Jill Stein warns there is "no lesser evil" in final town hall before election
Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate, Prof. Butch Ware, held what is expected to be their final 2024 campaign town hall on Tuesday – just one week ahead of a high-stakes Election Day.
Stein's message was clear as she and her supporters hit the home stretch of a White House campaign that promises record votes for the Green Party.
"There is no lesser evil in this race. We are standing up to demand an America that works for all of us and a world that works for all of us," the presidential hopeful said during the virtual town hall.
Stein warned that electing one of the two major-party candidates – Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump – will only lead to more war and destruction, with neither committed to doing what is necessary to end Israel's US-backed genocide in Palestine and violence across the Middle East.
Harris is vice president of an administration that has continued to provide weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel despite more than a year of daily atrocities. As a presidential candidate, she has refused to support an arms embargo to protect Palestinian lives. Meanwhile, Trump has urged Israel to "finish the job" in Gaza.
Stein, by contrast, has listed cutting off US military assistance to Israel as the top item on her Day 1 agenda as president. She characterizes ending the Democratic-Republican stranglehold on American politics as the necessary first step toward peace.
"To free Palestine, we must also free ourselves – free ourselves from the duopoly, free ourselves from endless war, free ourselves from oligarchy, from neocolonialism, from the genocide that's been committed historically in this country, not only against African Americans and Indigenous Americans, and the slow-rolling genocides we have committed around the world," Stein emphasized on Tuesday.
"We must stand up against all of that because the war abroad goes hand in hand with a war here at home, and neither of these are okay."
Jill Stein and Butch Ware chart another path forward
Stein's presidential campaign has energized voters of all backgrounds who are fed up with US warmongering and looking for an alternative path forward.
Amid overlapping crises at home and abroad, vice-presidential candidate Ware praised the Green Party for giving the American people a "channel for their aspirations and hopes, not just for the venting of our fears and our frustrations."
These aspirations include embracing a foreign policy respectful of human rights, divesting from militarized police, taking bold climate action, and dismantling systemic racism through reparatory justice.
Ware said he believes he, a Black Muslim professor, and Stein, a white Jewish medical doctor, were destined to come together in this election cycle.
"There never has been quite this kind of duo in American politics or really in global history," he said. "All of our traditions of faith and conscience tell us that in this moment, the way that humanity is moving is wrong and that we are, in point of fact, better than this. We are capable of better than this."
Although the road to the White House may be an uphill one, Stein made a "declaration of victory" on Tuesday for the campaign's success in uniting people across racial, ethnic, and national lines in the struggle for justice and peace.
"We still have battles to go, but I think we have won the day here by coming together, by embodying this new world that we are calling for," she insisted.
Cover photo: IMAGO / Middle East Images