The Green Party is once again running a spoiler candidate, this time in the very close race for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina. Green candidate Matthew Hoh, an author, peace activist, and disabled former U.S. Marine, may divert enough votes from Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley to guarantee that the GOP wins the seat, thus possibly giving the GOP control of the Senate on top of the House, which the Trump party is already expected to win.

Since the GOP has now unmistakably morphed into a white supremacist, anti-Semitic and violently authoritarian party, a turnover of control of the Senate thanks to a few thousand spoiler votes in North Carolina could spell the beginning of the end for democracy in our country.

But what do the leaders of the Greens care? They are the same sect that didn’t even blink an eye when Jill Stein, their candidate for President in 2016, provided Trump’s margin of victory in four key battleground states (thanks in part to a Moscow social media blitz to get progressive Democrats and independents to vote for her instead of Hillary Clinton). https://www.nbcnews.com/…/russians-launched-pro-jill…). The Greens thus played a major role in unleashing our ongoing national nightmare.

In 2018 an unhinged Green convention virtually declared war on the Democrats, not Trump. They were already in the process of selecting 10 spoiler candidates for potentially close House, Senate and gubernatorial races from Arizona to upstate New York, with the aim of preventing Democratic victories. Luckily none succeeded. https://socialistcurrents.org/?p=3160

The Greens were, in 2016 and 2018, and still are today–even after January 6–motivated by a fanatical hatred of the Democrats. But they see little political difference between the two major parties except that the Democrats are the ones they hope to replace.

Stein has certainly not changed her tune. Since 2016 she has refused to reveal who paid for her trip to Moscow in Dec. 2015 to participate in a round-table dinner with mass murderer and Crimea occupier Vladimir Putin, former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency chief Mike Flynn, and several other individuals. Also, Stein has not revealed any private discussions she might have held with Russian officials during her trip, in spite of the support her campaign subsequently received from the Russians.

Now Stein is back in the picture, strongly supporting Mr. Hoh, whose views on Putin’s aggression in Ukraine have been, at best, ambiguous. Among other efforts, Stein strongly supported Hoh in a Zoom fireside chat with him on Oct. 5.

If Putin was delighted to make the Greens his puppets in 2016, he must be equally delighted at the prospect of an increasingly pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine GOP winning control of the Senate.

Here are excerpts from a memorandum to President Biden signed by Hoh and other members of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) last May, when Putin’s horrifying ruthlessness in Ukraine was already becoming clear.

The memo began: “Mainstream media have marinated the minds of most Americans in a witches’ brew of misleading information on Ukraine…” And then, in one of their summary points, the signers appeared to accept Putin’s view of the nature of the Ukraine government:

“Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine will not escape attention on May 9, as Russia celebrates the 77th anniversary of the victory by the Allies over Nazi Germany. Every Russian knows that more than 26 million Soviets died during that war…Denazification of Ukraine is one of the key factors accounting for Putin’s approval level of above 80 percent….”

In their most cynical paragraph, the signers even tried to blame failure to make progress on global warming on the U.S. decision to help Ukraine fend off invasion: “In last year’s ‘Threat Assessment’, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines identified climate change as a major national security and ‘human security’ challenge that can only be met by nations working together. War in Ukraine is already diverting much needed attention from this impending threat to coming generations.”

Many of the predictions put forward in the memo have subsequently been shown to be wrong. And factually, the “Nazi” nature of the Ukrainian government was already known to be false (the country’s president is Jewish and it was Putin who was bankrolling neo-nazi, neo-fascist and Christian nationalist groups in both Western and Eastern Europe).

Overall, the memo puts the blame for the crisis on the West (“the U.S. and NATO”), not on Putin, although it was his regime that invaded a sovereign nation on trumped-up charges and was already committing horrific war crimes. The memo signers seem unaware that if the U.S. and NATO had not taken action to arm Ukraine, the invasion would have succeeded–and NATO, already weakened by the machinations of former President Trump (clearly a Putin admirer and hostile to NATO), would have become an empty shell.

American progressives who are alarmed by the spread of authoritarianism/fascism in our own country and around the world should stop ignoring the U.S. Green sect’s self-serving addiction to spoiler races that always help the Right and, in recent years, the farthest Right. The Green sect (the national leadership and some of the state parties) are not part of the progressive movement. They are a malignant faction with no sense of the danger of fascism that is looming in our country, only a concentration on their own political fantasies. This faction should be boycotted by progressives, and its attempts to make alliances on the liberal-left should be rebuffed in no uncertain language. When possible, state and local Green organizations that truly operate in a decentralized fashion and try to avoid helping the GOP should be encouraged to publicly acknowledge the destructiveness of the national leadership’s spoiler tactics.

The trickery of the Greens in North Carolina this year may not work; Beasley may win anyway or she may lose by a margin far beyond what the Greens took away. But the Green spoiler in 2024 when Trump or one of his clones is on the ballot may do better, especially if Democrats are demoralized by increased political polarization. Activists and campaign teams should be prepared to warn the public against the Greens’ favorite political tactic in a more aggressive manner than anyone has attempted before now.