If you’re planning a so-called “protest vote” for a third-party candidate, please don’t kid yourself that you’re doing something righteous.
Protests – real, noble protests – aren’t about YOU. They’re about making the world a better place and/or stopping it from going to hell, and making sure that no one gets hurt in the process. It’s about imagining how life ought to be and figuring out how to get there, but always, ALWAYS starting with a realistic assessment of where we currently are. And where we are is this:
If Donald Trump is elected president, America as we know it is over.
Free speech is gone.
Abortion rights are gone.
LGBT rights are gone.
Healthcare reform is gone.
Stop-and-frisk is brought back. Nationally.
Taxes on the poor go up.
Taxes on billionaires go down.
A global trade war crashes the world economy (including ours).
The national debt triples.
The supreme court is filled with alt-right Conservative zealots.
The EPA is eliminated, along with the department of education. 490,000 teachers are fired.
Century-old alliances are broken. Military strategy is decided unilaterally by Trump, who “knows more than the generals” and “has a very good brain.”
Immigrants are rounded up and thrown out of the country, their children left behind.
Refugees are given a religious test that can deny them entry.
Innocent people are tortured or killed if their relative is suspected of being a terrorist.
And climate change, which Donald says is a Chinese hoax, will kill us all, but only if Donald doesn’t start a nuclear war first.
This is what happens if you and everyone else like you decides that all of those things are no worse than a private email server, questionable public speaking fees, and being on the non-progressive side of a handful of issues. Your protest will lead to the destruction of every single issue we have fought for, and you will be a disgrace to progressivism and basic human decency.
So if you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton, or don’t vote at all, please don’t pretend that you are the instrument of change, and instead realize what you really are: the literal deciding vote for whether we carry on as a society and vote again in a few years or whether an incompetent egomaniacal compulsively-lying hateful rapist kills us all.
AND HE HAS A 1 IN 3 CHANCE OF WINNING.
If you make a protest vote, and he wins, you won’t be as disgusting as the people who actually supported and voted for this monster. But you WILL be just as responsible. Good luck protesting then, when he has repeatedly promised a system where dissidents will be sued, jailed, or “roughed up, like the good old days.”
You want to protest? Protest hate. Protest willful ignorance. Protest racism, sexism, bullying, violence, and intolerance. If you want to make a protest vote that can genuinely make a difference, then a vote for Hillary Clinton is the only protest vote worth making.
So please, I’m begging you: put yourself aside tomorrow, and save the world. We need you.
