Progressive Democrat Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez from New York is known for her dramatic and histrionic gestures, but she may have topped her previous record by recently describing Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as “predatory.”
Writing in her native environment of social media, Ocasio-Cortez recently told Instagram that she had “thoughts” about Stein, who has been a burr under the saddle of the Republican and Democratic parties during the last few presidential elections.
Ocasio-Cortez basically accused Stein of being a spoiler candidate who did not care about actual civic service, but only about upsetting the presidential elections. She pointed to the fact that Stein has been the Green Party’s presidential nominee for 12 years, but that she and the party have been unable to “grow your movement.” All Stein does is to “show up every four years” to talk to people who are “justifiably pissed off.” That alone without backing it up by filling seats at lower levels of government, Ocasio-Cortez said, is not enough, and it “reads as predatory.”
Stein shot back on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), calling Ocasio-Cortez “predatory” for “funding genocide.” By this, she meant that the U.S. support for Israel is allowing the Jewish state to annihilate the Palestinians.
With her trademark Millennial insouciance, she ended the statement with, “I’m sorry, I’m just saying it.”
Stein has indeed been a headache for the major parties. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, she got more votes than the margin of victory that Donald Trump needed to win the presidency in 2016. The big parties have called her a “spoiler,” and former secretary of state and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused Stein of being a “Russian asset.” That seemed to be the go-to tactic of Democrats against their enemies in the 2010s, as the “Russia-gate” hoax took up incredible amounts of air time for years before being debunked.
Stein is running again this year, and will be on the ballot in 13 states. Independent candidate and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the biggest independent name in this year’s presidential race, but he shocked the nation and the parties in August when he ended his campaign and endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump. This led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left, most acerbically from Kennedy’s own sister, Kerry Kennedy, who released a statement excoriating her brother and saying he was in an “obscene embrace” with Donald Trump.
