I blogged a couple of months back about how Green Party presidential nomination candidate (and now, Socialist Party USA nominee) Howie Hawkins was about half-right, half-wrong, on all things Russia and Russiagate. Basically, he's right about Russia meddling in our elections; he's wrong about it being for Trump only, let alone the insinuation that collusion actually happened.
Many Greens, though, reject his claims entirely.
Some think he's simply not credible because he's doing his two-track campaign in apparent violation of party rules. I understand the anger. But, that doesn't make him non-credible.
Others? They're simply, if not full-on conspiracy theorists themselves about the DNC emails, or even Seth Rich's murder, at least fellow travelers. (On that part, Howie was also half-right, half-wrong. If Russia is indeed meddling, it also is not just a a duopoly issue.)
Even before Hawkins made his fullest statement, I knew he had some thoughts on this angle, and I was secretly hoping his nomination would flush many conspiracy theorists out of the party.
That desire is becoming ever more strong, and going to be ever more publicly expressed, due to reactions on the party's official Facebook page. (Since its settings are "public," I'm not breaking any social media ethics by noting this.)
Even before the biggest stuff — Howie's two-track run — hit the fan there, I'd blocked former online friend George Hayduke, and also unfriended him on Twitter. Jasun Thor Easley got the next block. Others likely will be soon, starting with William Pounds. The hours and minutes of my life are too valuable to waste, especially with a thread troll and hijacker like Easley.
Even people who I generally thought more "sober" disagree when I call out conspiracy theorizers.
Jonah Earl Thomas, for example, asks how I could call Jesse Ventura and RFK Jr. conspiracy theorists but not Jill Stein? He does so, in part, by having a different take than I when Primo Nutbar interviewed Stein about the possibility of them heading the Green Party ticket. She sounded enthusiastic enough to me, Jonah. And, for being an apparent Seth Rich conspiracy theorist, and doing whataboutism on it while calling me a Democrat, Jonah's now blocked. So is John Phillip. And, yeah, I feel like naming names.
As for the larger issue of antivaxxerism in the Green Party? The "horseshoe theory" is partially true on conspiracy theories. And antivaxxerism also runs strong in lefty Dems like Kennedy, and the more ardent core, on this issue, of capital-L Libertarians, along with some libertarian and Religious Right Republicans. As far as Stein as antivaxxer, Jonah? Wasn't just a Democrat talking point. Many movement skeptics, regardless of party, raised it. So did some SPUSA socialists. (That party also has a more nuanced stance than Greens on GMOs.) It wasn't just Dems, Jonah. She added to that with some of her claims about cellphone radiation and stuff. In all of this, she didn't necessarily go to outright pseudoscience, but she was definitely in the land of fringe science at least.
As far as the baseline of Putin meddling? Per my key blogging on this, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul said, around the start of Trump's presidency, that a number of RNC computers had been attacked, just like DNC ones, at about the same time in 2016, and a few, though far fewer than DNC ones, had been hacked. That's noted in my first link at top And, Guccifer 2.0 is pretty damned clearly a Russian agent, and the so-called Forensicator who has tried to claim otherwise is shit-full of whataboutism.
And Andy Greenberg of Wired has a whole book about it and other Russian cyberwarfare, Sandworm.
Oh, and it's not just me. Jeff St. Clair, publisher of Counterpunch, also thinks you Seth Rich conspiracy theorists are nuts. (Sadly, St. Clair, along with managing editor Joshua Frank, have crappy
editorial control in general over free[lance] submissions that they
publish, as he's let his own site fuel this bullshit.)
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