Jill Stein Accepting Green Party Presidential Nomination: ‘We Are Saying No to the Lesser Evil’

The Green Party’s convention in Houston culminated last weekend with the official nomination of Jill Stein for president. In her acceptance speech, Stein talked about the drastic impact of climate change but also focused on giving political power back to the people.

Notes of positivity were threaded throughout Stein’s speech. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Stein said. “This is our moment. Together, we do have the power to create an America and a world that works for all of us.”

This optimistic rhetoric stood in stark contrast to other parts of Stein’s speech, however, as she tackled environmental concerns (“We need to declare a state of emergency right now”) and problems with the two-party political system. She also said a “crisis in nuclear weapons” was created in part by the Democratic Party.

The Green Party has made a point of criticizing both major parties throughout this election season, and Stein used her speech to address the notion of voting for “the lesser evil”:

When they tell us to get out of the way because we’re standing in the way of the lesser evil, the answer to that is that this politics of fear, which we’ve been told to bow down to, has only delivered everything we were afraid of. All those reasons we were told to vote for the lesser evil—because we didn’t want the offshoring of our jobs, the meltdown of the climate, the massive bailouts for Wall Street, the expanding prison state, the attack on our civil liberties and on immigrant rights—all those things we didn’t want is exactly what we got by allowing ourselves to be silenced and letting a lesser evil speak for us.

[T]he only solution to the likes of Donald Trump is a truly radical, progressive agenda that restores our needs and ends the economic misery that promotes the kinds of demagogues we are seeing in Donald Trump. … Hillary Clinton is the problem; she is not the solution to Donald Trump.

As Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” notes, Stein is polling at 5 percent. Both Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson have received support for their inclusion in the presidential debates this fall, but candidates need to poll at 15 percent or higher to be included — a limitation recently challenged by third-party interests.

Watch excerpts from Stein’s acceptance speech below:

—Posted by Emma Niles