As a sensitive pacifist, I sometimes have to avoid looking at the screen when my husband is watching his UFC fights. I don’t mind so much when the fighters are evenly matched, going toe-to-toe in a fair contest of martial arts proficiency, but then there are those times where one guy ends up on the receiving end of a one-sided beatdown by someone he just shouldn’t have stepped into the cage with.

Watching Jill Stein’s savage ground-and-pound clinic on The Daily Beast today was like that for me. I had to read her scorching response to Yashar Ali’s insipid smear piece through the gaps in my fingers, yelling “Ugh, where’s the ref? He’s done! Just tap out already!”

While Dr. Stein did make an unassailable defense of her investment portfolio, the real knockout punch came before the fight even started. While Ali’s entire article was an attempt to paint Stein’s investment portfolio as indicative of a “conflict of interest,” the good doctor pointed out that he neglected to mention the director of the Daily Beast‘s corporate owner is none other than one Chelsea Victoria Clinton.

Ooh. Cringe.

Since Stein issued her response, Ali has updated his vacuous article with a few feeble rebuttals (in which he was forced to concede that “it’s true that Stein would not have control over the investments of the funds she invested in”), but, as of this writing, he’s completely avoided making any mention of that one massive spin kick to the skull.

During the fake Democratic primaries the Daily Beast was cranking out hit pieces against Bernie Sanders like their lives depended on it, and a few alert Berners, like this gentleman from The Humanist Report, made the Chelsea Clinton connection back in February. Now that “do as I say, not as I do” Bernie has fallen in line and insisted that everyone should vote Democrat across the ticket despite his immediate return to Independent status after Hillary’s illicit nomination, the hit pieces against him have stopped, but the attacks against the Democratic party’s new public enemy number one, Jill Stein, have persisted.

I could write a whole other article about the Clintons’ “conflicts of interest” (like the massive gifts, pay-to-play scandals, political favors, unfathomably deep levels of corporate cronyism etc. as revealed by WikiLeaks), and how this is yet another example of the textbook domestic abuse tactic of accusing the abusee of doing what the abuser is doing, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now.

What I’m finding intensely interesting at this moment is this: why is Chelsea Clinton still having her henchmen run smear pieces against Jill Stein? The official narrative we’re hearing throughout all corporate media is that Trump has fallen too far behind to recover and the return of Chelsea’s parents to the White House in January is now an inevitability. So why are the attack articles still coming? Why aren’t they just ignoring Jill Stein if she’s an irrelevant non-factor?

I can only think of a few possibilities. The first would be that the official narrative is a lie. That the weighted polling practices employed by the Democratic party and their goons, as exposed by WikiLeaks and reported in this article by Zero Hedge, are still being employed to discourage Trump voters by making it look as though Clinton has an insurmountable lead. If that is the case, then it would make sense for Clinton-controlled media like the Daily Beast to continue doing everything it can to squeeze every last vote away from the progressive competition it has in Jill Stein.

Another possibility is one we’ve discussed before: the Democratic party is terrified of the Green Party. If all the corruption, election-rigging, warmongering and corporate cronyism scares away their progressive base to another party more in alignment with its values, the Democrats will lose viability as a party. This is why they’re still going out of their way to spin the lie that Nader was responsible for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000, even to this day while they’re pushing a presidential candidate who, as a senator, backed all of Bush’s worst decisions.

The other remaining possibility is that both A and B are true. The polls are being manipulated, and the rise of the Green Party will mean the loss of a whole lot of cushy power positions for the Democrats, whose plutocrat bosses will also be unhappy with having to deal with a non-corporatist political party entering mainstream American politics. They’ve had their hawkish eyes on the Green Party ever since it formed, and since that day, they’ve been acutely aware that they need to do everything they can to keep it from entering the mainstream. Their control of the corporate media (which the leaked emails are revealing in greater and greater detail is far more complete and pervasive than most of us had realized) has enabled them to do this so far, but the rise of WikiLeaks and alternative media combined with widespread internet access has caused them to lose more and more control of the narrative.

Either way, they’re getting desperate, they’re getting scared, and it’s showing. They’re being forced to extend themselves further and further out of their hiding places in their frantic attempts to keep their narrative from crumbling to pieces. Let’s keep pushing.

[Featured Image by by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]