In speaking out against the political prosecution
of Jill Stein, we’re supporting the rights
of all to free speech and protest
Whatever your thoughts might be on the Green Party’s Jill Stein, she’s irrefutably on the right side of history by opposing the genocide perpetrated by Israel and supported and funded by the U.S. . . . AND she’s prepared to literally put her body on the line to protest this ongoing atrocity. I respect her for that. It’s definitely something we’re yet to see from the majority of Democrats.
Stein’s been in the news lately for something that happened over two years ago when she was running as the Green Party presidential candidate against Biden and Trump. On April 27, 2024, Stein was arrested along with around 100 other people, mostly students, during a pro-Palestinian rally at Washington University in St. Louis. She was booked into the St. Louis County Jail in Clayton where she spent close to six hours in custody. She was subsequently charged with misdemeanor counts of first-degree trespassing and fourth-degree assault. The image above is one of many which, along with video footage, debunks the claim that Stein assaulted anyone. Also worth noting is that out of the 100 or so other people arrested, only Stein has been charged with trespassing and assault.
Above: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein links arms with others at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, MO – Saturday, April 27, 2024. (Photo: Christine Tannous/St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Drag queen and astute political commentator Lady Bunny recently shared the following on social media.
Many Biden/Kamala supporters love to snidely ask Green Party voters “What’s Jill Stein doing now?” to suggest that she only pops up once every four years to run for the White House.
Well, right now, Jill’s facing charges for protesting Israel in St. Louis [two years ago]. Past residents of the White House like Trump, Biden/Harris and Obama have all funded Israel’s atrocities. Jill represents a break from that. Dr. Stein is Jewish herself, so she’s living proof that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic.
In a statement, the Green Party notes: “The Partisan Defense Committee has signed the petition calling to drop charges against Dr. Jill Stein based on her arrest at the pro-Palestine encampment at Washington University in St. Louis. If convicted, Dr. Stein faces up to 18 months in prison for exercising her First Amendment rights.”
Above: Jill Stein being arrested at Washington University, St. Louis – April 27, 2024. (Photo: Alan Zhou)
Many consider what’s happening to Dr. Stein a political show trail or, as Carlos Garrido of the Socialist Future New Jersey collective puts it, “a lousy excuse to persecute someone who’s the most consistent fighter against the two-party duopoly.”
Continues Garrido:
Dr. Jill Stein is part of the real anti-war dissident left who understands that there’s no future for the left in the Democratic Party. She’s been standing for Palestine, against war, and for working people in the U.S. for the longest time. Now that millions of Americans are discontented with both parties of the duopoly and turning away from them, the establishment cracks down on her over this altercation that occured at a pro-Palestine protest. And you can hear crickets from the DSA folks who haven’t condemned at all the Epstein class’s attacks on Dr. Stein. And these attacks are not just attacks of her, the Green Party, or dissidents. They represent one point in many of the descent into fascism that the country is experiencing. It’s an attack on the constitutional rights of all Americans. And I don’t care whether you agree or disagree with Dr. Stein’s politics, you should support her. They are lousy charges against an honorable person all because she is a principled critic of the establishment.
Friends, if you support our First Amendment right to free speech, please signthis petitionand share it and ask others to do likewise.
Following is the petition statement and additional background information.
Petition Statement
To: Washington University in St. Louis and the prosecutor’s office:
Jill Stein is falsely accused of assaulting police and trespassing, based on her standing with students peacefully protesting the Gaza genocide on April 27, 2024. These charges threaten the right to free speech and protest for us all - and endanger our right to demand a foreign policy that serves we the people, not the war contractors, AI billionaires and the military industrial complex.
We the undersigned respectfully call on Washington University and the prosecutor’s office to stand on the right side of history and to:
1. Drop all charges against Jill Stein
2. Restore students and faculty involved in the protest to good standing
3. Acknowledge that opposing genocide is not antisemitic, but rather an affirmation of Jewish – as well as Muslim, Christian, and all religious and humanitarian – values
4. Divest from and cease collaboration with Boeing and any corporations arming and profiting from genocide
Background
Jill Stein was officially charged in a St. Louis court on September 14, 2026 where she demanded a jury trial. Pre-trial proceedings began on October 29, 2026.
Video and photos widely circulated on social media show Jill being violently assaulted at the protest by police using a bicycle as a battering ram. Peaceful protesters were brutalized by police and 100 people were arrested at the time. Jill is the only person being prosecuted. As the leading opponent of genocide in the 2024 presidential election, she pushed the demand to end genocide to the forefront of presidential debate.
These charges threaten the right to free speech and protest for us all - and smack of political prosecution. The charges also threaten our right to demand a foreign policy that serves we the people, not the war contractors, AI billionaires and the military industrial complex.
As the genocide expands to the West Bank and Lebanon, explodes into the war with Iran, generates regional chaos, global destabilization and staggering costs in energy, food and inflation, these developments affirm the moral imperative of the protestors’ demands.
Above: Standing at left with then-presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein (right) and my friend Christine, mother of Stein’s running mate, Butch Ware – St. Paul, MN, October 18, 2024. For more images and commentary, click here.
I think the worst take I’ve seen as it relates to the midterms is that we’ve somehow voted our way out of fascism. That is an absurd take, a ridiculous take. We haven’t voted our way out of shit. Winning elections doesn’t fundamentally change anything.
Yet [many people] have this idea that somehow the Republican Party is dead. That’s ridiculous. The Republican Party is backed by more money than God. They are simply going to find new avatars. Donald Trump being defeated doesn’t defeat fascism in America because Donald Trump is an avatar of American fascism, not the driving force behind it. He may have gotten them power, he may have unleashed a more open and naked form of fascism on the American people, but fascism is rooted in racism in America. It’s rooted in corporatism and capitalism. It’s rooted in the kind of ingroups and outgroups that have existed within our country since the beginning. Our country was authoritarian when it started. If you don’t believe me, just ask Black people and Native Americans. What’s more authoritarian than enslaving one population and committing genocide on the other and then putting them in concentration camps that we call reservations? And so this idea that these midterm elections have really done anything yet is a joke.
And the idea that Democrats are going to keep Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in place is keeping fascism in place. Fascism is driven by corporatism. It’s driven by the nexus between the corporate state and the government state, fueled by grievances of ingroupings and outgroupings. And so if you have two individual politicians taking money from AIPAC, completely in the pocket of weapons manufacturers, you don’t have anti-fascist politicians. That’s not what these people are. Corporate Democrats, “mainstream” Democrats, are the controlled opposition, and Schumer and Jeffries are the poster boys for that. And so we have to continue to push Democrats. We cannot believe that these elections have done anything because winning elections is the first step. What the politicians do is the second step. And Democrats’ track record of actually confronting fascism both here and in history – or liberals confronting fascism – isn’t good. They remain defeated [when] they don’t confront the actual structural, cultural, economic and social reasons fascism exists in this country.
Fascism is as much cultural as it is political. The political apparatus harnesses the cultural fascism of this country. Long before we claim “fascism” was created, fascism existed. The thing exists before the definition in the words. And so we need to be really careful about how we’re talking about this. And we need to keep pressure on the Democrats because they are not going to do the things that we need them to do. [And one of the first things] we need them [to do is] to get Schumer and Jeffreys the fuck out of the way.
This afternoon I visited the Alex Pretti memorial site on Nicollet Ave. in south Minneapolis. People are still coming to this sacred site and leaving their “I Voted” stickers from last Tuesday’s midterm elections. As MPR Newsreported on November 3:
As Minnesotans headed to the polls on Tuesday, some paid tribute to Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens who were killed by federal agents in January in Minneapolis, by leaving their “I Voted” stickers at their respective memorials.
Minneapolis resident Peg Ihinger, who affixed her early voting sticker to a picture at Pretti’s memorial, said she’s glad people are “really fired up to vote.”
“I just want this nightmare to end for our city and for our country,” she said. “And damn it, they shouldn’t have died. None of them should have died.”
The following was posted today by Notice News on Facebook.
Alex Pretti should be celebrating his 38th birthday tomorrow [November 9]. Instead, his family is still waiting for answers, nine months after federal agents took his life on a Minneapolis street.
Not one agent has been charged.
Alex spent his days caring for the sickest veterans in the ICU at the Minneapolis VA. He once read the final salute for a veteran named Terry Randolph in his last days.
In January, he was filming immigration agents when he stepped in to protect a woman agents had knocked to the ground. He did what nurses do. He tried to help.
He had no criminal record. Within hours, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem went on TV and smeared him anyway, and DHS has never taken back a word of it.
His mother summed it up last month when she said, “The federal government went on TV and lied about Alex.”
Since then, Dear Leader’s government has stonewalled. His parents say nobody from the federal government has even called them. Minnesota investigators say they still don’t have key evidence the feds are sitting on.
I really hope that the Democrats understand that the main reason they managed to win, and win big, is because of how poorly Trump and all his helpers have done since he was re-elected.
Trump made the economy his main point in 2024, then prompty crashed it so that he and other wealthy people could cash in. Then he decided to do whatever Netanyahu wanted, and now we’re at war with Iran. lays out how midterm voters delivered a massive rebuke to Trump’s war on Iran, ICE terror, and soaring cost of living, electing insurgent progressives across the country.
People are fed-up with Trump and Team Red. It isn’t that they love the Democrats or that they approve of them more (they still have a shit approval rating), they just didn’t want two more years with zero opposition to Trump. Dems are already talking about building bridges . . . which seems like code for “move to the right.”
– Unknown via social media
November 4, 2026
Following is a 14-minute segment of Democracy Now! in which hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh examine the results of Tuesday’s historic U.S. midterm elections with Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts. And just how historic were these elections? Well, in addition to taking back the House and Senate, Democrats also made major gains at the state level and will control a majority of governorships for the first time in 16 years. Democrats also flipped 12 state legislative chambers.
“The size of the wins for Democrats in statewide races was wild,” says Nichanian. He identifies protecting abortion access, bolstering unions and ending police cooperation with ICE as some of the priorities Democrats are likely to pursue.
The broad strokes of the midterms are clear: a massive repudiation of MAGA’s fascist wave has ended the Trump 2.0 era of congressional complicity with his authoritarian takeover. Trump’s lame duck presidency now begins.
Authoritarians do not do well when trapped — and with a famously norm-busting president, anything is possible. But, critically, election deniers like Darline Graham and Greg Abbott are conceding their races. Donald Trump is already saying he’s “absolutely willing” to accept the results and told CBS, “Congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”
[. . .] The wins were not universal, as some big losses cut deep. There’s a reality that all of this is ephemeral if Democrats cannot govern a policy of change – if we only manage an economic status quo it will disillusion and likely result in yet another whiplash election in the other direction.
Further, the attacks on elections were treasonous. I won’t list the complete litany of federal assaults – but we have a Department of Justice captured by authoritarian forces using its power nakedly for partisan goals. The far right openly prepared sham legal theories to refuse certification of Democratic representatives. While we did not get systematic federal law enforcement terror at polls, we saw National Guard throughout Washington, D.C. We still have too many election officials committed to the Big Lie. And ongoing structural impediments to a fair election are consequential: In Mississippi, the Senate margin remains tiny while any win may be marred by equipment trouble, poll changes, and voters unexpectedly removed by data purges from the voting rolls.
Notably, the election maps themselves have been gerrymandered by racists to ensure power – though their greed rebounded multiple losses in these redistricted seats. (Groups like Black Voters Matter deserve a huge shout-out for fighting in the South and in races Democrats had abandoned.)
Despite all that, we managed a pro-democracy win that was too big to rig. The country delivered a shellacking to MAGA politics – an encouraging sign for all of us who are hoping for a better future. Ultimately, the election proceeded with voters refusing to be intimidated.
Folks are celebrating all the blue this morning. Blue wave. Blue tsunami. Historic wins for women, Black and Brown candidates. But do the Democrats really know what to do with power once they have it?
Seriously. Because for the past two years, we have been watching Democrats behave like apathetic, helpless, timid, and perpetually concerned spectators to their own government. Every week there has been another outrage, norms shattered, institutions gutted, executive power grabs, and so on from the Trump regime. And too often the response from the Dems has been issuing a strongly worded statement, a cable-news appearance and somebody in our inbox telling us to donate $15.
Well, come January, the excuses are over! The Dems got the House. The Senate. You’ve got committees, subpoenas, hearings, confirmations and the power of the purse.
I don’t wanna hear shit about “turning a page” or about healing, or unity, or “reaching across the aisle” or “restoring normalcy.” DO A PURGE! Purge every racist policy, MAGA parasite, grifter, Christian nationalist infestation and every piece of authoritarian rot they spent two years embedding in the government. The MAGATs have governed ruthlessly with a sledgehammer!
But I am not naive. Democrats have spent too much time acting like the Republican Party’s fraternal twin. Democrats have a record of being committed to many of the same systems they suddenly condemn when Republicans take them to their ugliest extreme. Same militarism, surveillance state, corporate donors and same willingness to criminalize and cage Black and Brown folk when it’s politically convenient.
Come January we shall see what they do. They won the midterms but they did not overthrow racist-ass America. The architecture is still standing and the foundation is still rotten as hell. The same systems that made Trump and MAGA possible will still be here in January but jusy wearing a different congressional majority.
I remember in the wake of the 2024 election, some people speculated that we could be witnessing the end of the Democratic Party and its replacement by new, more effective channels of resistance.
If only it were that simple. While I believe that the general trajectory for an empire passed its prime like the U.S. is toward further polarization and the breakdown of the constitutional order, this general trend is punctuated by attempts from the forces of bourgeois democracy to stabilize the situation and hold capitalism’s contradictions together. I think we’re in one of those moments now.
The problem is: as the contradictions of capitalism accumulate and the empire’s capacity for plunder dwindles, these attempts at stabilization become more and more feeble, and the democratic rights they offer become more and more shallow. We can see this in the shift in Democrats’ rhetoric since 2018-2020. Back then, people like AOC were (correctly) calling the ICE detention centres “concentration camps.” They talked about defunding the police, believing sexual assault survivors, and defending trans rights.
This midterm season wasn’t just a rebuke of Trumpism, but also of the “Woke 1.0” civil liberties drive from the first Trump administration. This time, there was no talk about “concentration camps,” defunding the police, or Me Too. Trans rights were either ignored or treated with open hostility, such as in the Iowa Democratic Party. The gambit seemed to be that if they surrender the “culture war” to the right and strictly talk about the price of gas and groceries, they can win back their seats. That gambit turned out to be correct, but are we really in a better situation than we were in 2018?
I would say no. The Democrats were only able to win on the “affordability” question because they’re out of power, and can easily point to Trump as the reason for people’s problems. There’s no guarantee that they’ll actually lower people’s grocery bills if they retake the White House in 2028, and if the Biden-era economy is any indication, the opposite will happen. The GOP will come roaring back in 2030 and 2032, angrier than before, and the Democrats won’t even have the promise of defending civil liberties as a reason to keep people in the fold.
So while I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, the worst thing we can do right now is breathe a sigh of relief and think we can go back to brunch. It’s not our job to celebrate temporary slowdowns in capitalism’s trajectory toward fascist barbarism, but to expose the forces of co-optation as counterproductive to our struggle against the far right, and to build an independent, working-class alternative. They’re not going to just disappear or be transformed for the better – they need to be actively fought.
Following is a 13-minute segment of BreakThrough News in which host Rania Khalek “lays out how midterm voters delivered a massive rebuke to Trump’s war on Iran, ICE terror, and soaring cost of living, electing insurgent progressives across the country.”
“I am absolutely elated,” says Khaley. “But I'm also cringing because people like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are reaping the benefits of the backlash to Trump after taking zero accountability for the horrors their party unleashed.”
The Democrats won last night not BECAUSE of Jeffries and Schumer, but in spite of them. The credit belongs solely to the people of the United States. And they weren’t just repudiating old guard Republicans last night; they were repudiating old guard ANYTHING. Hearing Hakeem and Schumer speak today, they sounded frighteningly out of touch with what is going on here. They know it’s a tsunami, and they’re glad about it of course, but beyond that they seem to have little understanding of the power that’s washing up on the shore. Even much less, what it will be washing away. They seem not to understand that a tsunami, by all laws of nature, will inevitably remake the shoreline. The old will have to disappear, so new things can emerge.
Trump’s era has been so bad that a blue wave probably smells like relief. The naked fascism feels like it took a hit. But don’t be deceived. Capital is still large and in charge and if it needs more fascism to lock in its vision, any relief will be short lived. Democrats are capitalists. They are war mongers. They are part of the ruling elites army to ensure capital accumulation continues unabated.
If you go back to brunch and run cover for this new crop of capitalist administrators, you will be doing a grave disservice to the people of the world who suffer under blue or red imperialism. The campus crackdowns under Biden? Fascism. “China is the enemy” nonsense from Biden’s State of the Union address? Fascism. Gaza under Biden? Fascism/imperialism. ICE? Trump’s brownshirts? Flock cameras? AI job displacement?
DSA is capitalist. They do NOT pose a threat to the rule of capital. The dictatorship of capital remains unfazed. They are imperialists as well. They are not socialists and they are content as class collaborators.
So breathe. . . . Yes it was good to remove some of the visible unchecked power. But it isn’t a real victory and those who pretend otherwise are not to be trusted. They are class collaborators as well.
No one faction of the Democratic Party can declare victory after the midterms. The Republican implosion is so great that all Dem factions won, from democratic socialists to corporate centrists. Fascism is not defeated by one election (it can always be reconstituted into something even more dangerous) but it can be defeated, and we know how to do it – with left economic populism. Too radical? Wrong. One of Trump’s most significant legacies is that he exploded the Overton window. Anything is possible - for worse and for better. That means Democrats no longer have any excuse not to run on – and deliver – the policies that will actually meet people’s basic needs and address our most pressing crises, from systemic political corruption to climate breakdown. Bold, people-first policies is how we beat back fascism for real.
In the following hour-long video, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges talks with the activist, consumer advocate, and frequent third-party candidate Ralph Nader. In introducing this conversation, Hedges asks: “The 'Blue Tsunami’ has inspired hope across the nation as Americans have repudiated Trumpism – but will the Democrats actually stand up to the donor class and deliver for their constituents?”
Alright, we’ve all enjoyed seeing the Republicans get thrashed. I don’t think anyone here is upset about that. But now we have to focus on a new problem: liberal complacency.
The Obama years taught us some important lessons. Leaving the Democrats on auto-pilot only leaves them to enact the same kinds of policies we would get under Republicans, only with a quieter media presence. There will be absolutely no material gains if we are not constantly disrupting the day-to-day and forcing them to acknowledge the will of the people. We have seen that liberals can at least mobilize on demand with the No Kings assemblies. Now expand on that. Keep protesting. Build up unions. Do not let your elected officials rest if they are plugging “across the aisle” rhetoric. Our society, and the entire planet, cannot afford the passive attitude that allowed Biden-Harris to sell missiles to Israel without impediment.
While keeping liberals in check is important, leftists also have an immense workload on their own plate. Expanding mutual aid networks is going to be vital, as there is still no real sign of economic recovery on the horizon. We need to continue educating, getting theory into the hands of as many people as we can (our album Theory for the People is a good place to start) in order to continue building a new level of class consciousness in the U.S. We need to be building up labour unions, tenants unions, and any other organization that directs political power into the hands of the proletariat.
I won’t pretend that I am not exhausted, and that these tasks don’t sound trying even as I write them out. But if we can keep pushing back against capitalism in every arena that it appears, I believe that we will see a new world in our lifetime. Keep struggling, comrades.
The “Blue wave” isn’t going to change the system underlying Trump and prior elitist presidents. I see many people wasting so much energy pointing to Trump as if removing him solves the problems today. It’s an entire system, an entire culture, and an entire empire.
We need more system level thinkers at the forefront of dialogue. But social media algorithms keep rewarding narratives that uphold the system and bring the chaos agents to the forefront. Then again, perhaps our culture is still addicted to that.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
