Establishment article on Jill

Jill:https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x5pw3/jill-stein-profile

“….Her house is exactly as you’d picture it: a little dirty, cluttered with antique furniture, musical instruments, and hippie art. Atop her piano sits a framed collage with silhouettes climbing up a landscape of cut-up newspaper headlines, the most prevalent words: “PALESTINE,” “A LIFE OF WAR,” “CRISIS,” “COVER UP,” “RADICAL,” “MISCALCULATIONS.” In the office area adjoining the living room, about 100 copies of a newsletter called Practical Sailor were messily stacked. By the computer there was a glass lamp that bore a stunning resemblance to a bong. Her bathroom, impressively enough, was dirtier than my own, towels unfolded and the toilet unflushed, maybe because she’s one of those “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” type of environmentalists.

I couldn’t help but love her just a little bit, in the same way you love your friend’s hippie mom who let you smoke weed in the house in high school—you’re relieved she’s not your mom because you know deep down that that behavior is inappropriate, but you can’t deny the weed she grows in her backyard is dank as fuck.

Not that I came close to voting for her. During the election, I participated in a deluge of negative media coverage she received, writing one article that ridiculed her refusal to confidently state that vaccines don’t cause autism—“I’m not aware of evidence linking autism with vaccines” is the furthest she’ll go. (When I pressed her on this, she attributed her careful language to being a “scientist” before delivering a monologue on the corruption of the “medical establishment.”) I also mocked her concern about the “possible health effects of WiFi radiation on young children,” comparing her saying that she doesn’t have “a personal opinion that WiFi is or isn’t a health issue for children” to not having a personal opinion on whether reptilian shapeshifters did 9/11. (“We need to study it. I use WiFi, and the concerns are about young children,” she clarified to me, launching into a spiel mentioning a study about the effects of cellphone radiation on rats. There is no credible evidence that radio waves cause adverse health effects in humans.)

She then informed me that “people like to lie” about what she says and scolded the press for “cherry-picking” her comments on WiFi while ignoring her actual campaign platforms. Or rather, she did her to best to scold—she has preternaturally gentle way of speaking, her voice smooth and low in a way that is almost soothing enough to rock you into a soft slumber.
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In person, Stein is the biggest sweetheart—but she’s also a cautionary tale for leftists trying to build a movement. To understand who she is and why she does what she does is to understand the left at its absolute wackiest, what happens when a rigid mistrust of establishment politics goes too far, and what it means to be a joke.

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….To many of her critics, Stein’s stance on Russia is her most insidious view—her refusal to acknowledge that perhaps the United States’s biggest foreign adversary interfered in the election is baffling, to put it gently….
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…So it comes as no surprise that she welcomed RT’s interest in her 2016 campaign and didn’t have an issue with the Kremlin-backed media company broadcasting the Green Party’s primary debate. The way Stein sees it, RT hasn’t taken a particular interest in her but in “American dissidents in general.”

“That has everything to do with the fact that American dissidents don’t get covered by corporate media,” she explained. “I think trying to demonize RT for covering us is ridiculous. RT is a propaganda tool by the Russian government, in the same way that we do the same thing.”….
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….In our interview, Stein wouldn’t assert that Clinton and Trump are equally dangerous, but she also wouldn’t say that they’re not. (Classic Jill.) While Stein remains eager to criticize the Republicans, the focus of her anti-establishment vitriol has most often been directed at the Democrats. I chalk it up to, in part, what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” a psychological theory that asserts closely related communities “are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other” which satisfies “a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression.”

“We deserve more than two lethal choices is the bottom line,” Stein told me.

I wondered whether a shift in the Democratic Party to the left would change her mind. After Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic nomination, Stein had wanted him to join her on a third-party ticket (Sanders didn’t respond to her overture). With Sanders and other leftists enjoying more influence than ever, would Stein modify her assessment of the Democrats? Would she vote for Sanders in 2020 if he got the nomination?

“He won’t be the nominee, you can be sure. For the same reason he wasn’t this time,” she replied. She didn’t think the Democrats would ever make Medicare for all a reality, and though she conceded there were differences between the two parties, she trotted out one of her favorite lines: “Is the difference enough to save your job, to save your life or to save the planet?”
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“Yes, it can be, maybe not the planet but at least for your job or your life with the ACA versus how it was before,” I replied.

“I think it remains to be seen,” she said. “There are fewer people who are uninsured, but there are massive numbers of people who are under-insured. Are we gonna get there? What we find with less than single-payer is that it is a diversion and you always wind up starting over, and this has been repeated time after time.”

I told her I agreed that single-payer healthcare is needed, but for all the ACA’s flaws, wasn’t it better than nothing? Weren’t people who had preexisting conditions better protected?

Stein wasn’t sure. She thinks that Massachusetts would have single-payer if not for “the inordinate spending of the neoliberals on all sides of the aisle.” Then she asked me the question that defined her political philosophy: “Is half a loaf better than a loaf?”

“Half a loaf is not better than a loaf, but half a loaf is better than no bread at all,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, “but you don’t know what the alternative to half a loaf is.”