Stein is no stranger to losing things. When we met again a couple months later, we spent 15 minutes looking for her car, a blue Prius with a green "JILL STEIN" bumper sticker, after she forgot where she parked. She’s also lost the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, a 2004 Massachusetts House of Representatives race, the 2006 Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth race, the 2010 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, the 2012 presidential race, and the 2016 presidential race.

Jill Stein was looking for her cat. Inside her suburban treehouse of a home, slightly north of Boston, the two-time Green Party presidential candidate had been wandering around for about ten minutes, peeking in closets, disappearing into her bedroom. “Lily!” she called, but the feline refused to emerge. “She’s just shy,” she reassured me.

The logic of Clinton’s claim is easily disputed—as recounted in a Politico profile of Stein, “National exit polling that shows the majority of [Stein] voters would have stayed home rather than vote for Clinton, while others would have sooner voted for Trump.” Nevertheless, Clinton loyalists and other mainstream liberals have eagerly echoed the former secretary of state’s talking points—one Salon article asserted that Stein “spoiled the election for Hillary,” and an editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report called her “the Ralph Nader of 2016.” Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide, is a notable Stein adversary who once tweeted , “I know I need to let this go but I hope Jill Stein does not so much as whisper a rebuke of Trump pulling out of Paris. #shebuiltthis .”

In the process, she’s become both a punchline and a scapegoat. Despite receiving a mere 1,457,050 votes nationwide last year, she became the perfect patsy (alongside many other targets) for devastated Hillary Clinton supporters to project their post-election grief onto. In Clinton’s election memoir, What Happened , she writes, “Stein wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that she won thirty-one thousand votes in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin was smaller than twenty-three thousand. In Michigan, she won fifty-one thousand votes, while Trump’s margin was just over ten thousand.”

But when I spoke to her she didn’t seem to be considering another quixotic run in 2020. While she’s “not unshakably opposed to” running for president again, “it’s certainly not the default plan,” she told me. “It’s good for the party to develop and build new leadership.”

The Green Party leader doesn’t worry whether any of the hate could perhaps be justified. If Democrats hate her, it’s because “they’re threatened by voices of integrity that go much farther than they're willing to go in their kind of window dressing solutions.” If people misunderstand her intentions, that’s thanks to “the sponsors, the powerful special interests [that] are controlling the politicians, and unfortunately the corporate media.” She is not the type of politician who backs down if one of her platforms is widely unpopular or nonsensical or unrealistic. She considers herself an activist, a radical idealist who believes this country and the rest of the planet are about to totally collapse, and incremental change simply will not suffice.

Stein herself is not bothered by this hate. In fact, she seems to get a kick out of it. When I told her that she got a mention in What Happened—along with Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, and James Comey—she smiled and said, “I'm honored to be among the list of heavy hitters. Wow, bring it on.”

“She’s human eczema,” Teen Vogue politics columnist Lauren Duca mused on Twitter. She's "a right-wing tool” according to Dan Savage. The famously unhinged political gossip blog Wonkette, which touts itself as the “Official Blog of #THERESISTANCE,” once called Stein “so cunty.” Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald wrote a post-election account of an interaction he had with a fan after learning he voted for Stein: “I interrupted him and said, ‘You’re lucky it’s illegal for me to punch you in the face.’ Then, after telling him to have sex with himself—but with a much cruder term—I turned and walked away.”

Her house is exactly as you’d picture it: a little dirty, cluttered with antique furniture, musical instruments, and hippie art. Atop her piano sits a framed collage with silhouettes climbing up a landscape of cut-up newspaper headlines, the most prevalent words: “PALESTINE,” “A LIFE OF WAR,” “CRISIS,” “COVER UP,” “RADICAL,” “MISCALCULATIONS.” In the office area adjoining the living room, about 100 copies of a newsletter called Practical Sailor were messily stacked. By the computer there was a glass lamp that bore a stunning resemblance to a bong. Her bathroom, impressively enough, was dirtier than my own, towels unfolded and the toilet unflushed, maybe because she’s one of those “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” type of environmentalists.

In person, Stein is hardly villainous. She’s slender, with short and unkempt gray hair and a motherly attitude any offspring of liberal Jewish baby boomers will recognize. Despite my objections, she foisted a bowl of grapes on me, which I happily ate while she dissected a pomegranate. She can seem fragile and birdlike and charming, all at the same time.

The question for her and like-minded leftist do-gooders who want to avoid the quagmire Democratic Party politics can sometimes be is whether good intentions can do much of anything.

There are other things you could do to fight the impending collapse of the United States besides repeatedly running for an elected office that you have no chance of winning. But thoroughly disillusioned with the two-party system and highly mistrustful of anything and everything establishment, Stein is trying to save the world. At least, that's how she sees it.

To hear her tell it, she ran for president in 2012 and 2016 because she’s a “mother on fire,” and “when you and your family are backed into a corner, you will fight and do everything in your power… to do the right thing.” She described the current political situation as a “Hail Mary moment,” and told me, “I'm not running for political office for trivial reasons.”

She then informed me that “people like to lie” about what she says and scolded the press for “cherry-picking” her comments on WiFi while ignoring her actual campaign platforms. Or rather, she did her to best to scold—she has preternaturally gentle way of speaking, her voice smooth and low in a way that is almost soothing enough to rock you into a soft slumber.

Not that I came close to voting for her. During the election, I participated in a deluge of negative media coverage she received, writing one article that ridiculed her refusal to confidently state that vaccines don’t cause autism—“I'm not aware of evidence linking autism with vaccines” is the furthest she’ll go. (When I pressed her on this, she attributed her careful language to being a “scientist” before delivering a monologue on the corruption of the “medical establishment.”) I also mocked her concern about the “possible health effects of WiFi radiation on young children,” comparing her saying that she doesn’t have “a personal opinion that WiFi is or isn’t a health issue for children” to not having a personal opinion on whether reptilian shapeshifters did 9/11. (“We need to study it. I use WiFi, and the concerns are about young children,” she clarified to me, launching into a spiel mentioning a study about the effects of cellphone radiation on rats. There is no credible evidence that radio waves cause adverse health effects in humans.)

I couldn’t help but love her just a little bit, in the same way you love your friend’s hippie mom who let you smoke weed in the house in high school—you’re relieved she’s not your mom because you know deep down that that behavior is inappropriate, but you can’t deny the weed she grows in her backyard is dank as fuck.

In person, Stein is the biggest sweetheart—but she’s also a cautionary tale for leftists trying to build a movement. To understand who she is and why she does what she does is to understand the left at its absolute wackiest, what happens when a rigid mistrust of establishment politics goes too far, and what it means to be a joke.

Like many a baby boomer, the Vietnam War awakened the activist within Stein. While attending Harvard in the late 1960s, she participated in anti-war protests and occupied University Hall. But she didn't launch her career in electoral politics until much later. First, she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in anthropology, sociology, and psychology, went to Harvard Medical School, and worked as a doctor for decades. She became involved in environmentalism because she witnessed “an epidemic of asthma, cancer, developmental disabilities, obesity, diabetes, you name it,” much of which she attributed to pollution. In 1998, she joined a campaign to close the "Filthy Five" coal plants in Massachusetts. (The last of the state’s dirtiest power generators was finally shuttered earlier this year.)

Stein was born in Chicago in 1950 to two Jewish parents—her father, Joseph, was a small business attorney and her mother, Gladys, was a stay-at-home mom. She had a childhood that she described as “idyllic” in Highland Park, a predominantly white, Jewish, upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. “I was part of that generation growing up in post-war suburbia that was waking up,” she told me. “That this was a really crazy world and the suburbs are just lifeless and the whole war mindset was criminal.”

She found the Green Party the way many do, after feeling her efforts to protect her community were continually stymied by larger establishment forces. After she spoke at a Ralph Nader rally in 2000, the Green Party approached her to run for governor—“I was tricked into running for office,” she likes to say—with the promise of being able to reach a broader audience. Thanks to a 1998 referendum passed by Massachusetts voters, candidates who went without any large private donations got public money for their campaigns, giving her more money than most third-party candidates receive. (The legislature repealed the referendum in 2003.)

Arguably, Stein’s career peaked during the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race. She loved running for office—”it was so much fun,” she told me, oozing with girlish excitement—and performed surprisingly well, coming in in third place with about 3 percent of the vote. Her biggest moment came in a televised debate that featured her, the two other third-party candidates, Republican Mitt Romney, and Democrat Shannon O’Brien. Compared to the Libertarian who pledged to abolish all income tax and the raspy-voiced and largely incoherent Independent, Stein emerged as the most reasonable member of the third-party crew. Exuding a sort of frazzled art teacher vibe, she held a silver pencil in her hand to punctuate her points as she explained how recent Massachusetts tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy. (In hindsight, many of her ideas were similar to those of Bernie Sanders.)

“When we walked out to where the press was waiting, I was mobbed by the press who told me I had won the debate on the instant online viewer poll,” Stein told me. I was unable to find this poll, but her performance did receive positive coverage in the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix, which wrote she “won” the debate.