If Trump gets into office again, that’s on all of you, and you’re gonna be part of the problem if you aren’t part of the solution. NOBODY else is gonna do it for you. NONE of the other names that might appear on a ballot in your state will have a snowball’s chance in hell. If you don’t like Harris, that’s fine, you don’t have to like her, but choosing not to vote for Harris is giving your vote to Trump.

I have a cousin who insists on voting for Jill Stein because she doesn't want to vote for Trump but "I could never in good conscience vote for a Democrat". I know people who buy into the "I have to withhold my vote (or vote third party, or whatever) because withholding your vote is the only way to force change and bring about ranked choice voting". I know people who won't vote for Biden over Afghanistan or the Israel conflict while fully acknowledging that Trump would be exponentially worse, but saying "Voting for Biden (now Harris) would be endorsing his actions, so I can't do that."

And sadly, I do wonder how many of these people are just closet Republicans who are down with the racism and bigotry, and use those reasons to justify the fact that they just really wanted to vote for Trump in the first place but aren't ready to admit it yet.

Some of these people don't know how the system works, and others don't care. They believe they're taking some kind of "principled stance" and think that somehow, in a two-person race (none of the other independent candidates even appear on enough ballots to make it to 270 in the first place), they can get people to not vote for Biden (now Harris) but still somehow not end up with Trump, as long as they Jill Stein hard enough.

They don't understand......One road leads to Harris. All other roads lead to Trump. There are no other candidates that could even mathematically make it to 270. As the song goes, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Voting third party, or not voting at all in 'protest', is just voting for Trump with extra steps.

So get off your lazy ass for a few minutes to help save the world for what looks like it might be more than the next 4 years; it could be for a lot longer. And while you’re at it, if you keep voting Republicans into Congress, State, and local governments, (where most of the power ACTUALLY is), then they will keep working us all toward this kind of position. Stop putting them in power. Period.

And this is where you can tell who are the closeted Republicans. If they're voting D at the top of the ticket, then voting R downballot, they're a closeted Republican. They may not want to have to justifty their vote when they're sitting around with friends and family talking about the President, or your state governor, or whatever, where voting for Trump may still be considered embarrassing. But they'll have no problem voting for the bigot to sit on their local school board because they know nobody's gonna talk about who voted for who in the school board election of East Bumfuck, Nowhere.

It's why all but the most extreme (and often unemployed, violent felons) Proud Boys or Klansmen won't show up in public with their faces exposed. They want all the racism and bigotry, they just don't want to be covered with all the stink that goes along with it. So they quietly vote these people into power so they can get what they want while still pretending to be Democrats until they think they don't need to pretend any more.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again because I have seen no reason to believe otherwise: These issues will never go away until we address the systemic racism in this country at a grassroots level. And we have not even achieved step 1: We need to acknowledge that there are a lot more racists and bigots in this country than we were comfortable admitting to, and those people see everything that Trump has to offer and are saying "Yes, we want more of that.". But as a country, we are not willing to admit how deep the problem is and have spent the past 60 or so years pretending to solve the problem when all we've really managed to accomplish is sweeping it under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist, and we are now seeing the results of pretending that a significant portion of our voting base that is just as racist now as they were back in the 60s and before are just some fringe lunatics that can be safely ignored. They are not. There are a lot of them, and Trump has successfully coralled them into a very powerful voting bloc. And until that is addressed, this problem will continue no matter how many band-aids you try to stick on it. I'm not even saying I have any kind of a solution to that problem -- I'm a straight, white guy after all, but I do know enough to be able to say I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that what we're doing isn't it.