We must keep fighting the good fight!
This is the most important election in our lifetime!
We may have just one chance left to save our country!
We must defeat the Left!
We must make America great again!
There is no reader of this column who can possibly be unfamiliar with any of these lines. All Republican voters are accustomed to hearing them incessantly from Republican politicians and their conservative media apologists.
The problem is that voters and Big Conservative media consumers have been hearing these melodramatic assertions for so long that they may have forgotten, if they ever realized this in the first place, that they all boil down to a single categorical imperative:
Vote Republican.
To “fight” is to . . . vote Republican.
“The most important election in our lifetime” is one with respect to which it is necessary to . . . vote Republican.
To “save our country” is to . . . vote Republican.
To “defeat the Left” is to . . . vote Republican.
To make America great again is to . . . vote Republican.
Now, I implore the average GOP voter to consult the record of these media influencers and Republican politicians who have been issuing these prescriptions for decades. While some elections have indeed made a difference in the short term, GOP politicians and their boosters in the conservative media never say anything remotely like:
Vote the Democrats out this November, for while the Republicans won’t be able to affect any lasting changes even if they control both chambers of Congress and the presidency, they will be able to temporarily stop the Democrats from doing some [unspecified] bad things and do some [unspecified] good things, and the Republican president will be able to pass some executive orders [that, admittedly, could and most definitely will be reversed at the first moment by the next Democratic POTUS].
Or this:
Vote Republican, but don’t blame them when they fail to fulfill their promises, for they are up against a very powerful and hostile partisan media, plenty of “RINOs,” and an entrenched bureaucracy (a “deep state”) that promises to both deny them the credit that they deserve for whatever [transient, marginal] successes they achieve and ensure that nothing approximating the platform on which they’ve campaigned ever materializes.
And they most certainly won’t say:
You must get out there and vote—even though whatever efforts we may have made toward ensuring that your vote isn’t nullified by the corrupt may not prove successful.
GOP voters don’t have to take my word for any of this. All that they have to do is simply reflect for a brief moment and honestly ask themselves whether there’s a single syllable that I’ve written that isn’t true.
How exactly is voting Republican a matter of “fighting the Left,” or “fighting for the heart and soul of America?” Notice that GOP politicians and conservative media personalities are always glaringly vague on this point. They just treat as axiomatic that a vote for a Republican is a vote to retard the advances of the Left. In point of fact, however, we know nothing could be further from reality.
Even now, with a red tsunami forecasted for November, not a single Republican or Big Conservative media scribbler or talking head is so much as hinting at what Republicans plan on doing when they regain Congress (let alone how they plan on doing it). Nor are they saying what they surely will say if and when this forecast comes to fruition, that while they have the Congress locked up, they don’t yet have the presidency, so it’s unrealistic for their constituents to expect for them to do all that much (I’m not prophetic, it’s just that I’m old enough to have seen this movie on more than one occasion).
As of this moment, if not for the media reminding us that Republican politicians still exist, we could be forgiven for thinking that there is no Republican Party in America (if, that is, the GOP were the viable alternative to the Democrats that it is made out to be). Think about it:
For over two years, the world was brought to a standstill as national economies were wrecked, global supply chains destroyed, and the lives of countless men, women—and, yes, children—ruined in every conceivable way in the name of combatting a virus. Constitutional liberties were indefinitely revoked and all of those “little platoons,” as Burke referred to the civic organizations and communities that shield individuals from the state and invest their lives with meaning, were systematically and systemically undermined.
Republicans not only did nothing to prevent these crimes against humanity—they were complicit in fueling the narrative that made this destruction possible. Now that the Democrats recognize that COVID is no longer good business, they’re moving on from the incalculable harm that they’ve inflicted upon the planet’s population via this unprecedented power grab to do more harm under the pretext of other causes. And Republicans and conservative pundits seem just fine with this.
To repeat, an historically unprecedented exercise of power occurred in 2020—the country was, essentially, interned—and to judge from the silence of Republicans, the latter are perfectly comfortable with the prospect of Anthony Fauci retiring and traipsing off into the sunset in 2024.
This is an outrage. It is an outrage that the highest paid of our country’s nearly 3 million federal employees should escape punishment for the war against humanity that he waged, and it is an outrage that a single Republican should expect a single vote in the absence of guaranteeing that Fauci will be held accountable for his crimes.
If Republicans regain control of the government, will the brave men and women who have been attacked and censored finally have their voices restored via a series of nationally televised tribunals before which Fauci, Frances Collins, Robert Reich, Rochelle Walensky, and every and any other perpetrator of the COVID lockdown fraud will stand to answer for their crimes? Will Republicans expose the COVID madness for what it is, so as to guarantee that no one in the future will even think about hatching anything like it again?
Unless and until Republicans make a “contract” with Americans in which they not only pledge to have these tribunals, but outline how they will ensure that they happen and that all of the networks air them, not a single Republican deserves a single vote. The party of “limited government” had its moment of truth in March of 2020 and it failed abysmally. This could be an opportunity to go some distance toward redeeming itself. That it won’t seize the opportunity is a foregone conclusion that speaks volumes.
Beginning in May of 2020, just as small business owners were trying to recover from the pain inflicted upon them by the ruling class which forced them to close in the name of “the pandemic,” domestic terrorists, encouraged at every turn by the members of that same ruling class, visited violence upon hundreds of American cities in orgies of lawlessness. They caused billions of dollars in damages as they vandalized, torched, and looted buildings large and small. Innocents were injured, beaten and bludgeoned—some to death.
Law-abiding citizens, Americans who just wanted to reopen their businesses so as to pay the bills and feed their families, were being fined, harassed, and arrested because they failed to exercise “social distancing.” Meanwhile, the same politicians and police officers who persecuted them were literally marching in the streets and “taking a knee” before hundreds and thousands of angry people, including the rioters inspired by protesters. A huge middle finger was given by the demonstrators, the rioters, and the members of the political and media classes alike to all of the COVID protocols and the law-abiding citizens who were expected to observe them.
This was the real insurrection. This was real domestic terror.
Are Republicans, assuming they regain power, going to launch investigative committees, hearings, and tribunals to get to the bottom of this disgraceful, this scandalous, period in our nation’s history? Are they going to kick ass and take names?
Unless and until they guarantee that they will and outline how they plan on accomplishing this, they deserve not a single vote.
We could continue endlessly in this same repetitive vein. Why is it that the identity of the person who leaked the Supreme Court document indicating the overturning of Roe v. Wade still hasn’t been revealed? Will Republicans, assuming they regain power, make sure that the leaker, along with those gathered outside of justices’ homes for the express purpose of threatening them and their families, are exposed as the “threats to Our Democracy™” and “insurrectionists” that they are and punished accordingly?
Why has nothing like any of the above happened—including when the Republicans were still in charge during Trump’s term?
The questions listed here are rhetorical. We know that Republicans aren’t going to do any of these things, and the Big Conservative media personalities who routinely carry their water aren’t going to demand that they do so either.
For Republicans to “make America great again,” to genuinely “defeat the Left,” to “restore the heart and soul of the country,” they’re going to have to “fundamentally transform” what currently exists. This, in turn, is going to require, to put it mildly, a radical overhauling of the government-media-education machine that has been in place for a long time. House cleaning on a massive scale is going to have to commence on day one.
Unless and until Republicans pledge to do just this, and to outline how they are going to do just this, they deserve not a single vote, for nothing will change: The vast, “deep state,” bureaucracy and the hostile, ubiquitous, corporate media under its control will persist, and so the excuses Republicans have always had in the past for failing to fulfill their promises will remain the excuses to which they will have to return in the future.
So, why, again, should we vote Republican?