(ANTIMEDIA) A new Anonymous video strongly encourages voters to support 3rd-party candidate Jill Stein.

While the hacktivist collective has typically remained neutral when it comes to politics, in the past few years they have waged attempts to dismantle and expose the agendas of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Now, it appears, the decentralized group wants to facilitate the rise of third-party candidates in American elections.

The video, which features the group’s headless suited mascot standing guard in front of a spinning galaxy of stars, states the following:

“Anonymous is never unanimous and Anonymous as a group can never be said to endorse a political candidate. Anonymous has, however, always had a mission to create an informed public, to expose corruption, and to circumvent censorship.”

The electronically-altered female voice continued:

“[Jill Stein] has not only been censored and ignored by the mainstream media, by google and by Twitter. She was even arrested and held in a black site during the 2012 election for trying to attend a debate. In the interest of avoiding mainstream media’s bias against third party candidates, we endorse the suggestion for a #OpJillStein.”



The voice proceeds to encourage people to spread as much information about Jill Stein as possible with an aim to inject third-party candidates into future presidential debates.

The Anonymous’ video’s major claim — that Stein was arrested and held in a black site — is factually accurate, albeit flatly stated. In 2012, Hofstra University officials had Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala arrested and restrained for trying to participate in the debate being hosted there.

For eight hours, police kept the two mothers shackled to metal chairs with their wrists bound by plastic restraints, in a room guarded by 13 police officers. This same treatment was largely deemed reminiscent of CIA black sites when committed by the Chicago Police Department.

As she was arrested, Stein told police:

“We’re here to stand our ground. We’re here to stand ground for the American people, who have been systematically locked out of these debates for decades by the Commission on Presidential Debates. We think that this commission is entirely illegitimate; that if—if democracy truly prevailed, there would be no such commission, that the debates would still be run by the League of Women Voters, that the debates would be open with the criteria that the League of Women Voters had always used, which was that if you have done the work to get on the ballot, if you are on the ballot and could actually win the Electoral College by being on the ballot in enough states, that you deserve to be in the election and you deserve to be heard; and that the American people actually deserve to hear choices which are not bought and paid for by multinational corporations and Wall Street.”

Stein is the only political candidate who fully supports whistleblower Edward Snowden. She also holds progressive, anti-establishment views on electoral reform, money in politics, the PATRIOT Act, the Drug War, the militarization of police, the NDAA, labeling of GMOs, auditing the Federal Reserve, the prison-industrial system, NSA surveillance, and the military-industrial complex.

Debates opened to alternative political parties would provide a platform for promoting alternative visions for the country.

Fair treatment of popular but suppressed candidates like Ron Paul, a libertarian, might have changed the outcome of the 2012 election, as would a truly democratic process have given Ralph Nader a chance to voice Green Party ideals in the five times he’s run for president.

In 2016 John McAfee, the computer security mogul, is running as a candidate for the Libertarian Party. He recently appeared on several mainstream media outlets to support Apple’s resistance to the FBI, stressing the importance of privacy and cyber security in this country.

Currently, America’s two mainstream political parties manufacture consent around a limited spectrum of political ideas. This bottlenecking of views comes at the detriment of a true representative democracy.

Beyond the Green Party and Libertarian Party, there are 14 other political parties running candidates in 2016, including the Constitution Party, the Veterans Party of America, the Workers World Party, the Objectivist Party, and three socialist parties.

Anonymous concluded their new video with the following proclamation:

“Anonymous supports no political entity. Anonymous supports an informed public. We are everywhere. We are legion. We are those you left without a home. We are those you who have been murdered. We are voices no more. The world will change. We’ll change it. Tyrants of the world, expect us.”

This article (Anonymous to America: You Have More than Two Political Parties — Start Acting Like It) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.