So Kamala Harris’ commitment to and perpetration of genocide and climate change disqualify her from receiving my support. Genocide is a red line. Add to that her bragging about how she’ll be tougher on the border than Trump would, and all the other explicit platform pieces and rhetoric of hers which is signaling exactly what kind of leader she is and will be. The people insisting that well, this is still the Biden administration, maybe she’ll be better once she’s in office. Or that we can pressure her to stop committing genocide once she’s elected, or whatever other fantasy thought-and-prayers nonsense people say sound absolutely delusional to me. She’s taken over five million dollars from the perpetrator. Literally all she’s ever said about the genocide is that the perpetrator has the right to do what they’re doing, she’s been 100% consistent on that. Her VP pick said that the perpetrator expanding their territory is a necessity for the US. She’s not being coy or subtle about this, she’s all in for genocide. In any just world, both she and Biden would have been dragged in front of an international court for their crimes against humanity a year ago. Like, does anyone actually believe that if you ask the international war criminal who is funded by the largest corporate cartel in the history of the world really nicely to just chill, that she will? The people defending her, or downplaying her criminal complicity, are pissing on the graves of her victims in a way that looks wildly disrespectful to me. She’s a war criminal, and in any healthy world she’d be both morally and legally disqualified from ever holding any position of authority again, let alone leading the largest military and economy the world has ever seen.
There is a logic chain that flows from this foundation for me that might surprise some people, though. I’ll share some links in that chain before I share my conclusion.
The first link is best understood through a single person: Miriam Adlson. She’s a deranged billionaire, and she wants just one thing: the complete eradication of Palestine and all Palestinians, including the West Bank. The Democrats are too soft for her, so she went to Trump at the beginning of this election cycle and said: “I’ll become your largest campaign donor, if you promise me one thing. I want the West Bank annihilated in your first term.” Trump happily took the money. So we know that if Trump wins the White House, the West Bank will not last four years. As a continuous homeland, Palestine will be gone; it will only exist in the diaspora. Yes, Harris is absolutely committing and committed to genocide And scales of harm matter, especially to the victims. Someone who blows up a hundred houses and someone who blows up a thousand houses are both guilty of the same crime. But the people who live in the 900 houses that are or are not destroyed are the only people who really understand the difference between those two criminals.
I genuinely understand why people say: “If the democrats lose, it’s their own fault.” and “A vote for Stein is just a vote for Stein.” There’s some truth and integrity in those statements. I’d just ask you to picture an old-school scale. If this side is heavier, then the West Bank is 100% going to be blown into oblivion. If this side is heavier, then maybe it won’t be. You have one weight to place. In reality, placing your weight anywhere other than this side of the scale will make it more likely that this one is heavier. Netanyahu visited Trump at Mar a Lago like last week. They have a strong preference for Trump winning this election, and it’s worth paying close attention to what they want, because it’s guaranteed to be the opposite of what any healthy people want. So when Netanyahu says, with his actions, that he strongly prefers Trump, I believe him.
The race is neck-and-neck. So despite all the rhetoric about how a vote for Stein is just a vote for Stein, in reality, every vote that doesn’t go to Harris makes a Trump win more likely.
We can and absolutely must talk about how hey, this scale seems like maybe the most evil thing in the world. We should destroy this entire scale. Yes. I 100% agree. This scale is irredeemable, and driving us towards an unlivable world. And. For as long as it impacts people’s lives, we are responsible for the effects of where we place our weight.
The second link takes a super quick recap of Accellerationism. Accellerationism is a compound political belief. The first part is that the current system is inherently irredeemable, and incapable of creating a healthy or livable world. The second part is that people won’t change the system until it gets so bad that it’s completely impossible to pretend it works, so we should try and make it as bad as possible as soon as possible so that everyone wakes up and changes it as soon as possible. The two common critiques of accellerationism are these: 1. the propaganda model is so highly refined that people today can literally watch their towns washed away and their government shoot their neighbors down in the street, and still not wake up to who their actual enemies are. So the idea that if things get bad enough, people will wake up seems to be as much of a fantasy as the idea that Harris will stop committing crimes against humanity once she’s in office. and 2. The effects of accellerationism are always heaviest on the most marginalized people in a society. So accellerationism literally trades the lives of the most marginalized people in a society for the possibility that people will wake up and take meaningful action.
Very few accellerationists know they’re accellerationists. Accellerationism today tends to sound like these phrases: “I can’t support genocide, so I can’t vote for Kamala.” or “We just have to try something different” or “I don’t care, I just know that I can’t vote for someone this evil.” If you fill in those statements, giving them the full benefit of the doubt for the best possible argument, what they’re saying is this: “The increase in harm that my accellerationist action will cause in the short term is less than the harm over time that will be caused if this system is not changed in the very near future. So yes, everyone will suffer because of my choice, especially the most marganilized, but I still think it’s the best possible chance we have of a livable world, and I believe that cost is worth paying for that possibility.” An honest accellerationsist can say that complete sentence, and will stand behind it. Most people saying those first couple of statements can’t say that, because they don’t really believe it.
But regardless of what their motivations or beliefs are, in effect, in reality- voting third-party is an accelerationist position. Similarly, not voting to keep our hands clean is an accelerationist position. The very idea of a protest vote or a protest abstention relies on the idea that somewhere, someone might care about your protest, that your protest might have some impact. Let’s be real here- literally no one cares if you don’t vote, or vote third party. The only effect it has is to make the lives of the most impacted people worse. As Trump unleashes the rabid, racist, rapacious IDF on the women and children of the West Bank next year, does anyone think that the Palestinians will thank people in the US for voting Third Party? For Not Voting? As the air is crushed from their children’s lungs under the rubble of their homes, do we think they’ll say: “Ah, those people who voted for Jill Stein or stayed home are so ethical?”
The third link is about our experience here. Trump is openly saying that he will use the US military on US civilians, including political dissidents. He tried the last time he was in office, but the Pentagon refused. So he purged the entire DoJ and loaded the supreme court with crazed religious extremists, so this time he would be able to do it. He wants camps, and he wants me in them. The impact will be far worse on more marginalized people, but everyone in this country is at risk in a way that’s very hard to overstate. Sometimes I think that in our rightful emphasis on how much more fascism impacts marginalized people, we’re somehow left with the idea that white men would be safe. We won’t be, especially those of us who openly oppose it. When they ask their AI who needs to be in the camps first, it will be the people who are educating, organizing, and agitating at the top of those lists, regardless of their identities. Again- marginalized people are always impacted most. They’re born impacted, that’s multiplied by intersectionality marginalized identities, and that just increases the more they educate, organize, and agitate. But that doesn’t mean that any of us are safe under fascism. This narrative that “well, the white guys will be fine” is a wild underestimation of how bad things can very quickly get if Trump takes the white house, appoints two more Supreme Court Justices, and unleashes the US military on political dissidents to round us into camps. My point isn’t fear-mongering here, it’s just trying to keep this conversation real. This is what Trump is saying he wants to do, and I believe him. The Democrats are on the same path, Biden and Harris are all-in on Cop Cities, and the CIA is now training IDF concentration camp administrators. While both political parties in the US are owned by the same people and headed in the same direction, the differences between them are extremely important. The degree to which we think they’re identical is the measure of our own ignorance of how bad things could get in the next four years. Recognizing the ways in which the two parties are extremely different is just as important as recognizing the ways in which they’re identical. Unless we’re holding both their similarities and differences, we’re not looking at reality.
The fourth link in this logic chain is just a little bit of history. I remember thirty years ago, when a third party candidate, Perot, got 19% of the popular vote in this country. It did not break the duopoly. In fact, third party candidates have pulled over 5% like a half a dozen times in the last century in the US. In 1912, a socialist pulled 6%, Eugene Debs. So the argument that if a third party gets 5%, then the duopoly in the US will somehow magically shatter and we’ll all be free to compete in fair and clean elections is a belief that one can only hold if they have no knowledge of US history. So it looks like the two-party system is already fully aware of the risk posed by third parties, and has a well-practiced set of mechanisms in place already to prevent third parties from threatening the duopoly. If 5% could break the duopoly, it would have been broken many times by now. Add to this that the most popular third party candidate at the moment, Jill Stein, is currently polling at less than one percent, nationally. This means that even if getting 5% of the vote would make a substantive difference, Stein would have to get five times what she’s currently polling at to achieve that goal. That’s never happened, ever. A candidate getting 5% larger turnout than their polls suggested in a strong deviation from the polls. A candidate getting 500% more than they’re polling at is a fantasy story, and not even a believable one.
The fifth link is about what winning means to the democrats. A while ago, I said that the role of the Democrats in our current system is to lose. This was kind of poorly phrased. A more precise understanding requires some shared vocab. I have a real love/hate relationship with game theory, but the vocab is very precise and useful here. We’ll start with Win States. A win-state is the condition or set of conditions that a given player considers success. This is important to understand for two reasons. The first is that win-states are entirely subjective, and can be antithetical. The nominal win-state of elections is taking the white house- that’s nominally both parties’ goal, and only one can achieve it. Their win-states are the same. If my dog and I are on a walk, and we encounter a rotting raccoon carcass- my dog’s win-state is rolling gleefully in the carcass, and she’s happy if we both roll in it. My win-state is no one rolling in the carcass. Different win-states. So they’re subjective. The second reason is that many people say that their win-state is something other than their actual win-state. This is called “Identity Concealment,” and it’s an incredibly effective tool of manipulation. Telling people you want something totally unrelated to your actual goal can keep the entire focus and conversation away from your actual goal, and it’s hard to overstate how powerful a tool that is. The War on Drugs is a great example of Identity Concealment. The stated goal, the stated win-state of the War on Drugs, was minimizing drug abuse in the US. Any social worker could tell you how to do that, it’s incredibly easy. Provide housing, education, support for DV survivors, therapy, and supervised use sites. Decriminalize everything and provide support. Do those things, and in a year, you could cut drug abuse in half. Done. What the US did was overthrow a bunch of democracies, install a bunch of brutal dictators, and fund a bunch of horrifying cartels in Latin America. Domestically, they enslaved- err, I mean, excuse me, incarcerated a bunch of poor, mostly Black people into prisons, which are just one large system to traumatize people, destroy families, and increase the rate of recidivism as much as possible. All of these things had the effect of destabilizing Latin America, making it easier for the US to exploit both labor and materials, and increasing drug use domestically. One possibility is that the US is just so catastrophically incompetent that given infinite funding and resources, they can’t achieve the most simple of goals and can’t even recognize their failure over decades, can’t see that their tactics are having the opposite of their intended effect. This is what many Republicans believe, as part of the propaganda they’re fed to make them think that the government is the entire problem. Another possibility is that they’re playing an Identity Concealment game. If their actual goal was destabilization of Latin America for exploitation, enslaving a bunch of poor, mostly Black people, and absolutely destroying urban communities of Color- then the War on Drugs has been a smashing success. Especially when we consider that taking the effective approach to addressing drug abuse would have cost a fraction of what they spend destabilizing the world and crushing communities, it starts to look pretty obvious to me which is the reality. Their actual win-state is not the same as their stated win-state.
So I said that Democrats’ role in this system is to lose. While there are ways in which Democrats losing, and threatening to lose, elections benefits them and the status quo, a much more accurate way to say that is this: The democrats are playing an Identity Concealment game, where their actual win-state is not their stated win-state. To me, it seems pretty clear that their actual win-state is maintaining corporate funding. They do that regardless of whether they win or lose elections, whether or not they hold the white house.
Understanding this is integral to voting strategy. There’s a lot of people saying things like: “We can teach the Democrats that they can’t win while supporting genocide.” That argument is based on the belief that Democrats’ win-state is winning elections. It’s not. They know that by their standards, they absolutely can and do achieve their win-state while supporting genocide, wholly regardless of whether or not they win the election. Put simply, they’re categorically lying about what their win-state is. If you don’t believe me, just take this position for a spin. Remember that 70% of enrolled Democrats oppose this genocide. With that in mind, instead of thinking that Harris and the Democrats are playing to win elections, look at their actions based on the belief that they’re playing to keep corporate funding. Just see how it lines up.
The sixth link is about value sets. Two more vocab terms about ethics: Deontological ethics are the innate ethics of an action. Statements like “Violence is wrong.” are deontological. Teleological ethics are about the effects of an action. “The end justifies the means” is a teleological statement. In reality, we all balance these all the time. If a child runs to your house and says: “Someone’s trying to hurt me, will you hide me?” and you do, and then some huge angry dude covered in blood with an axe knocks on your door asking if you’ve seen a child- you’d probably lie. That’s teleological ethics. You may think lying is bad on a deontological level, but the effect of lying in that situation is good, so your teleological ethics take precedence. In that situation, someone who believes purely in deontological ethics would say: “Lying is wrong. The Child is hiding in the closet behind me.” On the other hand, if someone said: “You can end climate change right now by taking the lives of every single person you love,” I don’t think anyone could do it. That’s our deontological ethics taking precedence over the teleological. Despite strange people trying to claim otherwise for weird reasons, in reality, we all balance these all the time.
When people talk about Red Lines, what they often mean is that the action being considered crosses the tipping point from teleological to deontological. But this is a logical fallacy, it’s an Appeal to Emotion. The argument goes: “This thing is so bad that any engagement with it is morally unthinkable.” You can reveal the fallacy by applying the same ethics to a less emotionally charged subject. Imagine you’re locked in a room, and every day, you’re presented with two foods. Anchovy and Pineapple Pizza, and Haggis. That’s all you’re ever offered. You may hate both, and to give up your life rather than choose one would be ridiculous. So refusing to engage with the system that is governing people’s lives because of how evil it is is absolutely an Appeal to Emotion Fallacy. Like many fallacious arguments, it’s actually at least two fallacies kind of stuck together. The other one is a little lesser-known, it’s called a Fallacy of Composition, or a Composition/Division Fallacy. It is the presumption that what’s true of any part of something applies to it’s whole. Imagine someone saying: “Your butthole smells like poop, so all of you must smell like poop.” Fallacy of Composition. Many people saying that they can’t vote for genocide seem to believe that their strategic vote for a better world makes them as guilty as Netanyahu, Biden, and Harris. It absolutely does not, any more than your entire body smells like your butthole.
With that in mind, I invite you to consider this question: What’s more important to you: the bodies and lives of the most at-risk people on the ground in Palestine and here, or opposing one specific, run-of-the-mill war criminal politician? They’re not the same goal. If opposing one horrible war criminal is more important to you than the lives and bodies of her actual victims, then vote third party, or don’t vote. But if the lives and bodies of the victims are your top priority, then voting for her is the best choice on the ballot, before we get back to the real work.
From this logic chain, a deeply counter-intuitive conclusion emerges: The best way to oppose genocide is to vote for the candidate currently committing genocide. This is true because anything other than that vote is guaranteed to exacerbate the genocide, and create exponentially less safe conditions within the US to change the entire system. This is the exact opposite of an endorsement. This is a complete and absolute condemnation of the Democrats and everything they do, and the entire system. Any system which forces us to vote for genocide is irredeemable, and must be destroyed at all costs. But simply pretending that abstaining or voting third party is not action against that system- all it does is drive it faster.
The conclusion here is not that the people endorsing Kamala and terrified of Trump were right all along- they’re not. They’re largely second- and third-scale liberals who have absolutely no coherent Theory of Change. They’re just running away from Trump, exactly as they’re taught to, in a way that is driving the entire society towards fascism. Their vote for Kamala is an act of terror of Trump and Hope that Kamala may help them. Mine is neither. I know that Kamala is my enemy, and I know that she’s just a few steps behind Trump on the same exact trajectory. They still believe this system is salvageable, and while most won’t say it, they’re prioritizing their own stability. I don’t believe that, and that’s not my priority. But not prioritizing my own stability is not the same as believing in accellertionism. This distinction is nuanced, but it’s very important. Accelerationism is a strategy- I just think it’s a bad one. I’m not willing to condemn all the most marginalized people in our society, and myself, to a fascist hellscape for the sake of a chance that a bunch of people who’ve been propagandized their entire lives not to recognize their enemy might wake up. Frankly, people who are voting third party or abstaining don’t look to me like they have any theory of change either. History shows us that achieving 5% does nothing, and we know Stein can’t even get 5%. The Democrats don’t care if they lose the election, that will teach them nothing at all. We know that any vote other than a vote for Kamala makes a Trump victory more likely. If there’s a strategy for voting 3rd party that doesn’t rest on those three points, then I’ve never heard it. And remember- saying: “I just can’t do it,” while emotionally totally valid, is not a strategy. It’s just self-excusal, in a way that causes harm.
I’ll add this- while she’d obviously be better than Harris or Trump, I think Stein is an awful politician and a very bad candidate. She’s terrible at coalition building, I don’t find her public speeches inspiring or even terribly relevant. She has sketchy connections to dangerous people that at the very least are terrible optics. The Green Party in general is always a mess, like they waffled between West and Stein this campaign in a way that looked like weird disorganized infighting. If the Green Party operated on the 4th scale of political consciousness, they’d try and pull 5% exclusively from the locked-in red or blue states. Trying to swing purple states away from Harris is such a harmful strategy that it makes me lose any respect I ever had for them. I look forward to Stein’s retirement. On this note, if you’re in a hardcore red or blue state, and you feel like voting for Stein to try and get 5%, I think that’s an ethically sound action.
Contrast that with Claudia de la Cruz. Her entire campaign is coalition building. She’s one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve ever seen, she’s simply electrifying. PSL is on the ground, all the time. They live, act, and organize in the real world in a way that I just don’t see from Stein. de la Cruz is the candidate most aligned with my ethics by a long, long shot. So when Stein voters tell me to vote my conscience, I’m like- cool. That’s not Stein. And in an ethically holistic analysis, if i didn’t live in a state with Ranked Choice, it wouldn’t be de la Cruz either. But de la Cruz is someone who I look forward to following, working in alignment with, and seeing grow more and more over my lifetime.
Genocide is a red line for me. It disqualifies anyone from receiving my support. Everything Harris says, all her pretty platitudes, are coming from a mouth that aggressively supports genocide. So she’s disqualified from my support. So my utter and complete condemnation of her manifests as a vote for her. That’s not support. That’s me actually opposing thegenocide, instead of performatively just focusing on one person who supports it. I have to choose whether my purity is more important to me than the lives of the children in the West Bank. I hate that, and I’m committed to the complete destruction of the system that makes me choose that. But once I’m looking at it clearly, it’s no choice at all.
People say to me: “It’s nice to hear someone resentfully voting for Harris. I’m so sick of all the liberals who are just defending her and talking about how great she is.” No part of my vote is resentful. Because it wasn’t Harris who crossed the red line for me. This entire country is built on the wrong side of the red line. Literally every president in this history of the country has been a war criminal, our entire economy is built on the violent oppression of the most marginalized people in the world. The US military is the largest terrorist organization in the history of the world, by an order of magnitude. There are 196 countries in the world. The US has invaded or maintained military presences in like 192 of them. That’s not defense, it never has been. This is a brutal g-sidal empire, built on the blood and labor of it’s victims around the world. That is all it has ever been. Remember Identity Concealment? Imagine the IDF, standing on the bodies of their victims, singing proudly about this now being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. You’re looking at the history of the USA. This is the world we’ve been living and voting in all along, we’re just seeing it more clearly. If any ethical person was looking at high resolution footage of what the founding of this country looked like, what the labor practices of this country have looked like, what the foreign relations have looked like, literally any of the foundations of this entire state- it would all be over the line. So we need a meaningful, shared Theory of Change. At the moment, most people who see how completely intolerable this system is often just have an emotional response, which sounds like: “It’s totally unethical to support or engage in this in any way!” They’re right, emotionally. But as Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. We’re in it. And for centuries, there has been a group of people who understand that, and have worked to build a lineage of thought and change. Most of the people today who I respect in that lineage of strategic change don’t mince words about this. They vote strategically and get back to work.
Think of it like this: If a physically unstoppable group of people came to your house, and said: “Listen. This nice guy is gonna knife you one time, or this other mean guy is gonna knife you ten times. You choose.” You’d be pissed. You’d hate that set of options, and might struggle for something different. But in the end, you got knifed. And then the same thing happened the next week. And then the next, and every week for years. You tried different options, you tried refusing to answer. When you refused to answer, it was more likely that you got knifed ten times. By the hundredth week, if no other options had any traction whatsoever, you’d eventually pick the single knifing, from the nicest person you could, and then get back to work trying to end the system that was doing that as quickly as possible. The first time, you might feel resentful. By the hundredth time, you’d be more likely to feel a quiet, life-shaping anger. You’d realize that talking to the people holding the knives had zero impact other than the number of times you got knifed. That’s voting. Voting is talking to the people with the knife. You can refuse to vote, stay silent- it’s only going to increase the odds of it being worse. You can vote third party; suggest something other than knifing. It just increases the odds of it being worse.
Obviously, the thing we need to do when the system only offers us unethical choices is to destroy the whole system. But back to the trolly problem- you can’t do that from the switch, which is the voting booth. From the voting booth or switch- there is no other option. So to combine my metaphors, do you think you’ll be more effective at destroying the rails having been stabbed once, or ten times? Voting is only ethically confusing when we haven’t yet recognized the nature of the system. Once we see that it’s a trolly problem, it’s not confusing at all. Yelling: “I would body-slam the train off the tracks!” may feel good, but in reality it’s just abandoning the agency we do have for the sake of some facade of ethical purity. Picture this: if you were tied to the rails in a trolly problem, what would you say to someone at the switch who refused to touch the switch, to keep their hands clean? Who would only try to pull it in a direction that it structurally doesn’t go? Would you respect their ethics?
The villain in a trolly problem is the system that created a trolly problem. Once we’re standing at the switch with the trolley five seconds away, choosing the better option does not make us the villain, or even complicit- it just makes us responsible and ethical people. Complicity comes when we pretend that we have more agency in a single moment than we do, and when we don’t commit our lives to destroying the rails.
So I don’t resent Kamala Harris any more than I resent the better switch position in a trolly problem, or the number one. Is any number of people run over by a trolley acceptable? Is one an acceptable number of times to be stabbed? Of course not. No. Never. Do I resent the number one for being the more strategic choice in that scenario? No. It’s my preference. But that awareness is built on the embodied understanding that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are simply what the system is. They’re brutal war criminals intent on ending the world. There’s no hope in choosing to be stabbed just one time. I’m not endorsing it. I’m condemning it with every fiber of my being- and once I see that this is the nature of the system and the agency I have from a voting booth, I still choose one.
One of the things that I hope people take away from this video is that supporting Kamala Harris is just as unethical as not voting for her. Would you call your choice to only be stabbed once “support” for the stabbing? In my opinion, the only ethical vote for Kamala Harris is a complete damnation of her, and a commitment to the complete destruction of the system she represents. A vote for her from hope or purely from fear is deeply unethical, because those are neither strategic nor commitments. Most of the people voting for Harris have no Theory of Change, and are not acting or risking anything to create a better world where they don’t vote for war criminals.
Most of the public dialogue seems to miss this conversation entirely. It seems like a lot of people are either just saying they won’t vote for a war criminal, or trying to paint Harris, and the situation we’re in, as better than they are. To be quite frank, both of those positions sound equally delusional to me. And the people saying both often sound like they’re trying to convince themselves of something, because they can tell their perspective is incomplete. I don’t think anyone who has been planning on voting third party actually thinks it will help anything, it just looks like a well-intentioned effort towards not being complicit, leading to a strategy that actually makes them more complicit in ways that it hurts to look at. And I don’t think anyone actually believes we can move Harris closer to humanity once she’s elected, they’re just looking for some rationale for their vote, but they’re also not seeing the whole picture, because it would ask a lot more of them than just voting. So it felt important for me to add my 2c to this conversation, because I don’t hear anyone else talking about how from this set of awarenesses, a vote for Harris is the most utter and complete condemnation of her that I could possibly make. Whether or not you agree with my logic here, I hope that you can at least see that. Also, for the record, I live in Maine where we have Ranked Choice, so it’s easy for me. I wish that all the energy and money going to Jill Stein went to getting Ranked Choice, I think that would be a far, far more strategic use of energy at this time.
I’ll wrap up with this: the entire movement condemning Harris, saying we wouldn’t vote for her, has been absolutely healthy, helpful, and positive. It has kept a spotlight on her crimes, and been a key part of every tiny head-nod she’s made towards humanity, including calling for a ceasefire and picking Walz. The fact that those performative little meaningless gestures are nowhere near enough is evidence of how irredeemable she and the system are. Point is, a diversity of tactics is always the strongest strategy. We’ve needed the public pressure, and it’s helped. I’ve chanted in the streets that I won’t vote for her, and that was ethical and powerful. Well-done, everyone. And. Carrying that tactic into the voting booth is no longer good strategy. On a ballot, it becomes active complicity in the escalating horrors that Trump will perpetrate, both here and there, if he wins. So nobody has to say it, though as election day gets closer I think as many people publicly recognizing these truths as possible is helpful. The trolley is here, and yelling “just throw the lever!” is helpful now. But no one has to say it, it stings my mouth as well. The only way I can get the words “I’m voting for Harris” past my lips is by publicly saying that my vote for her is a complete damnation of her and everything she stands for, and explaining why. Whatever we say or don’t say though, once we’re in the voting booth, I hope we remember this. Performative failure is not strategic action. It helps no one at all, and causes a lot of harm. As US citizens, none of our hands are clean already, so let’s stop pretending that they can be, however we vote, and vote for the candidate with a pathway to victory who will cause less harm, and then get back to work destroying the system that forced us to make such an unthinkable choice.