The Nation Petulantly Demands Its Readers Vote for Genocide Joe Biden
The once-proud magazine for progressives has been reduced to dragging out the tired 'Now Is Not the Time' card, further diminishing its credibility.
You’d think The Nation, that once-venerable publication of, by, and for American progressives, would know better in the Year of Our Lord 2024 than to dredge up its quadrennial admonition not to vote third party—what with Joe Biden funding and arming literal Nazis in Ukraine, enabling a genocide of Palestinians by Israel, and presiding over a tanking economy as Americans continue to die by the thousands daily as COVID 19 spreads unchecked. You would, of course, be wrong. Strap yourselves in, dear readers, because this rant is going to be one fuck of a ride.
In yet another petulant, blatantly out-of-touch diatribe against the left—especially Generation Z, hack writer Alexis Grenell bores us with the following dreary opener.
Lately, segments of the American left seem to be testing the “fuck around and find out” theory of elections, promoting protest voting, not voting at all, and even third-party candidates in the contest between democracy and authoritarianism.1
Hoooo-boy, where do I begin?
No, stupid, that would be the DEMOCRATS testing the ‘fuck around and find out’ theory of elections, just as they have in every election since before I was born. Gen Z is simply the generation giving you the warning. You’re the one fucking around, to the detriment of us all.
You say this as though it isn’t the predictable result of decades of Democrats moving so far to the right they’ve exceeded the Republicans for bat-shit crazy fascism.
In a two-party system, electoral politics is essentially a bus: mass transit that’s designed to take as many people as possible, as close as possible, to where we all need to go.
You are clearly too stupid to understand how elections work. Electoral politics are not like a bus. Electoral politics are the process of applying political pressure to politicians so they do as their nominal constituents want.
Yet a vocal faction of Gen Z in particular seems to expect Uber-like, on-demand service. “Politicians have to earn your vote!” they cry, explaining why they voted “uncommitted” in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, or participated in the “leave it blank” campaign in New York, or will not vote for Joe Biden in the primary at all.
Was this crap written by Hillary Clinton? I ask because it sounds an awfully lot like the kind of clueless, out-of-touch bullshit she vomits up at every opportunity during her condescending lectures to voters.
Yes, politicians have to earn our vote—but only up to a point.
Yes: the point at which we vote their do-nothing recalcitrent asses out of office.
Voting is fundamentally a political act of collective responsibility, where we weigh the impact of our individual choices on society at large.
We know that, Alexis, You, quite obviously, do not.
It’s not an act of personal expression, and it doesn’t necessarily feel good.
Speak for yourself, dumbass.
We’ve got a messy system that frequently runs with delays and requires you to walk part of the way to your final destination.
Again with the comparison to a U.S. transit ride. Lemme ask you something, stupid: Have you ever taken the bus? I do. It’s my primary mode of transportation other than my own two feet. I don’t know where you pulled the notion from that politics is anything like taking the bus, nor do I particularly care. You’re a fucking imbecile who doesn’t even know how politics work, let alone how public transportation functions.
When it comes to Israel and Palestine, it’s like sharing the road with a drunk driver screaming about how much they care about human life while drag-racing a truckload of MAGA-merched-out Nazis.
“Funny” you bring up Palestine and Israel in the same sentence as Nazis, because it’s Israelis who are behaving like MAGA-merched-out Nazis while your boy Biden green-lights every single act of genocidal violence. But at least you admit you are a drunk driver. The first step to not being a drunk driver is to admit you are one and that you need help in order to stop.
This doesn’t mean we don’t try to fix the system.
Then why are you blathering insisting that we shouldn’t? Because throwing our votes away on Genocide Joe Biden sure as hell isn’t going to do fuck all to fix anything. It won’t even prevent anything else from breaking. It’s simply taking a sledge hammer to an already wrecked vehicle and ensuring that not only will it ever be driven again, it won’t even be salvageable as scrap.
But fucking around even in the primaries feels awfully precarious. And although the architects behind these efforts, like the Working Families Party, may be ready to pivot to Biden in November, the act of nonvoting or protest-voting runs the risk of priming people in the wrong direction.
And what, exactly, is that “wrong direction” of which you presue to warn us, Alexis? Because if you think continuing to stand by and enable the subhuman savages presently aiding and abetting a literal fucking genocide with our tax dollars and weapons made by U.S. arms manufacturers is the “right” direction, then bitch, you are nothing but a fucking psychopath and you deserve to be committed to a mental institution for the remainder of your existence, never again to be let out to poison minds and souls with your evil.
The “uncommitted” campaign has not set a clear enough benchmark for the Biden administration, given that Biden called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to an immediate temporary cease-fire, although the US president arguably undermined the recent UN cease-fire vote.
So let me get this straight, child: you don’t think voting uncommitted isn’t a clear indication that lay voters don’t want Genocide Joe Biden on the ballot in November and want someone else, preferably someone who won’t keep backing Nazis in Ukraine and Israel to the point of ignoring the ongoing collapse of U.S. infrastructure, toxic waste spills, an out-of-control pandemic, and environmental apocalypse as temperatures in large swaths of the globe hit in excess of 140ºF? You don’t think the senile, kiddie-groping war criminal you admit is going out of his way to undermine peace efforts to prop up war criminal Netanyahu is the biggest stumbling block to a peace agreement? You are a fucking clown shoe.
This ambiguity leaves the movement toothless as a pressure campaign, with little to tout beyond its own impact at the polls—to say nothing of the fact that it hasn’t taken any responsibility for the downstream effects that could deliver even more destruction in Gaza if Trump wins. Marianne Williamson rebooting her bid for president after seeing the results in Michigan isn’t something we have time for.
Now look, moron, stop pretending as though we haven’t already suffered four years of Trump and Biden both and that we can’t compere the two to understand that Trump is a rank amateure and incompetent buffoon who can’t get squat done without Democrats helping him every step of the way, and that Biden is far, far worse. Grow up and tell the truth: YOU can’t handle another Trump victory, because it makes YOU uncomfortable. The rest of us had to go day after grueling day trying to survive like in his America while the “best” Democrats can be bothered to do is put up against him geriatric fascists whose longer records in public offce demonstrate daily that they make that orange-painted turd look like Little Mary Sunshine by comparison. You want to avoid another Trump term? Put up better candidates instead one worse ones.
Nobody loves the bus, but it’s functional.
No it isn’t, not nearly as often as you think.
Some of the loudest groups protesting Biden’s handling of the conflict, like Within Our Lifetime, are deeply nihilistic.
Projecting, much?
“They are just so stuck in their anti-Zionism, they’re just missing the point that there are many people who would not subscribe to their ideology—which is very legitimate—but who are still sharing [their] moral compass and [their] immediate call to stop the destruction and return the hostages home.” Activists in Yonkers, New York, for example, opposed a city council cease-fire resolution on the grounds that its language was Zionist. These kinds of litmus tests make political collaboration impossible, at a time when we need to work together to halt the destruction.
You’re stuck in your pro-Zionism, missing the point that Israel is carrying out a fucking GENOCIDE, you subhuman PSYCHOPATH. YOU CAN’T FUCKING OPPOSE A GENOCIDE WHILE MAKING NICE WITH THE DEGENERATE SAVAGES SUPPORTING AND ENABLING IT. What part of this is so difficult to understand?
The same could be said of anyone refusing to vote for Biden—in the primaries or the general election—in an effort to “boycott” US policy, without doing anything to advance peace in Israel and Palestine.
That’s actually what’s true about those petulantly refusing to vote third party—in primaries or the general election—in an effort to both-sides a genocide by a brutal white supremacist ethno-apartheid-state against an occupied people comprised more of orphaned children than of adults.
Here’s an idea, you fucking degenerate psychopath: shut all the way the fuck up or offer an actual solution that isn’t capitulating to a goddamned genocidal fascist regime. You keep blithering about how we on the left are unrealistic and have no alternative, but you give nothing—no ideas, no alternatives, just petulant whining and threats telling us nothing and no one better is possible and to shut up and vote like good little puppies so you can go back to brunch and ignore the world burning around you.
Well, kiddies, it ain’t working. YOU put Trump in office in 2016 pulling this crap, and you’re about to do it again this year, because you fucking psychopaths refuse to grow up and learn. You expect people suffering RIGHT NOW from CANCER as a result of the toxic waste spill caused in large part by Biden breaking a rail worker strike by laborers sickened by COVID and not allowed a day off to recover to shut up and vote for the one chiefly responsible for all that? You think the people in Mauii who lost their homes to fire in a state where the average price for starter homes is in excess of $400,000 and were given a ONE-TIME pittance of $700 by a guy who then proceeded to babble about how he once nearly had a small kitchen fire to be silent and vote for the fool who not only hasn’t done shit to stop their drinking water being poisoned but has more than doubled fossil fuel drilling contributing to the overheating of the planet? You expect and demand that people who lost fifteen, twenty relatives in Rafah, more of them children than not, children blown to pieces or crushed to pulp by a genocidal apartheid terrorist state to close their mouths and vote for the cretin sending that terrorist state the fucking bombs?
FUCK YOU, you degenerate psychopath! You do NOT get to talk down to people or tell them to vote for their own destruction, and especially not because refusing to do so will TEMPORARILY INCONVENIENCE YOU. You are a child who has failed utterly to grow up in any meaningful capacity, playing at being an adult while us real adults struggle to keep roofs over our heads and put food in our stomachs in an America becoming increasingly like Nazi Germany circa 1941 as you sip your lattes and bitch about how “Orange Man BAD!”
Biden has already blown the 2024 election. It is far too late to prevent it. YOUR party put Trump in office and it’s returning him to office and all you can do is stamp your feet in childish outrage, whine, threaten, and behave like spoiled rich kids.