Why I refuse to vote

America is an imperial slaughterhouse and every four years this bloody killing chamber hosts a three-ring circus that the hammer-wielding men call a presidential election season. A multi-billion dollar spectacle of sodomy, naughtiness, pomp and circumstance in which spineless, gag-reflexless sociopaths compete in a shit-eating contest while we the people are all humiliated and forced to choose sides by ruthless intellectuals who keep screaming that this reality TV-glorified abortion is the most important democratic event in recorded history and that we will not be allowed to complain about being raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.

Fuck you, I’m not voting. Once Satan knows how many cycles of this shit I’m done with it. I won’t do it anymore and you can all go ahead and burn me at the stake as long as you use the ballot box as kindling and mute the final debate while my eyes melt. Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon spokesman for the next four years is fucking democracy because it’s not.

It doesn’t matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals could find a way to block the tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a halfway decent son of a bitch into the White House, he’d still be just the nicest guy in the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than fashion shows for their poodles.

I used to vote. I was really passionate about it, and not just because I subscribed to this theory of the lesser evil. I was a die-hard protest voter who understood that this thing was just a show, but still tried to hijack it in the hopes of using the platform it provided to advance a populist movement against the empire.

My strategy was pretty simple: I would pick the candidate who was most aggressively anti-war and do everything I could to keep the censors from keeping him off the stage for as long as possible in the hopes of waking a few zombies from their military-industrial slumber. In my first election, I campaigned like a red-hot son of a bitch for Dennis Kucinich, then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to portray a military-industrial-speak-monger named Barack Obama as a pacifist based primarily on the color of his skin.

In 2012, I put aside my proletarian pride to support Ron Paul while I was still a Guevara-quoting communist, seeing how this outspoken liberal pacifist galvanized a slumping antiwar movement after the Bush junta finally went away. I voted for Jill Stein twice before supporting Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I switched parties from the Greens to the Independents to the Libertarians, abandoning Marxism for a more free-market-oriented hybrid of post-left anarchism and queer libertine socialism, while retaining the same goal of breaking the war machine by any means necessary, including manipulating the circus of empire as a zoonotic tool of agitprop.

So what happened? 2020 came along, followed by a wild midterm election like the aftertaste of Rosemary. In the age of Trump and anti-Trump hysteria, the election cycle itself has become an increasingly violent tool of division, and its effects on the people around me have become increasingly horrific. As an anarcho-populist who exposes corruption, grassroots unity is my bread and butter, the core idea that left and right, conservative and liberal, are completely irrelevant labels when everyone outside the country club is getting screwed by the same greedy elites in both major parties.

I had worked hard for years to reach out to anti-war conservatives and convince them that queer people like me were not the enemy, and in one election season I saw all that hard work undone when the Christian Right turned my gender identity into its latest electoral bogeyman and other trans people responded by seeking refuge behind the strong arms of progressive warmongers while MAGA “isolationists” decided to put America first by going after our children.

It got worse. It spread. People no longer had positions, they just had enemies. Even sane radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible things Joe had already spent the 80s and 90s doing. The MeToo movement ate itself when it refused to side with one of this jackal’s victims, and Black Lives Matter followed suit. Then January 6th came, and angry people finally rose up in anger against power, but only to defend more power, wasting legitimate revolutionary momentum on throwing a tantrum at the other rapist on the ticket.

Elections themselves have become an instrument of dividing the working classes in a way never seen before. They are no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to crumble under the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into another failed state, they are transforming the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults, convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality TV rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump.

If he gets elected, democracy is over, or if he doesn’t get elected, democracy is over. And even third parties have been infected by this partisan contagion, with my own adopted Libertarian Party collapsing into a little bitch fight between anti-war voters who hate Trump and anti-war voters who hate transgender kids enough to let him speak at our convention.

You bunch of moronic motherfuckers don’t seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and that Donald Trump is nothing more than a symptom of the final stages of that electoral cancer. When Donald Trump was president, the same shitty wars were being waged into oblivion. All his efforts to kiss Putin’s ass didn’t stop him from eviscerating nearly every remaining Cold War treaty we had with the Kremlin. And since Trump was ousted from the White House, the same seething cauldron of chaos continues to simmer throughout Babylon while the same concentration camps remain overflowing on our prolapsed border.

The system has already collapsed. Only illusions remain, but they have become existential, something falsely tribal that people cling to for warmth while the mandarins prepare a final kamikaze assault against the inevitable Eurasian century in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Well, I repeat, just one more time, I am done. American “democracy” has become worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness, and I am already sick of it. There is nothing revolutionary to be done with this circus, if there ever was one. I will no longer validate a failed empire with my vote.

But that doesn’t mean I’m done waging war on war. I’ve simply changed my tactics to something more realistic than the hijacking of the Hindenburg, and I seriously suggest that anyone who seriously wants to oppose the empire do the same. We must do the opposite of what opposes us to this systemic disease. We must actively disengage. We must give up.

As the empire twists and turns in the wind like a scarecrow, it’s time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using new distraction tools like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be traded without taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can go old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea behind this tactic, known in left-libertarian circles as agorism, is to deprive the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don’t need a ruling class to function.

From there, we break away from the state and create a vast panarchy of many stateless societies. Each voluntary, self-sufficient community breaks away from an increasingly illegitimate union and declares itself a sovereign nation, existing completely free of borders wherever its citizens are. Each of these political entities would have its own government, its own schools, its own militias, its own medical services, but all of this would be entirely voluntary and completely independent of physical territory.

My Queer Hillbilly Autonomous Zone could exist in the same goddamn apartment complex as the Rastafarian Republic and the Mormon Fundamentalist Dutchman of Deseret. We could borrow sugar and make peace deals over poker on Friday nights. America could go back to being a little more like it was before the white man and his electoral circus fucked it up, a disorganized tribal mishmash of competing governments with no monopoly on the use of force. It wasn’t perfect, but no one got bombed because there wasn’t anything big enough to be worth destroying the world over to evaporate it.

Maybe it will fail. Maybe humans really are screwed. But if so, I’d rather go build something than line up to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by destroying people. You can do whatever you want in November. I’m tired of telling other people how to live. But don’t expect me to feel guilty for not giving in to your election fetish because I have better things to do with my time.