For The Record, Jill Stein Would Have Made A Great President

Caitlin Johnstone
6 min readJun 21, 2017

My dear friend Zach Haller has retweeted a series of screen grabs from Jill Stein’s recent verbal curb stomping of deep state surrogate Neera Tanden with the caption “My vote for @DrJillStein did, in fact, age well.” And right he is. Tanden has since bent the knee and deleted her hilarious assertion that Stein was somehow responsible for President Trump’s decision to gradually espouse Hillary Clinton’s omnicidal policies in Syria, which is understandable because it did not go well for her at all. Here it is, in all its gory glory:

I am quite confident that nobody hates Neera Tanden more than I do, but even I had to watch that brutal ground-and-pound beatdown through the gaps in my fingers. I guarantee you that no public debate between Stein and Tanden will ever happen, and that Stein will find herself on Tanden’s blocked list if she keeps bringing it up. Tanden’s Twitter page has already been purged of every openly visible tweet from the humiliating exchange, and is now packed full of retweets urging Democrats not to lose hope over Jon Ossoff’s historically expensive loss in the extremely winnable Georgia special election.

While establishment Democrats keep finding themselves in the ‘L’ column in elections and Twitter wars due to their consistent disregard for facts and their seething hatred of the actual left, their obsession with the former Green Party candidate continues unabated. As we’ve recently discussed, this is a deliberate attempt to stomp out any third party traction that might force American politics even an inch to the left and to maintain the dominance of the two-headed one party system in a country where democracy cannot be said to exist to any meaningful extent. But as long as they’re going to keep bringing her up, let’s talk about Jill Stein. Let’s talk about why she would have made an infinitely better President of the United States than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and why one percent of American voters were right to invest their votes in her.

This is not something that we are permitted to do, by the way. Establishment loyalists have been pumped so full of corporate media propaganda against Stein that any positive word about her is met with vitriol and condemnation, and anyone who still has Clintonist friends left to lose will likely lose them for good if they keep proudly displaying their Stein vote and saying they have no regrets about it. It is the ultimate Blue Church heresy, and this is why we must all become heretics today. Stein voters must not allow these vagina hat-wearing neocons to bully them into submitting to their ecocidal, omnicidal death cult.

In an alternate universe where democracy exists in America and a brilliant third party candidate isn’t sabotaged by establishment propaganda when she’s not being ignored, Jill Stein would have made an excellent president. Her Green New Deal alone would have provided the massive, sweeping changes that need to be made in US environmental policy to lead humanity away from the extinction-level ecosystemic collapse that it is hurtling toward, and given America a thriving, real economy that isn’t propped up with the barrel of a gun. It was like the renewed industrial vision for America that Trump campaigned on, only real and achievable. Instead of an economy based on debt, US military might, petrodollars, predatory trade agreements and the completely arbitrary whims of a few powerful banking elites, America could build an economy on the foundation of making real things and collaborating toward useful ends like energy independence and the survival of the species.

This is fundamentally doable, and, if our species is to survive, something very much like it will need to happen quite soon. Establishment loyalists panned Stein’s vision for America as crazy and unrealistic, but with the environmental situation being as dire as it is and the US now being this close to a world war with a nuclear superpower due to the current status quo, the exact opposite is true: doing anything but this is crazy and unrealistic.

In reality all of Stein’s ideas have been implemented successfully in one form or another elsewhere in the world, and previously in America itself in many ways. This kind-hearted doctor faced and continues to face the most unimaginably savage vitriol from the Democratic neocons in order to advance a vision of peace, economic justice, realistic environmental policy, electoral integrity, and social justice, as well as to break her country out of an abusive, exploitative system wherein Americans are consistently forced to choose between two corporatist warmongers with functionally identical policies.

There is simply no way to spin any of those policies as somehow worse than what Trump and Clinton were offering using facts and logic. Besides the completely irrational fantasy-based argument that woke lefties would have voted for bloodthirsty neocon Clinton if the Green Party had for some reason shirked its responsibility to run a presidential candidate, the only other arguments leveled against Stein have been either imaginary or absurd. The argument that she hasn’t accounted for the recount money is patently false as demonstrated in the tweets above. The frequently-cited fact that she was once photographed in close proximity to Vladimir Putin says literally nothing about anything; Stein was paid nothing for her appearance at that function, the accusations leveled against her for her appearance were thoroughly debunked by Glenn Greenwald all the way back in August, and there is no evidence whatsoever casting doubt on her assertion that she never even spoke to Putin (not that speaking to Putin, especially in 2015 long before any Russian hacking allegations surfaced, would have been innately nefarious anyway).

What else is there? The fact that she, a medical doctor, doesn’t think using brute force is the best way to get concerned parents to vaccinate their kids? The fact that she, a medical doctor, would like to see some more testing on GMOs and WiFi? On what planet are any of those things worse than invading Syria and risking a world war with a nuclear superpower? In what way are they worse than drone bombing children and killing civilians with white phosphorus? In what way are they worse than creating a failed state in Libya and laughing about the mutilation of its leader? In what way do any of those things come even remotely close to the evils that have already been perpetrated by Trump and Clinton? What mental gymnastics are these lunatics pulling off to make Stein’s positions even seem detestable, let alone worse than Clinton’s plans to invade Syria with 70,000 ground troops and install a no-fly zone in an area where Russian military planes are conducting operations?

Hillary Clinton would have made a horrifying president; as bad as Trump is I sincerely believe that our species dodged an even deadlier bullet by keeping Clinton out of office. There is no valid reason for any thinking person to believe that Jill Stein caused this to happen, but if she had I would have personally been eternally grateful to her.

Jill Stein would have made a great president, and I will continue to watch her every move with tireless fascination. Even if she never runs for president again, I will be immensely comforted knowing that she’s still out there kicking ass, taking names, and fighting for the greater good.

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