I just wanted to have a quick rant about how Russiagaters are so fucking stupid that they still to this day think that the Green Party ran a presidential candidate in 2016 because of a Kremlin conspiracy.

This might seem like a weird thing to kvetch about at this point in the game, but anyone who talks about this stuff regularly knows that it is impossible to mention Jill Stein online without some Clintonite posting the above picture and making an obnoxious insinuation, and it’s just now finally gotten to me. How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that a party which has out of necessity run a candidate every presidential election since 1996 only ran one in 2016 because of some kind of nefarious Kremlin plot, and how fucking stupid must your echo chamber be to have fostered such a belief?

How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that a candidate who received one percent of the popular vote (less than half of what Ralph Nader received in 2000) despite running against the two least popular mainstream candidates ever was only able to achieve this via Kremlin collusion? How fucking stupid do you have to be to never bother to research the perfectly reasonable explanation that Jill Stein has given for the picture in question?

Go on any social media post by Stein and a quick scan through the comments will turn up multiple “How’s Putin?” and “How’s Russia” comments, as well as repeated posts of the above picture and vague insinuations about Kremlin collusion. This is just a quick sample from her most recent tweet, which was about net neutrality of all things, something Clintonites generally agree with.

How fucking stupid do you have to be to live your life like this? How fucking stupid must Russiagate be to engender such stupidity?

In reality, down here on earth where the real things happen, Jill Stein had dinner after a human rights conference in 2015 during which no money or even words were ever exchanged. In her interview with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast, Stein gives her side of the story which nobody anywhere has ever provided a shred of evidence to contradict. Here is an excerpt from the transcript:

J. Stein: All right. So, let me just start with the mythology that this was an intimate roundtable. There were like 11 people at the table. I think only eight are shown in the picture because of the angle it’s taken from. And actually, if you look closely, if you blow up the picture, you’ll see there’s a chair between Michael Flynn [laughs] and Putin, which was occupied by the head of RT. She happened to be introducing Putin at that moment. Putin and, I think three rather strapping men kind of stormed in just before Putin was to give a speech, so they really weren’t at the table for very long. Maybe five minutes, maybe 20, tops. Nobody introduced anybody to anybody. There was no translator. The Russians spoke Russian. The four people who spoke English spoke English. There was a guy sitting next to Flynn named Cyril Svoboda who was the deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic way back, and also the foreign minister, etc. He spoke both languages. And what I read afterwards was that he had briefly translated between Flynn and Putin, and it amounted to, “Hi, how you doing?” “Okay.” That was it. So, that was the great conversation. Nobody else talked to anybody across language barriers that I could see. I assumed these were his bodyguards who came in with him. Turns out they weren’t his bodyguards. They were like his chief of staff and communications. But nobody cared to make introductions. This wasn’t intended to be a discussion of any sort. I spent just about the whole evening talking to the German former foreign minister sitting next to me, Willy Wimmer, and we had a very interesting conversation. But I think that was the only substantive conversation [laughs] that took place around that table. JS: And then Putin gets up to give his speech. J. Stein: Yup. JS: And then does he return to the table? J. Stein: No. Then they walk out. He was basically there to give a speech. This was not some kind of a dinner meeting. Nobody even met anybody. There were — I didn’t hear any words exchanged between English speakers and Russians.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. She paid her own way to attend a conference in Russia long before it became the big, scary boogieman everyone was expected to avoid at all cost at the end of last year, and nothing happened. How fucking stupid do you have to be to make a thing out of that?

Third parties happen. Not nearly as much as they should, but they do happen. Running presidential candidates is an essential part of a third party’s efforts to build party viability, and if people want to vote for a third party it is their right to do so. If Stein hadn’t run in the Green Party presidential slot it would have been someone else, because running presidential candidates is something the US Green Party always does. If you think this is because of a sinister Kremlin plot, you are fucking stupid. That is all.

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