Good morning to you, on Election Day.
This is my final, very nakedly partisan plea for you to go vote, and specifically to vote Democrat on a straight ticket, even if that idea sickens you. Please, hear me out. If this doesn't give you pause to maybe just, y'know, admit that the Republicans are mayyybeeeee doing something shady and so outside of the norms of American politics, this election, and that you might want to consider voting Democrat even if you hate everything you've been told that Democrats stand for, then I honestly don't know what will. Here goes a basic, college-journalist-who-graduated-level analysis of the context of this election. Once upon a time, this was called, “Check Your Reality,” although I hope I've grown since those days.
To begin with, check out this article, headline “Border Patrol To Conduct ‘Crowd Control’ Exercise on Election Day.” If this sort of thing sounds like dystopian nightmare fuel to you, yet, read on.
This is in Beto O'Rourke's home-town. This was not a pre-planned drill, it was announced yesterday. It is on election day. It involves the use of federal government officials to convey the message that illegal immigrants (or anyone suspected as being such) will be treated, to quote the President, to "Maximum Criminal Penalties." (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1059470847751131138) This smacks of punishing part or a whole of a city for letting Beto ‘get away with this,” I fear.
Basically,it is very clear that his administration is misappropriating federal troops - including the mother-fucking ARMY - to create an atmosphere of fear in order to get his desired political outcome, as made clear in a television ad deemed so racist that even Fox News will not air it (AP News), of people choosing to "Vote Republican." That sounds an awful lot like 'the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce,especially for political purposes.'
Let's play Jeopardy! Dictionary.com, I give you the question, "What is defined as the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes?" You give me the answer!
Terrorism, you say? ...This actually wasn't very hard, now, was it? But, surely I'm going too far? I mean, it's not like we haven't had a long-established, easily-verified-by-Google-Yahoo-Whatever pattern of voter intimidation, disenfranchisement, and other such'shenanigans' all primarily applied against Native Americans, Blacks,Latinos, and pretty much anyone in a gerrymandered poor district.
It isn't just Trump, because in Georgia and Kansas, where Brian Kemp and Kris Kobach respectively hold the Secretary of State titles while running for the Governorship, refereeing their own elections – and Republicans have not stood up. In Florida, Ron DeSantis runs a nakedly racist campaign against a successful Black mayor who provided America with an example of how an actual executive responds to a mass shooting by a White Nationalist Terrorist in a yoga studio. (Seriously, look this all up. Choose your own sources.) It's not North Dakota, where Natives are being told they don't have proper addresses on their Ids to vote with, as if they didn't live on this continent long before most of our ancestors got here. it’s even in New York, folks. It's in the Republican party's executive thinking functions every day that allows and assists in this hyper-nationalist ploy.
The math is clear: This cannot continue, because America's soul is already bleeding dry.
Even if you don't really want a Democrat to win, even if you don't believe in Medicare for All or Corporate Welfare or you don't know why the Dems might ever switch to something like Ranked Choice so why bother taking a chance and advocating for that when you vote, whatever the particular issue in between is, and you'd rather just vote Libertarian or Green so you know you didn't help get his people get elected (I get it, friend, I do), and even if the Dems in question are layer-cake corrupt - as long as they are opposed to embracing a White Nationalist agenda as the Republican party has, then consider how much worse a Republican would be and do the right thing for the sake of the Human race. The world is watching lights of liberty go out across the world. In Brazil, a man who quibbles that the only problem Brazil's military dictatorship had was that it didn't torture and kill enough people. No, I am not making that up, his name is Jair Bolsonaro and he styles himself as the Brazilian Trump. He once said he would rather have a dead son than a gay son. You make of that what you will.
We can at least provide a check on what we have seen, demonstrably, is a madman with power. Even if for no other reason than to provide a contingency plan just in case we're right, trust us, from the left, to tell you that we really do see in him an old American terror. He is the reincarnation of some of our worst fears – our past sins. The Native American Genocide? Slavery? Gay rights? Jim Crow? Exploitation of undocumented immigrants, from Chinese to Irish? Centuries where Women couldn't vote? Antisemitism? Islamophobia? Homophobia?
Trump and his ilk promise to “Make America Great Again.” He promises to make all of those painful questions disappear. He'll just never tell you how he's gonna do it, other than that he'll make sure it's all legal, all justified, all safe for you. He might even believe that – and wouldn't that be something? The mighty United States of America, a Unipolar world's Super-Power, unable to do more than quake and shiver in terror at the sight of a bunch of unarmed civilian seeking refuge from the wars we've started.
That is the America trump and his allies were promising you in that ad that was too racist to be aired on Fox News.
Trust us. We aren't on the other side. We're Americans. Do the American thing. E publius Unum.
Jesse Pohlman is an author and occasional journalist from Long Island, New York. He even produces Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Superhero novels on Amazon Kindle! Written with love for The Delphian circa 2006.
