Green Party candidate Butch Ware: All empires fall

Presenter: Kamala Harris announced July 30 that she would not run for governor of California. According to the podcast Political Dharma, the biggest winner in her decision could be the Green Party. Here’s former Eugenian, Alan Zundel:

Alan Zundel (Political Dharma): Kamala Harris, the former vice president of the United States who ran very briefly for president last year when Joe Biden finally stepped down, she said she’s not going to run for California governor. This was her announcement and that immediately raised the prospects for the Green Party candidate, Butch Ware.

[00:00:34] And the reason for that is that in California, rather than having separate primaries for the various political parties, there’s one big primary where all the candidates from all the parties have to run together in one primary and all the voters of any political party can choose one of those candidates to vote for, no matter who. And with Harris out of the race, Harris was the front-runner in all the polls about who people in California would vote for.

[00:01:06] The front-runner doesn’t mean majority support by any means, but she was the front-runner. With her out of the race, I count nine other Democrats who are in the race, seven Republicans, a Libertarian party candidate, and two independent candidates who do not have a party preference.

[00:01:27] That makes altogether 19 candidates. With this many candidates in the race, that means that people who lean Democratic might split their votes between all of those different Democratic candidates or even a few of them choosing independents or a Green Party candidate and therefore, no particular Democratic candidate, unless somebody emerges as a clear front-runner, is going to get a very high percentage of the vote.

[00:01:55] That would mean only two, the top two in the primary, the two who got the highest number of votes in the primary, are the only two who appear on the general election ballot. Therefore, if a third-party candidate can squeak into getting enough votes to be close to the front-runner or match them or go beyond them, they can be in the general election, which would be a big step for a third party. Doesn’t often happen with the top-two system.

[00:02:26] Presenter: The Green Party candidate for governor of California spoke at Oregon’s summer convention July 26. Introducing himself and his hopes for the party, Butch Ware:

[00:02:37] Butch Ware (Green Party candidate for governor of California): I was brought into my own personal faith tradition of Islam and also into the Black radical tradition in which all my political activism is rooted when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 15 years old.

[00:02:50] That book changed my life, changed my consciousness, brought me into the faith tradition that, you know, kind of organizes my personal life and a lot of my community life.

[00:03:00] But it was also my indoctrination into the Black radical political tradition. And we have lots of valuable lessons to learn from that Black radical political tradition about how to respond to this moment and become that revolutionary opposition party.

[00:03:16] When I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X at age 15, I read it cover to cover in one night and I wanted what Malcolm had at the end of that book. So I went out and I got an English translation of the Quran from my public school library the next day and I read that cover to cover the next night. and I was a Muslim before the end of the week. I took, I converted before the week was out.

[00:03:36] That was the beginning of a lot of consciousness-raising for me.

[00:03:40] But something that was really deeply striking to me in that Quran was that all of the heroes of that book were anti-imperialists. Abraham was fighting the most powerful imperial tyrant on the earth in his time, which was Nimrod. Moses and Aaron were standing 10 toes down against the most powerful imperialist in their time, Pharaoh. John and Jesus were being martyred for having the audacity to stand up to the Roman Empire.

[00:04:06] And over the course of the years, I’ve realized that there’s this deep fundamental truth across all of our traditions of faith and conscience that I was encountering in that book, but you guys will have encountered through your own traditions in various ways. There’s this single universal truth that’s expressed in a thousand different tongues, and it is simply this. It can be summarized in three words:

[00:04:31] All empires fall.

[00:04:33] All empires fall. Nothing that is taken by force is ever held. Nothing that is stolen through colonization is ever retained.

[00:04:45] All empires fall. Which means that from the beginning they are doomed.

[00:04:50] So the first thing for us to understand about the moment that we are in is: We are witnessing the collapse of American empire. We are in the extinction burst of American imperialism.

[00:05:03] Gaza has peeled the scales off of the eyes for many to reveal what most of us in this room already understood: that American imperialism is the most dangerous weapon of surveillance and death that has ever existed in human history, right, stretched across the planet, inflicting torment on humanity across the globe, to extract resources for the benefit of a tiny few.

[00:05:26] We are seeing them facilitating every kind of ecological degradation, every kind of moral apathy and moral rot. No concern for our homeless population, which is expanding rapidly in this state.

[00:05:41] Instead, mountains of money poured into a poverty-industrial complex, handed out to developers and NGOs instead of to the people that are actually suffering and hungry. Times could hardly be any darker than they are now.

[00:05:59] What Malcolm said about the Black community in 1964 being caught between two predators that differ only in the modality of the hunt is clearly true of the American electorate, whatever their racial background in 2025. We’ve got a population that is caught between a neoliberal Democrat party and a conservative party that has long since fled into overt fascism.

[00:06:29] So we are caught between foxes and wolves, one hunting by guile, the other by sheer force. And more than ever before, people want this alternative. 63% of voters in one poll, national poll, scientific poll said that both parties do such a ‘poor job’ that we need an independent third party.

[00:06:54] When that was data was basically reproduced in another poll that was broken down by voter registration, 70% of American independents said that we need that third party; 53% of registered Democrats said that we need that third party. And again, same language: ‘Such a poor job. Both parties do such a poor job.’ 48% of Republicans said the same.

[00:07:18] So half of the registered voters in each of those parties thinks that both parties are so bad that we need a third party.

[00:07:28] We have the best policies for working people, but we’re not yet a working people’s party. We have the best platform for Black liberation, reparations, transformation of the carceral state, but we’re not a Black people’s party. We have the best policies and platform to protect the Latino community and other immigrant communities that are being having civil liberties violated and that are being kidnapped. But we are not yet a Latino party because we still have to do the work on the ground in order to build the relationships in those communities and in order to build up the political infrastructure that will be required for us to win.

[00:08:13] It is not enough to have the best platform. We have to build relationships and build the political infrastructure on the ground, and that is going to take work. That is going to take fundraising. But most importantly, it is actually going to take like a commitment and a belief that this is what the party must do in order to be victorious.

[00:08:33] This takes me back to another one of Malcolm’s most profound lessons. First, he said, ‘We are not outnumbered. We are out organized.’

[00:08:40] We actually have the policies and the platforms and the positions from ecological concerns to working-class concerns to racial justice concerns. We are the best-positioned to meet the needs of the people. Our constituents are out there and vastly outnumber our opposition. We are not outnumbered. We’re out-organized.

[00:09:06] But then what Malcolm said from there is even more pertinent. He said, ‘Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are. Never let the man that you are against form your opinions for you.’

[00:09:23] So, we’re not outnumbered, we’re out-organized, and we’ve got a lot of building to do. But we’re the ones that are best positioned to do it.

[00:09:32] One of Malcolm’s students, Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, he used a lot of Malcolm’s theories and philosophies on organizing in the way that he did his own work in creating the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and he used to say, ‘Revolutionaries don’t just mobilize around issues, revolutionaries organize against systems.’

[00:09:55] We have mass mobilizations taking place now around police brutality, around Palestinian liberation, around abolishing ICE, mass mobilization that is not being transformed into organization against the systems that are productive of all of those fundamental forms of oppression. We can become the instrument that performs that function.

[00:10:20] The Green Party should be the instrument that channels people’s energy from mobilization around these specific issues into organization against the systems that are productive of all of these forms of injustice and inequality. We have that within our reach in this moment.

[00:10:40] But it is going to require effective campaign strategies. It is going to require solidarity—which has not always been easy to come by inside leftist movements.

[00:10:52] And that means that the light is on us here on the West Coast, in California, in Washington, in Oregon, where the politics have been more progressive, more radical, more rooted in anti-capitalist critique. This is going to be the place where this movement is going to start.

[00:11:12] We are running our campaign in the state of California to serve as the tip of the spear and I’m putting myself at your service in whatever way I can to help reinforce your efforts to run effective candidates, to get visibility on your candidates and messaging, and offering just one kind of humble piece of counsel for whatever you’re doing in terms of building the infrastructure for effective elections: Please do everything that you can to bring mutual aid and direct action into your organizational activities.

[00:11:48] Do not make this simply about electoral politics for people and do not present people a kind of illusory view of the solution as one that is solely to be found in electoralism. Those Black radicals that I mentioned before all utilize electoral politics strategies.

[00:12:10] Malcolm in ‘ 64 gave a speech called ‘The Ballot or the Bullet‘ and he talked about registering every single Black person in Harlem not as a Democrat or as a Republican but as an independent, because he understood the capacity to leverage political power.

[00:12:23] Kwame Ture said, ‘Of course, I don’t think that the solution is just going to come through elections. But electoral politics are how I organize people.’ Huey P. Newton ran for Congress not once but twice. Not because that’s the only way to transform things, but because political party organizing, when brought together with mutual aid and direct action, is capable of serving powerful movement purposes.

[00:12:51] That will transform us into the party that, when that inevitable fall of empire happens, we will be the one to reconstruct the alternatives. What we need to do is positioning ourselves as that real opposition party because the empire is going to continue to fall and crumble around us.

[00:13:10] If we are able to connect with communities and serve the mutual aid and direct action that they’re already engaging in, rather than just showing up and asking for votes every few years the way Democrats and Republicans do, then they are going to start to believe that this Green Party is that vehicle and we’ve got a great opportunity in 2026 because they’ve set it up as a ‘jungle primary:’ Only the top two candidates advance.

[00:13:35] The last time, in 2022, the second-place finisher in the primary only got 17.7% of the vote, which was about 1.29 million votes in June of 2022. And if we are able to get just to that second position, then that is going to set up a runoff election between me and whoever that Democrat is.

[00:13:56] So, from that point on, they will no longer be able to keep the Greens under a total media blackout. We will be able to get this messaging out not just in the state of California, but that California gubernatorial election is going to draw media attention. That is going to raise the Greens’ profile everywhere. That’s the tip of the spear. And it is much closer than we believe because it’s really probably going to require about 1.5 million, maybe 2 million votes on June 2 of 2026.

[00:14:29] So, we are putting all of our efforts into working with those community organizers on the ground that already have engaged constituencies, because that’s what worked with the Muslim community in the 2024 presidential election.

We were able to get 53% of Muslims nationwide to vote for us and only 20% for Team Blue, 20% for Team Red because we had targeted messaging on the issue that was of most concern to the Muslim community and they already had the established organizing and fundraising networks that once we were there showing up committed to the thing that mattered most, those became Green Party voters.

[00:15:08] If we are able to do even a fraction of that in the African-American community, in the Latino community, getting to that 18% -20% in June of next year is going to break the duopoly. And that is going to create a lot of space and political momentum for us to recruit and support strong candidates nationwide.

[00:15:27] Presenter: The podcast Political Dharma says California’s top-two primary for governor offers the Greens an historic opportunity, as Butch Ware promotes a West Coast movement involving mutual aid and direct action.