The Danger of Being a Single-Issue Voter in America in 2024

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.

Over the weekend I came across a series of videos on Instagram from someone whom I'm not going to name because I don't want to make him more popular or increase his klout score or whatever. He made his series of videos in response to this post that was written by my fellow Substacker Jon Pavlovitz titled “Not Voting For Joe Biden Isn’t Penalizing Joe Biden.”

This man is concerned about what's going on in Gaza. Okay, that's fair enough. There are still Israeli hostages that have been held in Gaza by Hamas since they were kidnapped on October 7. The Palestinian civilians have been bombed relentlessly by Benjamin Netanyahu's government even though it's common knowledge that Hamas have been hiding in tunnels that they've built under Gaza itself and Israel is literally bombing the wrong people who didn't participate in the terrorist attacks on October 7 and whose only crime is that they live aboveground instead of an underground Hamas tunnel.

This person is blaming Joe Biden for this. To some extent it's fair because Biden has resisted calling for a ceasefire until Hamas releases the hostages. (However it seems like bombing Palestinian civilians haven't resulted in Hamas in releasing the hostages.) The US has continued to fund Israel despite the fact that Netanyahu is such a thug that there have been protests in Tel Aviv calling for his ouster. In addition, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and the Hamas leaders.

But here's the thing. Even if Joe Biden does cut off all kinds of further aid to Israel and openly calls for a ceasefire, the war will continue because Joe Biden is the president of the United States, not Israel. Israel is not the 51st US state, it is an independent country. There is only so much that the president of one country can do about the internal affairs of another country.

This person on Instagram is so outraged about Palestine that he announced that he will not vote for Joe Biden. Instead he will vote for Claudia de la Cruz, who's running for president on the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Since her name is not on the ballot in his state, he will have to write her name in at the ballot box.

If it was an ordinary election year, I would personally respect his decision and not say anything. But we are in a year where the US is on the verge of sliding into a Putin-style dictatorship, thanks to Donald Trump and his GOP sycophants. Trump has openly said that he will rule as a dictator and will implement the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan, which will definitely shred the Constitution. Trump has also hinted that he wants to have at least three terms in office, as he indicated at a recent NRA rally.

Basically 2024 will be the last US election for an undetermined number of years if Trump wins.

To be honest, Claudia de la Cruz has no chance at all of winning this year's election. I know that it's due to how our voting system was set up. Personally I think this country needs more than just two political parties. Many other democracies around the world have more than just two political parties and they are all thriving. Voters should be given more choices than just Democrat or Republican. If this threat to American democracy from Trump and his Make America Great Again movement ever goes away, reforming our entire political system should take top priority.

Of course it doesn't help that de la Cruz hasn't done much to make her name more known among the American public. I hadn't heard of her until I came across this guy's Instagram posts.

I wish that Biden would deal with Netanyahu better but I'm not going to be a single-issue voter because I feel that Trump will trash this country thoroughly if he's allowed to get into the White House again. At this point we need to vote in overwhelming numbers to make sure that Joe Biden is reelected and Trump loses again. Every vote must count and a vote for de la Cruz or any other third party candidate will mean less votes for Biden and more votes for Trump.

The guy who said that he won't vote for Biden has the luxury of voting for a third party candidate because he is a white heterosexual cis man who is married and has a stable job. If Trump wins and Project 2025 is implemented, he will emerge relatively unscathed because he is relatively privileged compared to other Americans. So he can afford to vote for de la Cruz and not worry about how the outcome of the election will affect him personally.

If you belong to one or more of the following groups, you will be directly affected by Project 2025 if Donald Trump gets elected and he implements it: women and girls, LGBTQ, people of color, non-white immigrants, non-Christians, people who are Christians but are not Christian Nationalists, career civil servants, senior citizens, people with physical and/or mental disabilities, poor and low-income people. You will not have the luxury of choosing whether to deal with Project 2025 or not because it will be imposed on you. But that's not all, folks. Here is Rep. Jasmine Crockett reading some disturbing excerpts from Project 2025.

As a woman I'm well aware of the fact that I have to deal with this threat whether I like it or not. That's why I'm prioritizing making sure that Donald Trump is defeated once and for all because I will be personally affected by this.

The Instagrammer also has the luxury of choosing causes that don't even directly affect him personally. He chose the Palestinian cause even though he is not of Palestinian—or even Arab—descent. If he were—let’s say—an African American from a poor urban background, he would have to deal with racism, even if he would prefer not to, because of the horrible attitudes of too many white Americans in this country.

As for me, I'm not Palestinian or Israeli nor do I have family members who live in that part of the world so I'm not going to focus as much on this issue because there are so many hours in a day and the outcome of the US election will affect me more in the long run.

If you think that Donald Trump will be better on Israel, think again. And if you think he will be better when it comes to the Palestinians, you're delusional.

And who's to say that what Hamas did on October 7 isn't some kind of a well-planned psyop that's designed to get the world to stop paying attention to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and eventually lead to Vladimir Putin's preferred candidate Donald Trump to get reelected as president. The terrorist attacks happened on Vladimir Putin's birthday. Hamas is supported by Iran. Iran is allied with Russia. Russia has diplomatic relations with Hamas.

Then there is the class issue that's driving all of those campus protests over Palestine. The majority of the protests took place on the campuses of Ivy League and other prestigious universities (such as the University of Southern California and George Washington University). Not only are they all private universities but their tuitions are more expensive than at a state-run university. The cream of the crop typically attend those schools.

In contrast, I haven't heard of similar protests at community colleges nor at state-run universities. I live just three miles from my alma mater, the University of Maryland at College Park, which is a state-run school and I haven't heard of any instances of people holding camping protests outside at that school.

There's also a racial issue as well. Most of the photos and videos I've seen of these protesters wearing those Palestinian keffiyehs are overwhelmingly white. I haven't even heard of similar protests at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).

Like the Instagrammer I mentioned, these campus protesters have the luxury of choosing their cause and even buying the keffiyehs to wear as some kind of a radical chic fashion statement. If they opt to vote third party in large enough numbers to swing the election to Donald Trump, they will be largely shielded by their upper class families. Upperclass women with an unwanted pregnancy can easily fly to another country where abortion is legal and get one. (Which is what happened before abortion was legalized in the first place with the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision.) Rich people won't have to worry about dealing with Project 2025 because their wealth will shield them from the worst aspects of this.

And then there is the selective outrage. These people are loud in their concerns about the Palestinians but where were they when Russia continues to drop bombs on the Ukrainians nonstop for over two years? I don't recall campus protests over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nor do they seem to be concerned about other awful atrocities that are happening in places like Syria, Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia, the Sahel region of Africa, and Haiti.

I came upon another Instagram video about how the pro-Palestinian movement is starting to shift to becoming a terrorist left-wing version of QAnon in the US. I hope he's wrong about this because having one QAnon around is bad enough. To have two such groups on both the political left and right would be intolerable.

Basically I am not going to be a single-issue voter because of the threat of fascism from both Donald Trump and Project 2025 and you shouldn't either. The future of the United States of America is at stake.

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