Okay I’ve cooled off. Let me be more patient with you.

Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one’s soul. They will instead support no one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this. And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

— Omar El-Akkad

El-Akkad makes my point better than I can. If I remember correctly, this quote was written before the election, so the final clause should read: “and somehow managed to make it close.”

So it may come as a surprise to you, but I do not, in fact, support Donald Trump, nor am I actually proud of my supposed role in getting him elected. I was trolling you. I was tired of you shaming me for maintaining a principled stance against voting as if I had no principles, so I decided to show you what that would actually look like until you realize on your own that I’m not seriously that person. I guess you never caught on. Usually I /s these things out of consideration for my fellow neurodivergent comrades, but, I gotta be real with you, neurodivergent or otherwise, AmeriKKKan feelings are not even on my radar today.

You can’t shame me into voting for the next war criminal because this system is run by the capitalist class, for the capitalist class, orthogonal to the needs of the working class. The shame lies with the capitalists who make this happen. The capitalist class runs both parties, and they are uniparty on foreign policy, as I have demonstrated in the post you responded to. Voting changes nothing.

And fine, we can agree to disagree on all those points — but I’m not interested in doing shame Olympics. I don’t give a fuck because I know what makes liberals cheer, so I equally devalue liberal derision. I am plenty ashamed of my country and what every administration has done since white people landed on this fucking continent, as the rest of my post and comment history will show, but I’m not gonna respond the way you want me to respond to liberal shame politics when liberals are in bed with the capitalist class and their monsters — i.e., the Democrats are just as deserving of shame as the Republicans they helped put in power!