Two days ago I happened to write an article about the amazingly stupid conspiracy theory that the Green Party, which has run a presidential candidate every election since 1996, ran a presidential candidate in 2016 because of a Russian plot to sabotage American democracy. Today, Buzzfeed News reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Jill Stein’s campaign to comply with a document search.
This is what Russiagate has come to. This psychotic conspiracy theory is now so desperate to turn this endless fountain of nothing into something that it is rifling through the documents of a campaign which received one percent of the popular vote because its candidate had dinner in Russia two years ago.
What else can I say about this besides what I wrote the other day? Jill Stein gave a perfectly reasonable explanation of the dinner she had in which she was photographed at a table with Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin, and not one shred of evidence has ever been produced anywhere contradicting it. The Green Party necessarily has to run a presidential candidate every election in order to secure party viability; if they hadn’t run Stein they would necessarily have run someone else. The existence of third parties is a perfectly legitimate, legally sanctioned and desirable part of the American electoral process, and in the rest of the world they are considered normal. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever to suspect that Stein’s candidacy had anything to do with a Kremlin conspiracy.
And yet US empire loyalists everywhere are having another one of their notorious online “bombshell” parades about this document search as though it means something.
https://twitter.com/NaveedAJamali/status/942879745775144960
Jill Stein was sitting right next to Mike Flynn and Putin in Moscow. Wasn't hard to figure out she was in on it.
— Dr. Marcus H. Johnson (@marcushjohnson) December 18, 2017
JUST IN: Senate Intel Committee seeking documents from Jill Stein. After all she was sitting next to Michael Flynn and Putin at a dinner in which she was photographed at.
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) December 18, 2017
A Hillary Clinton campaign official appears to be having some sort of conniption about it:
https://twitter.com/Zac_Petkanas/status/942880616357486592
Medium’s village idiot Amy Siskind is doing a whole song and dance pretending that the news proves anything about anything:
https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/942883525086367745
MSNBC shill Scott Dworkin flat-out lies saying Putin paid for Stein’s Russia trip (she paid her own way):
If you're wondering why Jill Stein is being called to testify in regards to Russian election interference, it may have to do with the trip to Russia Putin paid for-where she sat with him & Mike Flynn in December of 2015. #TrumpRussia pic.twitter.com/X7HDkEx1t2
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) December 19, 2017
And yet there is nothing to this report other than a deeply disturbing political stop-and-frisk meant to punish a political candidate for daring to defy the neoliberal neoconservative one-party system and make this fact-free McCarthyite feeding frenzy look legitimate.
But it isn’t legitimate. If Russiagate was legit, it wouldn’t be advancing profoundly stupid conspiracy theories about third party candidates which require such a suspension of disbelief that you need to forget the entirety of the Green Party’s recorded history in order to believe them. If Russiagate was legit, the people selling it to us wouldn’t be caught lying about it over and overand over again. America’s power establishment is using Russiagate to cover up last year’s revelations about the rigged Democratic primary process and to manufacture public support for new cold war escalations with China’s right arm. There is no truth backing it up.
Last year we learned that one of America’s two major political parties actively sabotages candidacies which don’t perfectly kowtow to establishment agendas, and this year we’ve seen this same establishment running relentless punitive character assassination campaigns against any leftist candidates who dare to run outside the rigged Democratic party system.
Which of course is why it’s so funny when people claim that Russia attacked American democracy. In order for anyone to attack American democracy, democracy would have to exist in America.
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5 responses to “McCarthyite Witch Hunt Comes For Jill Stein”
It’s scary how they equate accusations with guilt. Disgusting really.
[…] one take on the summoning of Jill Stein, read McCarthyite Witch Hunt Comes For Jill Stein, with excerpts […]
Hi Caitlin, I enjoy your analysis and was wondering if you’d heard of journalist Greg Palast’s work on (among other things) election fraud and voter disenfranchisement in the US. He’s been going at this issue since the 2000 debacle and has done some excellent work on how the GOP disenfranchised thousands of voters in 2016. It’s striking that Democrats have been completely silent on this issue considering the strong evidence, while focusing on the much flimsier “Russia angle.” Anyway, keep up the good work and check out Palast.
Russia narrative mongers must be desperate to try to link Jill Stein! Just had breakfast with stalwart Hillary bot friend. Even he is starting to be persuaded that this witch hunt has gone off the rails.
Democracy hasn’t existed in either of the two major political parties for decades. If you didn’t do precisely what the establishment wanted, you were pushed to the sidelines and marginalized… so the corruption was fostered and encouraged.
If democracy HAD existed, we would have been able to hear the messages of Ron Paul, Dennis Kuxhinich and Mike Gravel… instead, we were forced Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
Just imagine how much better America would have been under either a Ron Paul or Dennis Kuxhinich Presidency.