History shows that when people unite, they can make America a more just, equal and peaceful place – and quicker than you might think – Jill Stein told an audience at Riverside City College on Wednesday.

Noting how people thought the Berlin Wall would stand for years and how public protests led to the South Korean president’s recent ouster, Stein, the 2016 and 2012 Green Party presidential candidate, said: “Don’t for a minute drink this Kool-Aid that they’re trying to force down our throats that we are powerless. We are powerful.”

Progressive gains, including the Environmental Protection Agency, came under Richard Nixon, “one of the most corrupt, authoritarian, repressive presidents we’ve had up until now,” Stein told at least 100 people on the steps of the Martin Luther King Learning Center.

According to Stein, those progressive wins came about due to public activism and pressure.

In 2016, Stein, a physician, won roughly 1.4 million votes nationwide — about 1 percent of the total — including just under 279,000 votes in California. She received 11,500 votes in Riverside County and 10,600 votes in San Bernardino County.

Her speech, which came as part of a campus speaking tour in California, combined an explanation of the Green Party platform with a path for progressives to move forward in the Donald Trump era.

“We can have an economy, an education system, a health care system, a food system – we can have an international relations system that builds an America and a world that works for all of us,” she said. “The good news is that these are majoritarian ideals.”

To a cheering audience, with some holding signs such as “Free Your Mind, Think Jill Stein,” Stein, 66, called for debt-free public education as a right.

“It’s time to bail out the younger generation,” she said. “If they bailed out the crooks on Wall Street who crashed the economy, it’s time to bail out the victims of that waste, fraud and abuse.”

Money for free public college can be found by shifting funds spent on a needless new generation of nuclear weapons, said Stein, who called for de-militarizing the federal budget and a war on poverty that she said would make Americans more secure than a war on terror that fuels extremism.

Stein also supports universal, single-payer health care and a green jobs program to counter what she described as a “climate emergency.”

“We need to get off that wartime (economic) footing and we to do it in a hurry,” she said. “We need to get off of the fossil fuel footing as well … in Pearl Harbor, we lost one harbor. But with the climate emergency we have now, we are about to lose all harbors all around the world.”

Democrats, Stein said, need to stop taking corporate money and looking for people to blame for losing the election.

“They’re saying we interfered with the election by standing up for real democracy?” Stein said. “It’s hard to say it without laughing.”

Trump got votes from working Americans “because so many people have just had it up to here with the deregulation of Wall Street brought to us by the Clintons, with the off-shoring of our jobs brought to us by the Clintons,” Stein said, adding the solution “is not more of this neoliberal centrist Democratic Party that caused the right-wing extremism to start with.”

Stein described Trump as “living on borrowed time, because he is a walking minefield of legal, constitutional and ethical liabilities.”

“This is crazy enough that even the Republican establishment is quaking in their boots about this monster that they have allowed to be created,” she said. “So we could see things turn around rather quickly.”