I’m about to use some bad words. Some of you will be offended by what I’m going to say. Some of you will cancel your subscriptions. Don’t ever accuse me of doing stuff because of money — more often than not, I cost myself revenue by telling people what I really think. But in writing these emails now for the last number of years, I have rarely thought I should avoid saying what I really think, even at cost. Here I go again. So be prepared.
I’ve had enough.
We keep being told we must debase ourselves a little further every cycle. We must embrace the groypers, who are white nationalists, racists, and antisemites. We must embrace the racial grievance mongers. We must embrace the Christian Nationalists who never talk about Christ but always talk about politics. We must be okay with crooks, frauds, charlatans, and those who’d attack the victim of molestation. We need a big tent, just not big enough for basic decency.
We must hold our noses. We must close our eyes. We must pull the lever. If we do not, it is the end of America. “Close your eyes and think of America,” they tell us.
I have heard that every two years for 20 years. I used to say it myself. I was once the guy who believed every election was the last election if my side did not win, and I have the RedState archive to prove it. America is still here. The candidates, however, keep getting worse.
Pastor Josh Howerton put up a video the other day arguing that voting is not a sacrament. I agree with him. He also argued that voting is not sending a message, and on that, I fundamentally disagree. Voting is always sending a message, and so is not voting. I say this as someone who ran campaigns and won elected office. Voting is always a message and direction from voters.
In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Afterward, his team concluded that millions of evangelicals had stayed home, and they reordered both their policy agenda once in office and their 2004 strategy. The reordering was intended to win those voters back. The evangelicals who sat it out sent a message, and the campaign that barely survived them heard it loud and clear. Adoption reform, PEPFAR, education reform, Christian social service access to government funds, and other items all became priorities. Campaigns study who shows up, who stays home, and who skips a race on the ballot.
Now a lot of pastors, pundits, politicians, and activists would have you believe you must keep voting for terrible candidates, or else. They want you to separate moral culpability from your decision-making, and then, please do not reflect on where our votes get us.
In Texas, we are told we have to vote for Ken Paxton because the alternative is James Talarico. I am sympathetic to that argument. I have no use for James Talarico. A vote for Paxton, though, is a vote for a serial adulterer whose own staff turned him in to the authorities for corruption. I personally know someone he swindled — a man whose non-profit Paxton took advantage of before using the power of his office to threaten him.
In Georgia, we are told we have to vote for Mike Collins, a man who has surrounded himself with Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and men who have harmed both dogs and women. In Ohio, we are told we must rally behind Vivek Ramaswamy, a grifter who has made his closing argument an attack on his opponent featuring the opponent’s own mother. That mother sided with the stepfather, who allegedly molested her daughter, and the mother abandoned her child. That is the closing argument, and we are supposed to cheer it or ignore it rather than be repulsed that a candidate used the mother who abandoned her molested daughter to attack that daughter. Ramaswamy could have denied responsibility. He could have fired the people who made the ad. Instead, he justified it.
We keep getting worse and worse candidates, and we keep being told we must support them to save the country from the Left. At some point, we have to ask what it does to our own souls to keep convincing ourselves that we must support objectively awful people because the other side is awful too. Jesus asked what it profits a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul. We are not even gaining the whole world. We are trading our souls for a Senate seat.
The worst candidates are not an accident.
Republicans and Democrats alike have wrongly decided that they can win elections by driving their base to the polls and ignoring everyone else. They know you will eat whatever they put on your plate because they have convinced you that it is the end of America otherwise. They keep force-feeding us shit sandwiches and telling us to like them, and we keep cleaning our plates and saying, “Please sir, can I have another?” Then, every one of us laments that the country is in decline. Of course it is in decline. We have chosen to settle for terrible candidates instead of demanding better ones, and none of us wants off the crazy train to hell. And, in the process, we are alienating independent voters who do not view candidates as causes to be chosen, but as human being we must choose between.
You see the world as Republican vs. Democrat. The voters who decide elections see the world as candidate X and candidate Y and they very often choose based on who they like, not on issues. You keep pushing mortal creatins and the voters who decide things decide to reject the cretin. But then you blame the Republicans who reject the moral cretin instead of realizing nominating the moral cretin was a bad idea to begin with because you didn’t just lose other Republicans. You lost the independents who actually decide the election.
And I don’t know that I can do it anymore.
I don’t know that I can vote for Mike Collins. A vote for him is a vote to staff a United States Senate office with young white supremacists, racists, and Holocaust deniers — putting them into the halls of power in Washington with a United States senator’s name on their business cards.
I will get blasted for this. I will be bullied and told I am supporting Jon Ossoff. I am not supporting Jon Ossoff, and I will not vote for Jon Ossoff. I am simply done eating the shit sandwich. I voted for Herschel Walker. He was not great, but his problems were in the past. Even as I warned they would cost him the election, I could vote for him, knowing he had long since moved beyond his problems. Collins’s problems are current, and they are that he chooses to surround himself with morally bankrupt people who will gain footholds into power with Collins’s help.
There are great Republicans on the ballot in Georgia this year, and I intend to vote for them. My ballot will register a vote for Rick Jackson, Greg Dolezal, Tim Fleming, Brian Strickland, John King, Tyler Harper, Richard Woods, Bárbara Rivera Holmes, Fitz Johnson, Josh Tolbert, Austin Scott, and the other fine Republicans running.
I expect to leave the Senate line blank, and I want you to know it. I want the party to know it too. I have worked in politics long enough to know that the undervote gets studied. Someone will notice that a Republican voter cast a ballot for every Republican down the line except one, and that message will be received. I want them to know it was me.
I know some of you will be furious with me. I understand that, because I have been the guy furious at the voter who would not fall in line. I am exhausted, though, by horrible candidates whom we are told are still better than the alternative. I am exhausted by watching good people talk themselves into defending the indefensible. I am exhausted by the bullies who insist we must eat the shit sandwich or else.
Every restaurant owner understands this. When a restaurant changes its menu and the new dishes flop, the owner does not stand in the kitchen insisting the customers are wrong, forcing them to eat. He looks at the empty tables, he looks at the plates coming back half-eaten, and he looks at the receipts. He pays attention because the alternative is going out of business. The dishes nobody ordered come off the menu, the cook gets a talking-to, and the owner works hard to win back the customers he lost. The restaurants that refuse to do that close, and nobody mourns them.
The parties are no different. They keep putting shit sandwiches on the menu because we keep eating them. But if enough of us push the plate back and refuse to eat, the people in the kitchen will notice, because their jobs depend on it. They will change what they serve only when they realize the customers will walk out if they don’t.
The only way to stop being force-fed shit sandwiches is to refuse to eat them and demand better. If every election requires us to swallow something rotten, we might as well starve. My blank Senate line is not a vote for the other side. It is my vote for better.
Your mileage may vary, but at some point, you have to stop lamenting the decline of America and realize you are complicit in it by your decision to keep eating what the parties are serving without demanding better. We do not make America great again by continually descending into the sewer to find candidates.
Pretty much everyone who read this to the end and is outraged with me was also outraged with Democrats defending Graham Platner, despite his history. And, ultimately, Democrats pushed him out of the race. Even so, Democrats want their voters to support a jihadi sleeper cell in Michigan and a moral cretin in Michigan and a heretic in Texas. There’s never a bottom with either party because they know you’ll keep showing up and insisting your side is still better no matter how terrible your side gets.
Normies are gonna finally have to say they’ve had enough. It is one reason I hope Mike Rogers wins in Michigan — so the Democrats realize they need to reject the DSA.
