Don’t vote!
All votes are votes for evil. I'll explain everything here.
Don’t vote. That’s my message.
To be clear, my message isn’t “don’t vote for x, vote for y.” My message isn’t “don’t vote mainstream, vote for third parties.” My message isn’t “don’t vote federal, vote local because those are the votes that really matter!” (No, they don’t matter.)
My message is DON’T VOTE. Period.
I’m not “lazy.” I’m not disinterested in politics. I care very deeply about the growing fascism in the world, the climate crisis, the completely unmitigated pandemic, trans people being hunted down, Palestinians being genocided, the US military destroying various countries around the world.
I’m nearly 40 years old and I have been very active in the political process since I was 15. That’s since before I was legal age to vote. And from about age 18 to my early 30s, I voted in every municipal, provincial, and federal election I could here in Toronto, Canada and its nearby towns and cities that I’ve also lived in over the years. I went out of my way to make sure I was registered to vote and that I could get to a poll. I even volunteered at some polls in the mid naughts.
When the 20th century was still with us but coming to a close, I was a teenage libertarian. I’m very much embarrassed by that. I had a very abusive and over-controlling mother, and the infamous libertarian political alignment test was well distributed on the 90s web. The concept of an over-controlling government was my proxy for my over-controlling mother. And the test is designed to mark most people as “libertarian” anyway. I was even a member of the Ontario Libertarian Party. (To my credit, libertarianism on the internet hadn’t yet openly embraced any of that “Men’s Rights Movement” related crap, social media didn’t exist yet, and anticapitalism wasn’t as easy to learn about at the time.)
But by age 19, I was out in the world on my own. I had no financial support from my parents, so I was poor. By my early 20s, my firsthand experience of how tough it was to survive on welfare made me question capitalism and turn left. I became an NDPer by that point. The NDP is Canada’s mainstream “left” party. You’ll learn why I say “left” in quotes very soon.
I didn’t just vote NDP at the federal and provincial levels and vote for NDP-supported politicians in municipal elections. I also got so deeply involved that by 2004, I was a delegate at the Ontario NDP policy convention at the Hamilton Convention Centre, representing the riding of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek.
A bunch of disabled people and people in the Socialist Caucus pushed me to run for a junior position on the Ontario NDP executive. I was only 20 years old at the time. I did it because those several people encouraged me. I sat next to Sid Ryan at a table at some point. I made a speech. I was almost laughed at. And the Lewises controlling everything behind the scenes made damn sure that I didn’t get elected to the executive. At one point, I ran into the washroom in tears.
But despite that minor traumatic experience (I have had many more traumatic experiences in my life), I kept on voting NDP federally and provincially, and unofficially at the municipal level too. (Here in Canada, candidates for City Hall, both Mayor and Councillor positions, don’t officially run under a party banner. But everyone knows which candidates are unofficially aligned with the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP.)
I kept supporting the NDP for many years. I believed in heavily regulated capitalism. I believed in taxing the rich to a considerable extent, and providing strong well funded social services. I believed in increasing the minimum wage and greatly increasing the amount of money that welfare recipients get. I thought I was a very kind left-wing person. But not a wacky extremist like those Marxist-Leninist types!
I volunteered for a lot of NDP candidate election campaigns. I spent many hours knocking door-to-door and handing out flyers. All of my labour was unpaid, I was poor at the time, and through hindsight I realize that my labour was exploited by the NDP. The campaign managers and several other people were certainly paid for working on those campaigns!
Between 2006 and 2007, I interviewed a lot of NDP politicians for Hamilton’s Mayday Magazine, including Andrea Horwath. Horwath was an NDP star, especially in the Hamilton area. She would later go on to be the leader on the Ontario NDP and she’s now the mayor of Hamilton.
In late 2011, I was involved in the Occupy Toronto movement, concurrent to Occupy Wall Street. I spent a lot of time in St. James Park tents. I participated in a lot of protests.
Olivia Chow has legendary status in the NDP. She’s the widow of fellow legendary NDP leader Jack Layton. When she announced her candidacy for the 2014 Toronto mayoral race, I was in the crowd and ready to volunteer.
In 2018, I was 34 years old and starting to realize for maybe the fourth or fifth time in my life that I’m autistic. But by then, I was much more in control of my life and my cybersecurity writing and research career had brought me out of poverty. So I was able to spend about $3,000 on my adult autism and ADHD diagnosis. My official diagnosis didn’t get me any help. But I got in touch with the online autistic self advocacy community again. Eventually I realized that the idea that nonautistic “experts” should be the gatekeepers on who is or isn’t autistic is like when heterosexual “experts” gatekept who was or wasn’t considered to be gay. Totally absurd.
Anyway, as I believe autistic people should decide who is autistic, I most certainly don’t support ABA either.
ABA stands for “Applied Behavioral Analysis.” It’s basically gay “conversion therapy” for autistic kids. It actually has the exact same origins as “conversion therapy.” ABA completely traumatizes autistic people and takes away all of their agency, their ability to make their own decisions. It forces autistic kids to pretend that they’re not autistic. I’m not going to dedicate this particular blog post to how horrible ABA is. So instead, you can read this University of Cambridge publication: “Building a Person”: Legal and Clinical Personhood for Autistic and Trans Children in Ontario. It explains everything I’ve said in this paragraph.
Anyway, ABA is the official mainstream supported “therapy” for autistic kids in Canada. In Ontario, it’s provincially funded. It’s absolutely disgusting how the torture of autistic kids is government funded, and their parents fight hard to make sure their kids get bullied into submission by ABA.
What’s also disgusting is that the Ontario NDP enthusiastically supports government funded ABA. They’re in total cahoots with the ABA lobbyists, and ABA is a multi-billion dollar industry. You can read about that here: ABA: Inside the controversy surrounding the most popular therapy for autistic children in Ontario.
I also recommend listening to this episode of the Blueprints for Disruption podcast: Autistic Resistance: The Foundations.
Autistic NDPers have definitely fought against their party’s support of ABA, only to be spat on and marginalized further.
So in my mid-30s, I decided to forget about supporting the NDP. My politics were turning farther and farther left anyway. I started to explore my options in the Communist Party. Those Marxist-Leninists were no longer silly extremists to me. Capitalism is extremist. And you can’t support even “heavily regulated” capitalism as the NDP does and still be a proper leftist. I started to realize that truth. Thankfully becoming “middle class” hadn’t stopped my evolution farther left, not one iota.
I don’t want to get into it too much here. But the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Ontario are both a total mess. I attended multiple online meetings. They make it very, very difficult to join. You have to attend the first five minutes of meetings for months or years for them to make you a member. That’s the first five minutes of meetings that are about an hour to 90 minutes in length. They kick you out after the first five minutes because you’re not a member and they’re going to discuss private member business. “But I want to become a member!” Tough shit, you have to be treated like a second class citizen for a couple of years until the party leadership decides that you’re not a COINTELPRO plant. There have also been scandals related to party leaders protecting people in the party who have rape allegations and the like.
And even if the Communist Party wasn’t fucked up and a total joke, our “democracy” here in Canada would never let a Communist candidate get anywhere close to public office. Only Conservatives, Liberals, and NDPers can attend debates. Not even the Greens get to attend. And you’re also cut out of any opportunities within the system to fundraise so that voters know you exist.
And then the Covid pandemic hit. People pretended to care in 2020. Our provincial and federal governments pretended to do things, all while ignoring the Covid is airborne, and not spread by droplets. Covid is airborne, which means N95 respirators should be worn instead of cloth and surgical masks. Covid is airborne, which means those plexiglass barriers and hand santizer do fuck all. We need respirators and air filtering and ventilation. (That’s and, not or. See my post Air quality is not a substitute for respirators.) And partly because the virus mutates much faster than the speed of vaccine development, the Covid vaccines don’t do very much. They most certainly don’t stop transmission or infection. Which contrary to all the gaslighting, the history of vaccination has always been about stopping infection and transmission completely, not just reducing symptoms or cutting the immediate death rate a bit.
By 2022, it became much more obvious which people and entities were totally pretending to care about Covid and not actually serious about it. That includes all levels of government here. And I learned that not even NDP politicians, the Communist Party, or organizations like Fightback Magazine really give a fuck. It’s just constant masklessness galore! (There are only a few exceptions. Unlike many people who call themselves anarchists, the anarchists who wrote this open letter care. As you read the open letter, you’ll learn that most people who call themselves anarchists and communists don’t care. They’re happy to further the capitalist campaign of pretending there’s no pandemic as millions and billions people are killed or become permanently disabled. Killing and maiming your comrades for some capitalist vision of restaurant dining “freedom” means you’re not really a leftist.)
Watching so many supposed leftists happily spread a level three biohazard around killed whatever hope I had left that any progress could be made through organizations that call themselves anticapitalist.
And through all that and our ever worsening climate disaster, I learned more and more that we in Canada, the US, the UK, and most of the rest of the world don’t actually live in democracies. We live with the illusion of democracy. Any political candidate or political party that says all the right things, as people like Bernie Sanders used to do, will not actually give a fuck about anything they said they stood for when they’re in public office.
And don’t get me started on the whole “vote for the lesser evil” charade. Americans and Canadians and Brits have been “voting for the lesser evil” for decades. And the supposed “lesser evil” just got more and more evil. And now for the US Presidential elections in 2024, you’ve got an obvious fascist in Donald Trump versus a more covert fascist in Joe Biden. Trump’s evil needs no introduction. Biden’s evil is defined by many years of “not wanting a racial jungle” and being pro-segregationist, being “tough on crime,” locking up Black Americans in record numbers, supporting and finding Trump’s wall, locking up immigrants in ICE concentration camps, sending the IDF billions of dollars each and every day to murder every single Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, and of course, letting the Covid pandemic rip with a massive death and disability toll. These evils aren’t in the past, they’re all current and ongoing.
Here are various exhibits that illustrate how western “democracy” is really just a scam to make ordinary people think that they have some influence within the system:
Bernie Sanders is totally supports the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Biden’s evil should no longer be any surprise.
Toronto Star: Mayor Olivia Chow backs plan to rename Etobicoke stadium after Rob Ford. Yes, the hero of the supposedly “left” NDP supports naming a stadium after the former Toronto mayor who was just like Donald Trump before Donald Trump became US President.
Olivia Chow is also totally against people protesting in support of the lives of Palestinian people.
There are several other episodes of Blueprints of Disruption that I encourage you to listen to. Host Jessa McLean was a passionate activist inside of the NDP, but the NDP treated her like dirt because she’s a real leftist whereas the NDP leadership actually support all of the aims of capitalism and imperialism.
Inside the NDP: Corporate Lobbyists Running the Workers Party?
Inside the NDP: Controlled Convention
Inside the NDP: Sidelining Socialism
Inside the NDP: Why They Came for Me
AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) was really against “kids in cages” until she got into public office. Now she and the rest of The Squad are enthusiastic allies of the Democratic Party establishment and the Biden administration.
There are at least thousands more examples in Canada, the US, the UK, and various other countries about how even the political “left” isn’t really left, and even political candidates who say all the right things on the campaign trail will totally commit evil once they’re in office.
I used to get excited about Bernie Sanders, AOC, Olivia Chow, even the Communist Party.
Now I’m almost 40. I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen these assholes ignore our current ongoing pandemic, their enthusiasm for abusing autistic people and other disabled people, for exploiting LGBTQIA+ people like pawns to be thrown out when they’re no longer useful, I’ve seen them do fuck all to rein in fossil fuel consumption to slow down the climate disaster, and I’ve seen “left” politicians rooting for Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocide of the Palestinian people.
Your vote tells these powerful shitheads that you support them and their evil systems, regardless of what your intentions were with your vote. No matter how hard you want to believe that there’s such a thing as a “lesser evil,” or such a thing as voting against someone... there isn’t. The only votes that are possible to make are votes for evil.
Don’t vote.
Don’t vote!
DON’T FUCKING VOTE!!!
Riot in the streets instead. And give money directly to homeless people.
Kim Crawley, buttondown.email/Crowgirl, @crowgirl.bsky.social, @crowgirl@hachyderm.io, linktr.ee/kimcrawley