It’s time for another politics update!
In case you’re just joining me, I’ve been trying to write a lighthearted and snarky article about once a week, where I go over all the big stories about the federal election one by one. I cover the pro-life movement and Ohio state politics separately so I don’t lose my mind. This article is going to be a little less snarky than usual, because things are getting terrifying.
Please keep referring back to my boilerplate about voting as a Catholic. No, the Catholic Church does not have an official political party, not even the one you’re thinking of right now. It’s spiritual abuse to tell people they have to vote a certain way on pain of sin. All the candidates support at least some intrinsic evils as part of their platform– and yes, I promise you, there are more intrinsic evils than just abortion. It is a sin to vote for any candidate BECAUSE you like one of the intrinsic evils he or she supports. It’s not a sin to make your best guess about who would be the better leader and pull that lever IN SPITE OF an evil they support. Anyone in my comment box telling you otherwise will have their comment edited to read “I am a supersonic idiotic brain-infected disconnected booger pickin’ piece of chicken.” No exceptions. And now, we’re off to the races.
Things are getting down to the wire ahead of the November 5th election.
The ballots are printed. Early voting is open in many states already– I voted last Tuesday, voter number 398 for Jefferson County according to the ballot machine, and I’ve never seen the tiny Board of Elections office looking so crowded.
The opinion polls are also cropping up like mushrooms, showing that the race is tightening to a dead heat, but it has been pointed out by people who accurately predicted the 2022 results that a lot of these are from right-wing affiliated sources, so it’s hard to gauge how accurate polling averages are. I think we should consider ourselves to be flying blind from now until the election is over. We have no idea who will win. No polls, no false reassurance, no daily panic as you look at the averages either. Just vote!
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are still circling the handful of battleground states like buzzards, making appearance after cheerful appearance. They must be getting awfully sick of Pennsylvania right now because I feel as if they’re in Pittsburgh every other day. Kamala has appeared on The Howard Stern Show and on a podcast called “Call Her Daddy,” which I’d never heard of because I’m old and not cool. She was a guest on The Late Show. She appeared on The View. She also had a long interview on 60 Minutes, as every major candidate except one has done for the past fifty years. That one candidate is Donald Trump, who was scheduled to sit down for an interview but suddenly canceled because he didn’t want to be fact checked, and because he was still upset about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Pundits are complaining that Harris is not talking to the media nearly enough.
Meanwhile, the Republican party has taken to lying about… well, just about everything.
Last week we had Hurricane Milton, which mercifully died down to a Category Three storm instead of being as catastrophic as we feared. But that was still an enormous amount of flooding in Florida, after they’d suffered another hurricane so recently. And the response from Donald Trump, and from his lackeys like Laura Loomer and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been to lie about it. Greene has the silliest lie; she has insisted that a mysterious “they” can control the weather, a preposterous conspiracy theory that I thought would be too much for the MAGA movement. Next thing I knew, earnest MAGA voters were telling stories about the ways in which they imagined a shady cabal was causing catastrophes to flood red states. These are the people who believe that man-made climate change is a hoax, but they have no problem believing that the government flooded Asheville, a city that usually votes Democrat, in an attempt to drown Republicans.
That conspiracy theory was so preposterously nutty as to be almost endearing, but others that weren’t nearly so funny were spread and amplified by Trump, with predictable results. It started by claiming that FEMA funding was diverted to help immigrants and that Georgia governor Brian Kemp hadn’t been able to communicated with President Joe Biden, neither of which were true. He claimed that FEMA was blocking aid to North Carolina, also a lie. And of course, these lies have consequences. We now have trucks full of “militia members” driving around “hunting FEMA.” FEMA workers can’t do their jobs and help people because of conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, J. D. Vance is also telling lies, or at least refusing to tell the truth. He’s been on several television shows lately, where he’s been given opportunity after opportunity to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and he keeps saying anything but that. He says he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election, because of Hunter Biden’s laptop. I don’t know how a democracy is supposed to stay a democracy, if the person who is one coin flip and a heartbeat away from the presidency can’t say that the last person who won the presidency really did win the presidency.
Vance and other prominent Republicans keep bizarrely repeating that the 2020 election did too lead to “a peaceful transfer of power” because Inauguration Day happened peacefully– never mind that Donald Trump incited a coup attempt that killed and injured several people two weeks earlier.
And then there are the lies about immigrants. We know that last month, Trump and Vance terrorized the citizens and legal residents of Ohio by spreading completely unfounded rumors about Haitians living and working peacefully in Springfield, Ohio. They haven’t taken any of that back. Vance refuses to call the legal residents “legal,” because he doesn’t like the laws they obeyed and wants to change them. Trump has threatened to strip them of their migration status and deport them to the wrong country; he ranted that he was going to ship them to Venezuela. Trump has continued to rant about immigrants, claiming that Kamala Harris is deliberately letting in whole armies of violent escapees from “dungeons” and “insane asylums” all over the world. He claimed that the whole world thinks of the United States as “occupied” and that other foreign countries have had their crime rates go down because they sent all the criminals here. None of this is true, of course. It’s nonsense. Violent crime rates are plummeting lately, and illegal border crossings are very low as well. But that hasn’t stopped him from making up a story out of whole cloth.
This weekend, Trump gave a speech in Aurora, Colorado, which the New York Times said was “marked by nativist attacks” which is a bit like saying the Titanic’s maiden voyage was “marked by leaks.” He stood flanked by mug shots of Latino men, ranting that the United States had been “invaded and conquered.” He repeated the conspiracy theory that parts of Aurora were being run by Venezuelan gangsters, which is a lie. He demanded the death penalty for any immigrant who kills an American citizen, and said that he was going to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport thousands upon thousands of immigrants.
I don’t know how to express how dangerous it would be to give the presidency of the United States, or any political office for that matter, to a party which has given itself over completely to lies and scaremongering.
This isn’t normal. Spin, trying to put a positive or negative shine on something that’s really happening, is a normal part of any political campaign. Playing up your own party’s achievements while mocking the other party’s failures is to be expected. Putting everything your party does in the best light while claiming that the other party does everything for the worst motives is just run-of-the-mill politics. Ignoring the plank in your own eye to point out the mote in your opponent’s is par for the course. But making up stories with absolutely no basis in reality in order to scare people, scapegoat vulnerable groups, and sow chaos, is something entirely different.
I’ve begun every political post lately, including this one, by reminding people that it’s not a sin to vote your conscience. I still believe that. If you vote for Donald Trump or any other Republican BECAUSE you hope he’s going to hurt immigrants and get FEMA workers shot, that’s a sin. If you vote Republican this time around because you honestly think they’re the best choice, that’s not a sin. But it’s awfully stupid and dangerous of you, and I’m begging you to reconsider.
This isn’t about the Republican party, in general. I’ve voted Republican many times before; I don’t regret pulling the lever for Romney. America did great under Eisenhower. Lincoln was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. I’m talking about the Republican party at this moment in history, when they’ve been consumed by would-be fascists and thrown all the honorable people out.
This isn’t about whether you’re liberal or conservative. Nobody in the current Republican party is a conservative. They do not care about defending the constitution. They certainly don’t care about individual freedoms or small government. Any notions about love for America, respect for the office of the president and upholding yourself with decorum have gone out the window as well. The actual principled conservatives have fled the GOP, and are voting for the other side or at least leaving the ticket blank. The current party is all dangerous radicals. Maybe someday we’ll have a principled conservative party again.
This isn’t about abortion. Abortion rates have been going up steadily ever since Trump’s inauguration and the Dobbs decision hasn’t stemmed the tide at all. In fact, the only difference that the Dobbs decision seems to have made to date is that women experiencing miscarriages are getting hurt. Neither side is pretending to be against abortion anymore. Trump is not pro-life. There simply isn’t a pro-life candidate. I wish there was.
This isn’t about “murdering babies after birth,” because I promise you, that’s already illegal in fifty states.
This isn’t about “communism.” Both candidates have a list of populist plans for the economy that are squarely within the boundaries of capitalism.
This isn’t about “open borders” in any way. Both candidates are against open borders. Harris has supported a bipartisan border security bill that I, personally, find draconian; I would prefer to be much more welcoming of asylum seekers. But it’s a utopia compared to Trump’s scaremongering and promise of mass deportation.
This is about holding onto our democracy, and stopping what might well amount to ethnic cleansing.
It’s about putting out the fire burning our national house down, so we can work on the home improvements we’ve so desperately needed.
I would like to go back to an America with two boring political parties who squabble and disagree about how they’re going to solve real problems that actually exist.
The first step towards that is already going on in many states across the country, and the last day to take part in it is November Fifth.
We’ve got three weeks to get this right.
And I’ll be back on with another politics update soon enough.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.