Lol! Only 2 weeks ago I made the following post on Reddit in response to a non-American who was asking why 3rd party candidates never won I elections:
"Anytime someone gets close, the media makes them out to be a joke. They bash the third party relentlessly and make the two sides believe that voting for them would be a waste. Because the "Big Club" (ref. George Carlin) doesn't want any other parties involved. And people are just stupid enough to know they are being duped but go along with it anyway.
Then, we get to the point of no return and voters are made to believe that if they vote for the third party candidate, they are actually voting for tyranny. And it ALWAYS works.
The USA doesn't want to be free. We don't want to make things better. We want to WIN!!! No matter the issue, no matter the consequences, no matter what you believe, "I need the validation of my team winning!" WIN!! WIN!! WIN!!!
That's all that matters."
And now every other post is a "How Jill Stein is a piece of shit" post.
Your reaction to yet more proof that jill stein is not a serious 3rd party candidate is to double down on your belief that she is a serious candidate but also the victim of a massive conspiracy. That's the thought process of a victim of disinformation.
The sad reality is that 3rd party candidates are not viable in our 1st-past-the-post voting system.
If you seriously wanted more than 2 viable parties you'd be advocating for electoral reform, not pretending that russian funded republicans like jill stein are somehow different from the other russian funded republican on the ballot.
I think he was half right. Our for-profit capitalist media has done Bernie Sanders dirty over the last 20 years so I don't trust them to be fair and objective towards any 3rd party environmentalist groups that would potentially put sustainability before profits. Dont get me wrong, I think Jill Stein is a Russian sponsored spoiler candidate, but I think the media would shit on her even if her campign was sincere.
If we had a party that was legitimately dedicated to environmental justice AND we had a political system that allowed minority parties to participate, then yeah, that would be a real threat and the media would be martialled against it.
But I just don't see how the media reaction to third parties matters. Non-ranked voting, non-proportional voting and the electoral college structurally forbid minor parties from being anything but a spoiler.