The flaws in the "spoiler" narrative have a lot of "tells".







The first tell is that candidates on the right and center are never, ever accused of being a spoiler.

Only leftists can be "spoilers".

When a "flaw" only goes in one direction, then it's not a flaw. It's a scam. Every time. A transparent and amateur scam at that.

The second tell is the hyperbolic rhetoric.



They’re spoilers (the Daily Mail); they’re the reason we’re in this mess (the Week); their deliberate unreason (Kathy Griffin, seriously) is a threat to us all.

The third tell is reassuring, superficial statements that sound good, but simply aren't true.



However, those who insist on voting for third-party candidates are often actually voting against their own preference.

When I say 'simply not true', I mean the facts are known, but are just ignored.



You have to assume that almost all of Stein’s voters would have gone to Clinton. But both pre-election polls and the national exit poll suggests that a lot of them wouldn’t have voted at all, if they’d been forced to pick between the two major candidates. The breakdown might have been something like 35 percent Clinton, 10 percent Trump and 55 percent wouldn’t vote. That doesn’t wind up netting very many votes for HRC.

The fourth tell is to try to convince you that everything you know about the world is wrong. For instance, spoilers Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein can't win because everyone who voted Democratic now want war with Russia.



But Democratic attitudes have changed since Trump took office. Liberals who once encouraged diverse primaries are now deeply suspicious of alleged spoilers like 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has faced questions about her ties to Russia; a party that has traditionally prided itself on skepticism toward military adventurism has since embraced a more muscular, anti-Russia foreign policy.

Which leads us to lies, by guilt from association, based on more lies.



Gabbard is an interesting case, because she does have some foreign policy objectives that align with Russia, so it would make sense that a candidate who is known as an Assad apologist is seeing favorable tweets and headlines from some sort of Russian apparatus. But even her denial of being a Russian asset was somehow confusing because people believe Greenwald—given his work with Edward Snowden—is a Kremlin propagandist himself.

All of this builds into a false narrative in which Gabbard and Stein are actually spoilers for the MIC and their regime change policies more than the Democrats.



Like Sanders and Warren, Gabbard is acutely attuned to the left’s frustration with endless wars. What she’s offering, however, is a fatalist view starkly different from the optimistic global vision of progress they’ve been pushing into the national conversation.

The final tell is when the public just flat-out ignores the entire narrative and does what they want anyway.



But the party grew by roughly 40,000 members between 2016 and mid-2018 — and now, as more and more voters become disillusioned by the two major parties, the Green Party is poised to once again play its biggest role: spoiler.