Four years ago, when Jill Stein was the Green Party’s candidate for president, she wasn’t onstage trading barbs with President Obama and Mitt Romney during the second debate at Long Island’s Hofstra University. She was outside, in the street, with an American flag draped over her lap. And then, shortly after, she was getting arrested for refusing to move.

Barred from the debates (candidates have to meet a floor of 15 percent in the polls to be invited), she garnered just 469,501 votes, or less than half a percent of the total cast. That, evidently, was enough to convince her that she should run again. Last June, Stein, a medical doctor turned environmental activist, announced that she was indeed throwing her hat into the shitshow that would become the 2016 race—just days after Donald Trump’s own rambling speech announcing his run for the White House.

In an election that includes a playboy former reality-show star, Stein might be the most badass candidate for president. Her platform reads like that of a Miss America contestant exposed to gamma radiation: She’d “end poverty” and also unemployment; “abolish” everyone’s student debt; and, to top it off, she says she'd give everyone healthcare. It’s far to the left, too—much farther than the avowed socialist vying for the Democratic nomination—pushing for a transition to entirely renewable energy by 2030 and legal weed. Plus, she’s plenty angry.

“When corporations are in the driver’s seat, we do not get the thoughtful and informed and principled people that we would like to see running for office,” Stein tells me. “We get really corporate caricatures who are serving the billionaires, or who are billionaires. This is not what democracy looks like.”

Though she likely won’t be included in debates this fall—she’s currently polling at 2 percent—she’s raised her profile to the point that some Sanders devotees have named her their pick if Bernie drops out. Which brings up a question worth asking: Who is Jill Stein, and what is she about?

GQ: Many voters have never heard of you or the Green Party. What’s the first thing you tell someone who doesn’t know you or your platform?

Jill Stein: I tell them I’m what they’ve been looking for. Because American voters are really tired of a rigged economy, and they are tired of a rigged political system. And poll after poll will tell you that people are sick of the two political parties. And I’m from the one national party that is not poisoned or controlled by corporate money. I’m a medical doctor, and I’m now in the practice of political medicine after a career in clinical medicine. Because politics is the mother of all illnesses when it comes right down to it, and we’ve gotta fix that one in order to get at all the other things.

“Forget the lesser evil. Fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it.”

Your “Power to the People Plan” for governing decries “the system.” What is the system, exactly?

Let me put it this way. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, perhaps a century ago, that we have a choice between vast concentrations of wealth or democracy. We have chosen the former. And our democracy has basically slid through our fingers. And it’s essentially a system that’s been hijacked, whether you look at public dialogue, whether you look at access to the ballot, and participating in elections, we have a system that basically circles the wagons around the two establishment parties.

Your agenda has some seriously lofty goals, like “end poverty and unemployment” and “abolish all student debt.” How realistic are those objectives?

Well, put it this way: The course that we’re on right now is—we’re making a beeline for disaster. We’re looking at the next collapse of the economy. The reform bills did not do the trick for Wall Street. And Wall Street is more prone to collapse and failure now than ever before. The banks are bigger than ever, and more concentrated than ever. So I would question the presumption that we are on a stable or sustainable course.