New York Times Attacks “Peace-peddling” Jill Stein as the Presidential Race Comes Down to the Wire

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor

23 Oct 2024

The New York Times scapegoats Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein as polls indicate a dead heat between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

On October 20, the New York Times published “Jill Stein Won’t Stop. No Matter Who Asks.” Its reporter Matt Flegenheimer writes, “For the last eight years, Ms. Stein has taken her place as a peace-peddling, Democrat-bashing, Republican-aided, formerly Russian-boosted villain of the left (and champion, admirers say, of the farther left) while Mr. Trump’s opponents relitigate his rise and move desperately to prevent his return.”

The absurdities and glaring contradictions in this hit piece presumably have the blessing of the Times editorial board, which endorsed Harris on September 30.

Jill Stein is “peace-peddling”?

As opposed to warmongering? Imagine that. It would be comical if it didn’t indicate this country’s commitment to perpetual war and military industrial profit.

“Democrat-bashing”?

Is the Democratic Party now a hallowed institution beyond criticism? Is it not bashing the Republicans daily and running a negative ad blitz against Jill Stein? Are Stein and the Green Party supposed to sit back passively and take it?

Is the Harris campaign, with its billions of dollars, its army of consultants, and its huge advertising budget unable to credibly, logically defend itself against the critique of a medical doctor carrying the “People, Planet, and Peace” banner of the Greens, who have raised well under $2 million in the current campaign season?

“Republican aided”?

On October 21, the Washington Post ran a report headlined “Harris hits three states with Liz Cheney.” The vice president has the support of Liz and Dick Cheney and that of Condoleezza Rice, among other high-profile Republicans, and she’s vowed to include a Republican in her cabinet. How dumb does the Times think its readers are? And/or how dumb are they? Their allegation against Dr. Stein is that some Republican-affiliated lawyers helped with her legal battles to gain ballot access, particularly in Nevada, where the state gave the Green Party the wrong signature-collecting forms, then refused to add her name to the ballot because the Greens had used them.

“Formerly Russian-boosted”?

The Times reporter repeats the endlessly recycled charge that Jill Stein visited Moscow and sat at a dinner table with Vladimir Putin—as she did—despite its own 2015 report, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deals."

"And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One,” that report reads, “Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.”

Shouldn’t profiting off a deal to transfer ownership of fissile material used to manufacture nuclear weapons be of more consequence than a bit of dinner table chat in the interest of transboundary understanding?

“villain of the left (and champion, admirers say, of the farther left)”?

This seems to assume that the Democratic Party is by some calculation “the left,” despite its complicity in the proxy wars in Ukraine and West Asia and in the 2010 bank bailout, the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, which led to the financialization of real estate and the current housing crisis. The Democratic Party is “the left” even though Biden-Harris have overseen record oil-drilling leases, and imposed more crippling sanctions all over the world, most of all in Africa. Sad to say, that does seem to be what’s left of “the left,” aside from the “farther left” allegedly now represented by the tiny but persistent Green Party.

Vice presidential candidate Butch Ware has said that Greens are actually “centrist” in that they stand for what the majority of Americans want—peace, health care, decent education, affordable housing, clean energy, and more—while the two major parties are extremists.

Stein voters will not elect Donald Trump

The central allegation in the New York Times hit piece is, of course, that Dr. Stein may cost Vice President Harris the election, as Stein allegedly did Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The central flaw in this endlessly recycled argument is the assumption that Stein voters would vote for Harris if they couldn't vote for Stein when there's no evidence of that. I know a lot of Green voters but only one who got so scared of Trump that he decided to vote for Harris.

I live in a state so blue that the tiny sliver of Green voters has no impact beyond political expression, but I’m in contact with swing state Green voters, none of whom would vote for either of the duopoly’s presidential candidates if they couldn’t vote for Stein, Cornel West, or Claudia de la Cruz in the states where a third party managed to get on the ballot.

The claim that Stein could cost Harris the election might be slightly more plausible this time because of the Muslim and Arab American voters who have traditionally voted overwhelmingly Democratic and who may make the difference, especially in Michigan, by refusing this time. But would they vote for Harris if they couldn't vote for Stein, West, or De la Cruz? It certainly doesn't seem so. "Abandon Harris," a group quoted in the NY Times piece, first began organizing as "Abandon Biden" last November. They launched a campaign to defeat first Biden, then Harris, in the swing states, which they defined as a moral imperative, a campaign against genocide, ten months before endorsing Jill Stein.

And how can anyone tell Muslim and Arab American voters that they should vote for Harris when they're seeing whole family lines savagely wiped out in Gaza and Lebanon with 2000-lb. US bombs and even white phosphorus, which causes deep, severe burns, penetrating even through bone?

There are two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, probably minus some hundreds of thousands by now given that many are no doubt buried under the rubble. The vast majority can't leave either by land or by sea because Israel controls all the exits. They're trapped in a concentration camp with our bombs raining down on them, and now they're dying of hunger and thirst. Some ten kids are having one or both legs amputated every day. How does this differ from a Nazi concentration camp?

Nevertheless, the Muslim and Arab American vote isn't uniform in refusing to vote for Harris. A mostly Muslim and Arab American group calling itself "The Uncommitted" withheld their votes from Biden in the primary and then held a sit-in on the steps of the Democratic National Convention because the Dems let the Israeli American relative of a hostage speak but refused to let a Palestinian American speak. The Uncommitted ultimately said they wouldn't endorse Harris but thought it was important to stop Trump, which was essentially endorsing Harris.

In September a group of leading Muslim American scholars and imams signed a letter calling on Muslim voters to spurn Harris and vote for Stein or one of the other third-party candidates. This week a group of approximately 50 Black Muslim leaders signed a statement saying the same.

Also this week, Michigan’s American Arab and Muslim Political Action Committee endorsed Stein.

There are an estimated 2.5 million Muslim voters in the US and an estimated 2.5 million Arab American voters who no doubt largely overlap. The key swing state of Michigan contains the largest Lebanese American community, and the city of Dearborn has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. The New York Times hit piece acknowledged that there are more than 300,000 Michigan residents with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.

If Kamala Harris loses Michigan and therefore loses the election, and/or if she loses because of the Muslim and Arab American vote in other swing states, she’ll have only the Biden/Harris genocide to blame, not Dr. Jill Stein.

The Times on Green Party presidential candidate Butch Ware

Stein's running mate, Butch Ware, is a history professor and polyglot specializing in Africa and Islam who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. He did his doctoral research in West Africa, studying the Islamic/Sunni/Sufi pacifist movement founded by Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba, who led a nonviolent struggle against French colonialism. The Times notes without comment that he calls Harris the “Black face of white supremacy” and likens Barack Obama to a “house negro.” I had to explain to alarmed relatives that these expressions are common to Black intellectuals who think that both Harris and Obama are committed to white supremacy to the detriment of Black Americans and Africans, and that the “house negro” reference harkens back to Malcolm X's famous speech "The House Negro and the Field Negro," in which Malcolm said he was a field negro.

I also explained that October 20 was the anniversary of the execution of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the end of the NATO bombing war on Libya and on the orders of Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Libya was the most prosperous country in Africa, and it's been a wreck ever since. Gaddafi's crime was nationalizing Libyan oil; US oil companies moved in amidst the chaos that followed his assassination. That's just one reason, I explained, why many Black intellectuals refer to Obama as a “house negro.”

The Times also noted that David Duke had endorsed Stein, so I also had to explain to relatives that she disavowed the endorsement, which she had never sought. Many thought it was a psyop to damage Stein, and it may well have been, but David Duke is reported to have said he supported her because she's the only candidate opposing US wars in the Middle East and I can't argue with that, however reprehensible he is.

Will the hit piece have any consequences?

Will the New York Times hit piece change anyone’s mind? Not likely. Will it persuade traumatized Muslim and Arab Americans to vote for Kamala Harris? There isn’t even any argument that they should.

Will it shame anyone into voting for Kamala Harris instead of “peace-peddling, Democrat-bashing, Republican-aided, formerly Russian-boosted villain of the left” Jill Stein? There’s nothing there to convince them, just a lot of smears.

The hit piece seems more like a scream as this closest-ever presidential election comes down to the wire. Whenever they lose, the Democrats rush to scapegoat the Green Party rather than considering their own failings, which in this case are most obviously the devastation of Gaza and Lebanon to the horror of many but most of all to the Muslim and Arab American communities.

The New York Times has given Democrats a headstart on the shaming and blaming in the very real possibility that they’ll lose.

Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.