Jill Stein: pro-fascist hippie dupe

We've long considered Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, too inconsequential to be worth calling out. But we are seeing her stuff being promoted more and more—particularly her calls for Bernie Sanders to ditch the Democrats if (when) he doesn't get the nomination and run with the Greens. See, for instance, the pathetically gushing interview with her on Democracy Now. We doubt Bernie would be so monstrously reckless as to split the anti-Pendejo vote, fortunately. But leave it to Democracy Now's pusillanimous Amy Goodman to not throw Stein a single hard-ball—either about the wisdom of tempting a Pendejo presidency, or about the Green candidate's atrocious politics. Stein is getting this kind of free ride everywhere. Check out this glowing account on AlterNet about Jill's defense of anti-pipeline actvists protesting outside the home of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman. This from the woman whose party is practically a stateside propaganda organ of the Bashar Assad regime, which has serially massacred protesters and is now escalating to genocide against the Syrian people.

The Green Party platform contains not a single word about Syria, despite a lengthy section on the "Palestinian-Israeli Conflict." This committment to human rights is rather (shall we say?) selective. Let's start by examining Stein's "Green Shadow Cabinet"—which openly shills for the Assad regime. Stein's "Attorney General" Kevin Zeese runs a website with the hilariously ironic name of Popular Resistance, which we have had to call out as a platform for Assad regime propaganda, repeatedly seeking to exculpate Assad of the Ghouta chemical attack and portraying the Syrian opposition as monolithically jihadist. Worse yet, the Shadow Cabinet's Ajamu Baraka, identified as "Public Intervenor for Human Rights" (sic!), actually hailed Assad's thoroughly controlled psuedo-elections which confirmed his inherited dictatorial rule in 2014 as a victory against "foreign intervention," crowing about Assad's widespread "support," and how the opposition was "fomented" by the "gangster states of NATO."

Green Party Watch notes that after the Ghouta attack, when Obama briefly threatened air-strikes against Assad's military forces, Stein said: "President Obama's rush to war risks a repeat of 2003, when President Bush's order to invade Iraq prevented UN inspectors from discovering that Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs, one of the stated reasons for war, did not exist." Talk about fighting the last war! To say this days after a chemical massacre in which some 1,400 perished simply demolishes all the Green Party's empty talk about human rights. The chemical weapons in Syria assuredly existed—and in fact, gas attacks have continued (repeatedly) even after Assad ostensibly disposed of his chemical arsenal under the deal that averted air-strikes. To complete silence from Stein and her party, of course. And as for "rush to war"—are we supposed to believe Syria (now the biggest refugee crisis on the planet) is at peace as long as the US isn't involved?

In an interview on Soundcloud, Stein even repeated the discredited jive about how the rebels gassed their own people at Ghouta as a provocation. The interview now seems to have been deleted—maybe Stein realized this was just a bit too much? But we'll note that Stein's predecessor as Green presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney actually travelled to Damascus in the aftermath of the Ghouta attack to express her support for the Assad regime!

On the Issues notes that the Green Party's response to 2014 State of the Union said that following the failure of the Geneva talks, "the US moves closer to their real strategic objective—regime change or the dismemberment of the Syrian state." First, this is nonsense. A close reading of the actual facts indicates that Washington has in fact been tilting to Assad in the Syrian war, and has even opposed moves toward a federal system for Syria. And second, "regime change" in Syria is not a neocon plot—it is the aspiration of the Syrian people, since they first launched what was then a peaceful revolution in March 2011 under the slogan "the people want the fall of the regime." The refusal of the American left to see this is racism and imperial narcissism. But active propaganda support for the regime goes beyond even that.

This is hippie pro-fascism, perpetrated by peaceniks simply incapable of grasping that there can be any evil in the world not directly hatched by Washington. It is no less repugnant for being basically clueless. It pains us that activists we respect—including Brian TokarDavid McReynolds and Sean Sweeney—continue to loan their names to the "Green Shadow Cabinet." We call upon them to step down immediately in solidarity with the Syrian people, and publicly state their reason for doing so.

  1. Jill Stein digs hole deeper

    The ForwardProgressive blog calls out Jill Stein with the dead-on accurate headline, "Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Sides with Donald Trump, Praises Bigotry-Driven Brexit Vote"! They quote a statement she posted online: 

    The vote in Britain to exit the European Union (EU) is a victory for those who believe in the right of self-determination and who reject the pro-corporate, austerity policies of the political elites in EU. The vote says no to the EU’s vision of a world run by and for big business. It is also a rejection of the European political elite and their contempt for ordinary people.

    She does add, as an afterthought:

    We must build a culture of inclusiveness and respect, and challenge the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim pronouncements of demagogues who divide and distract us from the real source of economic distress – the economic elites throwing us all under the bus.

    But this doesn't acknowledge that here in the real world, the Brexit was a "victory" precisely for the forces of xenophobic demagoguery. Does Jill think it is a coincidence that, as Uncut notes, attacks on Muslims and immigrants have been mounting in England since the vote? As ForwardProgressive concludes: "Supporting bigotry, racism and borderline fascism is never worth it just because you like their thoughts on trade agreements and banks."

    Thank you. Our label "pro-fascist hippie dupe" is further vindicated every time she opens her mouth. Shut up and get a clue, Jill.

    1. Saved from the Memory Hole: Jill Stein’s pro-Brexit statement

      The ForwardProgressive blog now points out that Stein apparently scrubbed her own statement on the Brexit after being called out for blocking with racists, removing the embarassing "victory" and changing it to the softer "wake-up call." This just further reveals how completely bereft of principle and intellect she is.

  2. Saved from the Memory Hole: Jill Stein’s genocide-denial

    As noted above… In an interview posted on Soundcloud last year, Jill Stein repeated the ugly conspiracy theory that the Syrian rebels gassed their own people at Ghouta as a provocation. The interview was subsequently deleted, and seemingly an effort was made to scrub it from the web entirely. Did Stein's handlers clue her in that this was just a bit too much, even for her? Or do they remain intransigently clueless, and the disappearance of the interview was merely a tech glitch? And which would be worse…?

    Anyway, attempts at scrubbing almost always prove futile, and after a diligent search by one of our genius researchers, we did manage to find the interview. Here it is. The offending quote starts at 24.46, about half-way thru it. Crowing about the supposed victories of the anti-war movement, she boasts: "We stopped the first Syrian war. In 2013 there was an effort to begin a bombing campaign based on what now looks like it was a false-flag chemical weapons attack in Syria."

    My God, how much error can you pack into two sentences? There are two howlers before she even gets to the repugnant "false flag" wackiness. First, the phrase "first Syrian war." What is that supposed to mean? Presumably, the intervention against ISIS over the past two years is the "second Syrian war"? In other words, Syria is only at "war" if the US is involved? The actual Syrian war—which has been going on for over five years now, leaving more than a quarter million dead and 12 million displaced—is completely invisible to Stein.

    Then, it is sheer delusion to think that the anemic, nearly non-existent protests against Obama's bluster prevented the bombing in 2013. Obama, after initially announcing his intent to bomb Assad's air force, instead punted to Congress—something he didn't do in the 2011 Libya intervention. Obviously, he didn't really intend to do a damn thing in response to Assad crossing the chemical "red line." Congress didn't even get to vote before Obama accepted the Russian plan to supposedly disarm Assad's chemical arsenal—although the regime's chemical attacks have continued. When US intervention finally came a year later, it was against Assad's enemies, ISIS and Nusra Front. This is quite in line with the actual US policy: tilting to Assad against the jihadists.

    And, finally, the pièce de résistance: the regime disinformation of the "false flag" theory. Which she takes for granted, seemingly not even familiar with the exhaustive Human Rights Watch report that even identified the regime bases from which the chemical warheads were fired.

    There are a few other gems of delusion in the interview. Using the pronoun "we" to refer to the government like a good imperialist, she says: "We've created failed states in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen…" As if these are all the same template, as if there had been no revolutions in the latter three countries, and as if Assad and Qaddafi played no role in the destruction. She similarly says "we've created a refugee crisis" in Syria. Not Assad—who is now escalating to genocide in his war on the Syrian people, and who the refugees themslevs say they are fleeing. Nope, "we" did it. Everything is about "us."

    She also throws in that "we" want to call Nusra "good terrorists"–while "we," in fact, are bombing them. Check your scoresheet, Jill.

    And amid this hit parade of dictator-shilling and genocide-denialism, she has the chutzpah to invoke Martin Luther King, "international law and humanitarianism," and "human rights, human dignity"! This is what we mean by hippie fascism. Is she really entirely clueless or is she deeply cynical? Who knows? It doesn't matter.

    In a final irony, she warns that failing to give her and her friends a voice "forces people into the camp of fascism." While she is actively shilling for a fascist regime.

    This ugliness is nothing new for the Green Party USA. The Syrian "opposition is not interested in creating a democracy," declared a 2013 article on the ironically named War Is A Crime by David Swanson, who is "Secretary of Peace" (sic!) in Jill's pretentious "Green Shadow Cabinet." An assertion that spits in the face of the pro-democratic civil opposition in Syria, that for five years of horror has now been putting more on the line for democracy than the USA's self-important game-playing pseudo-left could ever dream of.

    We reiterate our call, in the strongest possible terms, for our friends Brian Tokar and David McReynolds to immediately publicly resign from the Green Shadow Cabinet.