Pacifica and “Green Party Disruptors”

I’m as disgusted as Zack Kaldveer and Sherry Gendelman say they are in their June 8 CounterPunch article about the quackery and conspiracy nonsense airing on Pacifica.

But then they do their own conspiracy mongering:

The painful truth is years of gross mismanagement, disinformation and infighting among this handful of controlling interests – including conspiracy theorists, Green Party disruptors, and the Workers’ World Party – have resulted in programming that often sounds like something you might hear from Alex Jones or read in a QAnon chat room.

They don’t say who these “Green Party disruptors” are. Their Green Party link is to a NY Times article with me pictured at the top. The article has nothing to do with Pacifica. I have nothing to do with Pacifica. It doesn’t reach Syracuse, New York where I live. I’m not a member and won’t be voting on the bylaws referendum.

On its surface, the NY Times article was a pedestrian dog-bites-man story about Republican hacks who, without the knowledge of my campaign or the Green Party, did some petitioning to get the Green Party on state ballots. It happens every election cycle. The NY Times “exposé” was like the crooked cop in Casablanca saying “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here.”

The subtext was the story’s real message—that the Greens are “a Republican Party op,” as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow put it at that time in her own fact-challenged conspiracy rant. The NY Times’ politically-slanted story was the only article on my candidacy it ran during the whole 2019-2020 campaign.

Troubled as Pacifica may be, I got far more news coverage and interviews from Pacifica stations and programs than the NY Times and the rest of the corporate media combined. That is why I want Pacifica to thrive and to dump the quacks and conspiracists that undermine its reputation as a credible source of news and analysis.

But Kaldveer and Gendelman lose all credibility themselves as they continue to spin their conspiracy fantasy about the Green Party:

The vaunted “democracy” proponents of the status quo incessantly repeat like Republican’s talk about “liberty” and “freedom” is bought and paid for by multi-millionaire-backed 501c4’s. These dark money groups are the driving force behind the current anti-democratic system that allows such inherently unpopular, disorganized, and dysfunctional political and pro-corporate underwriting interests to seize and maintain power over Pacifica radio. For example, much like the current defective U.S. politics, two dark money groups controlled by multimillionaires fund most election slate card mailings that Pacifica donor members receive. Pacifica members are encouraged to vote for slates with names such as Justice and Unity, and Rescue Pacifica, among others, when they are, in fact, fronts for both Workers’ World and Green Party members. As a result, these fat cat funded groups control a slight majority of the Pacifica National Board.

The Green Party doesn’t take money from corporate interests as a matter of policy.

It is telling that Kaldveer and Gendelman don’t name the two dark money groups and the multimillionaires controlling them and document how they are funding the slates that are supposedly fronts for the Green Party.

These vilifications of the Green Party are as baseless as Hillary Clinton’s smear of 2016 Green presidential candidate Jill Stein when Clinton called her “a Russian asset. I mean, totally.”

Howie Hawkins was the 2020 Green Party candidate for President.