Lucy Gellman Photo
Stein at Wednesday’s rally.
Philadelphia — A day after Bernie Sanders announced that he was “proud to stand with” former presidential campaign rival Hillary Clinton, some of his supporters joined thousands of people cheering on a new candidate of choice, the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
Stein fired up the crowd with a 5 p.m. speech at “A Day For Bernie,” an outdoor protest organized by Occupy DNC Convention 2016, Bruce Carter and Black Men for Bernie and The People’s White House.
Held from 11 a.m. to just past 6:30 p.m. outside Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building on John F. Kennedy Boulevard, the event drew thousands still smarting from Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton following their hard-fought Democratic presidential primary campaign, and his conciliatory speech on her behalf at the city’s Wells Fargo Arena. The protest took place the day after the Democratic National Convention officially nominated Clinton as the party’s presidential standard-bearer.
Taking the stage — an elevated stone platform that supports Jacques Lipchitz’ Government of the People sculpture — to cries of “Jill not Hill! Jill not Hill!” and John Lennon’s “Power to the People,” Stein addressed around 2000 would-have-been Sanders voters. The crowd went wild as she decried Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, blamed the first Clinton administration for creating terrorism in the Middle East, and pledged “justice for all” specifically including the black and Indian American communities, undocumented immigrants, women and LGBTQI citizens.
“You are amazing! We are the future! We are that revolution of justice that is happening right now!” Stein declared, pressing up close to the microphone. “You got it started, and together we are going to take it all the way until we prevail.”
With the crowd cheering, Stein made her pitch: Joining her means joining “a movement for people, for planet, and for peace, for peace over profit.” She called for getting money out of politics and investing it in social justice, eliciting wild whoops, applause, and small hordes of people inching closer to the makeshift stage.
“When a social movement gets together with a political voice,” she declared, “that’s when we really challenge power as we must.”
“They would like us to be divided and conquered. They would like us to be a movement to stop fracking over there, to stop police violence over there, to stop deportations over there — we need to be all of those movements all together. And when they try to pack us up back into the abuses of the past back into a political campaign with a candidate who is an advocate for the big banks, for the prison industrial complex, for the war profiteers, for the fossil fuel giants .… You know who I’m talking about: Hillary!
“We say no to that lesser evil, because that lesser evil has actually paved the way to the greater evil. That’s because people stop coming out to vote for politicians who are throwing them under the bus! People don’t come out to support lesser evil politicians — that’s how Congress flipped!”
“We have a right wing extremist movement that is rising up all over Europe, North America, and beyond because of the policies exemplified, moved forward by the Clintons … We must stand up to them all! … Putting another Clinton in the White House is the worst thing we could do for Donald Trump and that movement. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the solution to the Donald Trumps of the world.”
Wilkinson.
Stein’s takedown of Clinton was followed by a call for a truth and reconciliation commission to pursue reparations to “the African-American people and the Native American people.”
In between cheering and applause, audience members and protesters revealed a more complex range of reasons to vote for — or perhaps not vote for — the third-party candidate.
Wiping back tears, Los Angelean Lillian Wilkinson spoke about her lasting allegiance to Sanders — and new interest in Stein — after an emotionally turbulent week. After flying to Philadelphia Sunday to protest the DNC, she said, she still had an anti-Clinton fire in her belly.
“Senator Sanders is the most authentic, compassionate … It breaks my heart,” she said, her voice breaking. “I think he’s a once in a generation, once in our lifetime candidate, and it’s just so sad. But he started something, and for that I am very grateful.”
She wasn’t buying the argument that she should vote for Clinton as a lesser evil than Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“I say: ‘If Hillary and the DNC were really serious about defeating Trump, Hillary would have stepped down and nominated Bernie. He was always leading double digits at the polls. Always. Clinton money is what’s doing this … It bought the DNC. I used to worry a lot more about Donald Trump. Now I worry about Clinton. To me they’re almost the same thing. Do I think Donald Trump should be president? No. He’s a buffoon and an idiot. But Hillary is something else. For anyone to say ‘you have to choose’? Fuck you. No I don’t. I’m voting third party. I’m voting Jill Stein … She give me hope again, like Bernie did.”
Waters.
It wasn’t that simple for 75-year-old Lavelle Waters, who had driven from Redding, California, to join her New York-based granddaughter Lashelle Willkes at the protest.
“I did really support him, and I was really disappointed when he supported Hillary,” she said. “I think that it’s very hard to know what to do — I’m thinking that maybe it’s best not to vote at all, because the system is not only corrupted, but just so deadly it has to be brought down and changed. I’m thinking that it’s possible that if we vote we’re playing into the system and making it look like it’s all okay, and it’s not all OK.”
But, she added, she would have to think twice about voting third party if she lived in a swing state like Michigan or Ohio.
“In California, the election’s practically over by the time you vote. California always goes Democrat … [in a swing state] it would be much, much harder, because you just want to know what to do. I want to know what to tell my grandkids … I don’t think they’ll vote in the main election.”
That was also true for Willkes. She said she doesn’t especially like Clinton, but she feels compelled to vote as a woman of color, and as someone dating an immigrant who told her that he didn’t want Trump, and couldn’t voice that at the polls yet. Asked for whom she plans to vote, she smiled and looked to her grandmother, then back near where the action was winding down on stage.
“I’m still undecided,” she said.
To listen to Stein’s full speech from the protest, click on or download the audio above.
