AOC also suggested that Harris would represent the interests of working people, despite the fact that, like Trump, Harris is quite openly backed by a plethora of billionaires, whom she has already reassured will be treated even better under her reign than they were under Biden’s:

Stein went on to highlight the obvious hypocrisy of the Democratic Party deriding the Green Party for not having built up any power, given that the former has consistently used its immense wealth and influence to crush the latter’s attempts to do just that:

AOC…is supposed to be in the leadership of the Democratic Party. It’s amazing if she doesn’t know about the anti-democratic tactics and strategies that the Democratic Party uses to crush and silence political opposition. They’ve been hiring an army of lawyers to throw competitors like me off the ballot. They’ve been hiring infiltrators and saboteurs and publicly posting job advertisements for those positions. They’ve been hijacking our public funding in order to keep us off the ballot. And they actually impersonated the Greens in order to throw us off the ballot in `22 in the Senate race for North Carolina…how is that not fraud and election interference?

Indeed, the New York Times reported in March that the Democrats had hired “an army of lawyers” to prevent the Greens from gaining ballot access – the paper characterized the effort as “a state-by-state counterinsurgency plan.” Around the same time, the Democratic Party announced that they were looking to hire a “Third Party Project Manager” to infiltrate and disrupt third parties, of which the Greens are the most successful. Perhaps realizing how comically evil this looked, the Party quickly deleted the job advertisement. Fortunately, once it’s been on the internet, nothing is ever really gone:

The Democratic Party has also attempted to block the Green Party from accessing the public campaign funding it is entitled to via legislation. And when the Marine Corps combat veteran and activist Matthew Hoh ran as a Green in the 2022 North Carolina Senate race, the Democrats pulled out all the stops to crush him, from attempting to prevent his obtaining ballot access, to impersonating the Green Party over the phone and telling supporters that they should vote for the Democratic candidate instead.

Infiltration and sabotage? Calling voters and impersonating another political party in order to change their votes? These are the sleaziest, most anti-democratic tactics imaginable. If Republicans had been the ones engaging in them, you can bet that the Democrats would be howling about The End of Democracy^TM.

So it is insanely hypocritical for AOC to complain about the Green Party not winning anything, when the party she so cravenly sold out to has been using its vast money and power to obstruct the Greens at every turn. To my knowledge, AOC has never condemned this behavior, and it’s unlikely that most Democratic voters have any idea that their party engages in this kind of thing.

One result has been that Stein and the Greens are rarely afforded the opportunity for their message to reach an audience outside the online left.

Recently, however, there was an interesting exception to this trend. The radio show The Breakfast Club, hosted by comedian Charlamagne the God, surprisingly had Jill Stein and her running mate Dr. Butch Ware on for a long-form discussion.

I know very little about Charlamagne the God or The Breakfast Club, but clips from the interview were going viral and generating enough controversy, so I went ahead and watched it in its entirety. I am very glad that I did, because this interview is a thing of beauty. Stein and Ware effectively showed what a genuinely independent, values-driven campaign sounds like – to an audience that otherwise would never have heard of them. Their stellar performance shows that they would mop the floor with establishment politicians from the two major parties if they were ever allowed to share the debate stage with them, something both parties are determined to avoid. The current presidential candidates – a borderline-illiterate, racist buffoon and an AI word-salad generator subbing in for a senile corpse – would never be able to go up against people like this.

Not only were Stein and Ware able to address numerous extremely important issues that Harris and Trump either ignore or intend to make actively worse (genocide in Gaza, the potential for nuclear war, climate catastrophe, crises in healthcare, education, and housing), but they managed to do so while dealing with one of the most hostile interrogators I’ve ever seen – someone named Angela Rye.

I had no idea who Angela Rye was before yesterday. Now that I’ve had to listen to her for over an hour, I wish that was still the case. Throughout the exchange, she was rude, arrogant, condescending, and just about as unpleasant as a person can be. It didn’t take me long to see why. Rye explained mid-way through the exchange that she was a friend of Kamala Harris, and that she’s “been in the room” with her, whatever that means. After her cringeworthy performance interviewing Stein and Ware, I looked into her background, and it all makes sense. She’s a Democratic Party insider, a millionaire, and someone who has previously accused black leftists critical of Corey Booker and Kamala Harris of being “Russian bots.” She clearly thought that by interviewing the Green Party candidates, she would “destroy” them, but that’s not at all how things went down.

Hacks like Rye have good reason to be worried at present. With Kamala Harris basically adopting Donald Trump’s 2016 immigration agenda as her own (American liberals really are the most unprincipled people on Earth), receiving endorsements from human landfills like Dick and Liz Cheney, and pledging to continue the mass slaughter in Gaza, thousands of people who might otherwise have held their noses and voted for her to keep Trump out, are now refusing to do so because they (correctly) see that the differences between the two get smaller and smaller as Harris continues her lurch to the right. Indeed, reliable polling shows that Muslim voters, who generally supported Biden in 2020, are overwhelmingly lining up for Stein. (Incidentally, I’d love to hear the “pro-Palestine protestors are raging antisemites” crowd explain why Arabs and Muslims are lining up to support the only Jewish presidential candidate.)

So Angela Rye’s breathtaking hostility towards Stein and Ware (you really have to see it to believe it) probably stems from these concerns. When Ware (a black Muslim and a historian) inveighed against Democrats using blackness to carry water for colonialism, things got heated. And when Stein noted that Rye was repeating “the framing…of white supremacy and colonialism” (which she was), the DNC apparatchik had a full-on tantrum.

All in all, Stein and Ware crushed it, explaining crucially important, underdiscussed issues to a popular audience (how many Breakfast Club listeners knew that a single American nuclear submarine contains the destructive power of 5,000 Hiroshima bombs?), all while fending off insanely hostile attacks from a DNC stooge and genocide apologist (whatever Rye might say to the contrary).

The YouTube comments, presumably from the Breakfast Club’s regular audience, certainly agree with this interpretation. The overwhelming consensus is that Stein and Ware killed it, and that Rye came off very poorly. Apparently, the exchange persuaded many listeners to support Stein’s campaign, which is surely not what Rye & co. had intended this interview to accomplish. Here’s a small, representative sampling of what people had to say after being given a chance to listen to voices outside the two party system:

-          The way this backfired on the liberals is insane they brought Stein and Ware on with ill intent but judging by the comments, the people are moved by their message. We want a real change. Planet, Peace, and People over Profit.

-          Stein touches on so much the media ignores, Climate / water shortages, healthcare, possible WW3. No wonder they didn't want her on the debate stage.

-          Dr Jill and Dr Butch were the two blackest people in the room.

-          I’ve just decided to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party. I’m so relieved that there is an alternative to the red and blue.

-          I hope Angela Rye reads all these comments. She deserves to know how she single-handedly helped change a lot of voters who were not voting Green to Green well done Dr Stein/Dr Ware

-          Kudos to Dr. Stein and Dr. Ware for responding with grace in the face of Angela's blatant disrespect. That was hard to watch but their message was worth it

-          I’m an independent conservative but I’ve gained so much respect for Jill Stein after this interview. I was super impressed with Butch Ware. Yall did the Green Party a favor. I’m now gonna read more into Jill Stein.

-          The more I watch this, the more impressed I am with drs. Stein and ware. They would be the best executive this country has ever seen

-          I was going to sit this election out because I don't support genocide, But after hearing Dr. Stein I will be voting Green!

-          I’m donating to Jill Stein’s campaign and voting for her.  Thank you Angela Rye for helping me to decide not to vote for Kamala.  Brilliant job.

-          Angela, I want to thank you. I was an undecided voter after RFK Jr joined Trump. But because of you, Angela, and how you conducted yourself during this interview, I'm voting for Jill Stein.

And that’s merely a small selection, from YouTube alone – Twitter/X and Instagram are the same.

But if you heard about this interview not through watching it, but from the coverage in “progressive” media outlets, you’d never know that this was how it turned out. Media aligned with the Democratic Party agree that the interview was a disaster – but for Stein!

Now, no reasonable person could possibly conclude this if they’ve actually seen the full exchange. But outlets shilling for the Democrats have their marching orders, and they’re sticking to them: “Jill Stein schooled on politics in brutal ‘Breakfast Club’ interview,” Salon claims. “Jill Stein Gets Smacked Down After AOC Criticism on The Breakfast Club,” Mediaite blares. “Dem strategist hits Jill Stein with ‘taste of reality,’” AlterNet screams. “Jill Stein Gets Smacked Down After AOC Criticism on The Breakfast Club,” MSN declares.

This coverage completely ignores the substance of the interview, in order to focus on a brief moment which, taken out of context, can be used to depict Stein as clueless. At one point, Rye asked her how many members of Congress there were. Stein answered, “what is it, like 600 or something?” Watching the exchange, it’s clear that Stein thought the question referred to the House and the Senate, which together are often referred to as “Congress,” and which have 535 members in total. But Congress alone has 435 seats, and since these outlets disingenuously ignored the obvious fact that Stein misunderstood what was being asked, they were able to craft a “Jill Stein doesn’t even know how many members of Congress there are” narrative – which, again, anyone who’s seen the interview will recognize as nonsense.¹

And (interestingly, given how often Stein is smeared as a stalking horse for the Republicans) the far-right was quick to pile on as well, with the fascist Breitbart also jumping on the “Jill Stein doesn’t even know how many members of Congress there are” bandwagon.

Turning back to reality, having seen the interview, I was quite impressed that, far from not knowing important numbers, both Stein and Ware demonstrated a seriously impressive ability to recall facts and figures, on the spot, throughout their hour-plus interrogation.

Bringing this thing full circle, it’s fitting that AOC chimed in, again, to dump on Stein in the wake of the interview:

And once again, Stein’s response was devastating:

Refreshingly, numerous other lefty thought leaders were similarly disgusted with AOC – former Bernie Sanders secretary-turned-commentator Briahna Joy Gray, avowed leftist Big Short and Vice director Adam McKay, socialist writer (and friend of Cut the Cord) Nathan J. Robinson, among many others.

I’ve already conveyed my deep, deep distain for AOC’s transmogrification from a firebrand outsider who launched her career occupying Nancy Pelosi’s office into a typical Democrat willing to defend the party no matter how vile its policies – especially its unforgiveable actions in Gaza. Her behavior since then has merely cemented these feelings. That’s why I’m so glad to see that many people I respect, whose opinions carry a great deal of weight for loads of people – Gray, Robinson, McKay, et. al. – have had it as well.

And I’m glad that Dr. Stein and Dr. Ware were able to gain some major exposure. People might say they’re a long shot campaign, and that’s fair. But what I take away from this whole situation is that, first, the moment people actually had a chance to hear them, they became supporters – go read the comments for yourself if you don’t believe me. And second, American Muslims (hardly a small demographic) have decided to support them in droves, which is a pretty major shift.

Granted, it may very well just be a quirk of this increasingly strange election cycle.

But it just as well might be the beginning of an avalanche. Inshallah!

1. And even if it were true, such information is pretty trivial.