The Danger of Basing Your Vote on the Advice of Someone Who Doesn't Even Live in the US

There are foreigners pretending to be Americans

If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.

Last week I wrote a post on The Danger of Being a Single-Issue Voter in America in 2024. It was in response to an Instagram post by a man who said that he was not going to vote for Joe Biden because of what's going on in Gaza. Nor was he going to vote for Donald Trump. Instead he's going to vote for a third party candidate named Claudia de la Cruz, who is running for president on the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

I hadn't heard of this woman until I came upon that post. I don't think that she stands a chance of winning because she is so obscure and the media has basically ignored her. Given Trump's threat to rule as a dictator and stay in office indefinitely, we need to vote in large numbers to ensure that Biden wins. Let's be honest, Joe Biden is the only candidate who stands the best chance of beating Trump. Not Claudia de la Cruz. Not Cornell West. Not Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Not Jill Stein. Not any of the other third party candidates that are floating out there. The minor parties just don't have the number of potential voters that Biden and Trump have.

I also mentioned that this Instagrammer has the luxury of throwing his vote away on de la Cruz while not being too concerned about a Trump victory because, as a white middle-class heterosexual cis man, he would be far less affected by Trump implementing Project 2025 than a woman of color or a senior citizen who is LGBTQ.

For as much as I fret about him throwing his vote away on a candidate with a zero chance of winning, at least he was born in the United States, he is an American citizen, and he lives in the United States.

This week I came across this post on Twitter/X that really infuriated me. This guy wrote that, despite his strong feelings on Gaza, it was still defensible to still vote for Biden if you live in a swing state. But now he said that he can no longer, in good conscience, say that people should vote for Biden due to what's going on in Gaza.

There's one problem. If you go to his profile, you'd see that he describes himself as a “scot exile in london.”

Basically he was born in Scotland but he now lives in London, England. He was born in the UK and moved from one part of the UK to another. And now he's posting about urging people to not even vote for Biden if they live in a swing state while he's doing this from London.

This guy is even more privileged than the Instagrammer because if Trump gets elected, he won't be affected at all on a personal level because he is a British citizen living in the United Kingdom. Other people noticed that fact and he's getting dog piled over it.

I wish I could say that he's the only non-American who lives outside of the US while pretending to be an American online. But ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and started exposing Twitter users to people whom they don't even follow, I've became aware of this guy named Ian Miles Cheong. He proclaims himself as a Donald Trump supporter, posts about American politics, and admires Vladimir Putin because Trump supports Putin. Yet Cheong was born in Malaysia, still lives in Malaysia, and, as far as I can tell, has never once stepped foot in the US. Yet he's pretending to be an American citizen. Not once have I ever seen him post anything about Malaysian politics or what's happening in Malaysia in general. All he has to do is write a post about the latest news in his native country that looks interesting to him while including a link from The Star or Free Malaysia Today.

Then there's Caitlin Johnstone, who writes about US politics all the time like she's a US citizen. It took me a few months until I learned that she was born in Australia and she still lives in the land down under. Australia is an even bigger country than Malaysia so you'd think that there would be some Australian political issue that she would like to highlight in her writings, such as the controversy over last October's vote in her country against altering the Australian constitution to formally allow the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people to have an Indigenous advisory body that would have advised the Australian parliament on matters concerning the community. At least writing about the issues affecting her fellow Australians would have given a greater legitimacy in her writings than pretending to be an American writing exclusively about US news and politics.

The bottom line is to not let someone who was born and live in another country tell you how you, as an American, should vote in November because that person will not be directly affected no matter the outcome of the vote.

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