Why I Won't Vote Tomorrow

I often vote Democrat or left-of-that. Not this time.

Joe Biden has made his pitch for why to vote for his side. Apparently, it’s because the other side encourages political violence and doesn’t accept the results of elections. “Democracy is on the ballot,” the President told us a few days ago, in what was billed as a major national address. The New York Times headlined it thus:

“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state — who won’t commit, they will not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” the President said. “This is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.”

We are indeed on a path to chaos. Each of our national political parties — both the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party — will continue to wallow in feverish conspiracy theories about the election getting stolen (even as each tries to steal it, rather than convince anyone of anything). Each will refuse to concede defeat when an election is close. At a time of rising political violence, if things don’t go their way, each will encourage its angrier and more unhinged constituents to go postal.

Just two years ago, heading into the Donald Trump-Joe Biden election of 2020, the Democrats were sounding the alarm that if President Trump were to lose the vote, he might cling to power through violence. (It is worth remembering that — hyperventilation about January 6 and the Big Lie™ aside — Trump did leave office. It wasn’t pretty; very little is when Donald Trump is involved. But he left, and pursued the matter further in the courts, and with the public.)

Yet even as Democrats moaned in 2020 that Trump and his Republicans might not concede if they lost the presidential election — they were loudly declaring their own intention not to concede if Biden and his Democrats lost!

“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances,” said Hillary Clinton at the time.

Under any circumstances!

Clinton said this in August 2020, three months before the vote, and at the end of a summer of rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s death, rioting that had killed many innocent people and left cities in flames.

That anti-police rioting was downplayed by the Democrats and loyal media, much as the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots are downplayed by the Republicans and loyal media. Because for leaders on each side, violence is fine as long as it’s directed correctly. So it’s an outrage when Democrat Paul Pelosi has his skull fractured by an assailant, but when Republican Senator Ron Paul has six ribs fractured by an assailant that’s just a good time.

Clinton’s “under no circumstances” defiance expanded on a televised address to the Democratic National Convention a week prior in which she’d warned Trump would try to “sneak or steal his way” to re-election. That echoed similar comments by candidate Biden himself that his opponent would try to “indirectly steal” the election.

Then in September, The Washington Post and other media reported on a table-top exercise aimed at predicting how events might unfold immediately after the November 2020 elections. This had some headliner participants from our political elite class, and was given front-page play across national media.

“What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election?” asked a Georgetown law professor who co-founded the exercise, and continued:

So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.

A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.

That’s right: It was a stated bipartisan consensus that if Trump won the election, the Democrats would take to the streets with violence. They would launch us into a political crisis — their own version of January 6. The Democrats would, to borrow from President Biden’s indignant speech this week, “not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” and would instead choose “the path to chaos in America.”

Wait — the Democrats would have been election-deniers? Without a shred of real evidence?

That’s right. From The New York Times account:

For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in [showing a Trump victory], to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.

But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede.

The organizers were “shocked, shocked!” to hear this — even though Hillary Clinton had publicly said two weeks earlier that Biden should “under no circumstances” concede.

The participants in this war game two years ago were all anti-Trump Democrats and Republicans, and at one level they were just rolling around in the same malicious fantasy they had indulged in since 2016. (It was a supposedly dispassionate exercise in trying to see how things might go wrong, so as to prevent violence — yet the participants made a point of gleefully relaying to the press that when they LARP’ed out the “narrow Biden win” scenario, “Trump was ultimately escorted out by the Secret Service — but only after pardoning himself and his family and burning incriminating documents.”)

But at another level, the entire war-game exercise was a message to the nation: The Orange-haired one is leaving. It’s our turn. If you get in our way, we are going to burn down your cities and towns.

In the war-game, Podesta-as-Biden “alleg[ed] voter suppression”, whatever that means, while the states of California, Oregon and Washington threatened to literally secede (!) rather than accept a second Trump term. Congress deadlocked on the matter and, as The New York Times summed it up:

“At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.”

So now here we are, two years later, going into another November election, and the Democrats again demand our vote. They have no plan other than endless war in Ukraine (the Republicans will sub out Ukraine and sub in Taiwan). The healthcare system is collapsing — speaking personally, it’s a terrible time to be an ER doctor, especially when we can’t even get sick kids cared for properly — inflation is climbing, we’re flirting aimlessly with nuclear war, and the Democrats offer exactly zero solutions to this or any other problem, other than to cry: “Democracy is on the ballot!”

Is it though?

A Final Thought

Even as Democrats and loyal media act like only a mentally ill person could question whether the Trump-Biden election was fair, they are completely silent on a blockbuster from those days.

When Joe Biden was Vice President, his son Hunter had flown on Air Force Two with him, striking business deals around the world — in Ukraine, in China. In fact, Trump’s first impeachment was related to this: He asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden’s doings. (I wrote about this at the time on Medium.)

In October 2020 — a month before the vote — The New York Post broke the news that, thanks to e-mails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, they could confirm that Hunter was brokering meetings between his Ukrainian oil company employers and his father. In response, Twitter disabled that newspaper’s accounts, and mainstream media instead ran with a public letter from “top intelligence people” claiming the New York Post story was based on “Russian disinformation.”

Even then we knew this was a lie, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story — as absurd and bizarre as it was — was real, since neither the Biden campaign nor Hunter would deny it. It’s since been confirmed true (see paragraph 24 (!) of this New York Times report).

So a legitimate story — a major corruption allegation involving a presidential candidate, one that was already at the center of a Presidential impeachment trial — was suppressed, lied about and never reported in the weeks before the vote. Had that not happened, in such a close race, Trump would likely have been re-elected — and Democrats would have likely responded with a violent rejection of the result.

Democrats — and what’s worse, the supposedly free and professional journalists at mainstream media — never address this. Yet they beat their breasts and claim that we have to vote for them tomorrow to save democracy? Sorry, not sold. Chris Hedges says correctly that we should have walked out on the Democratic Party and mounted a serious opposition while we still had a chance, and he’s right. But that’ll just have to wait for another time.