Stay home in November

And do everything in your power to persuade as many people as possible to come stand on this narrow sliver of terrain

No one is surprised that Donald Trump ran the table on Super Tuesday. And I doubt that anyone is too surprised that Nikki Haley has suspended her campaign.

And at least I am not really surprised that she took a mushy-middle approach to assessing the lay of the land, saying that now the Very Stable Genius must “earn the votes” of those who supported her. Something less than an endorsement, but lacking the courage of Liz Cheney, who was willing to sacrifice her political career to state plainly what the actual lay of the land is.

Look, I’m not going to go over Trump’s entire record of turpitude - the stiffed contractors during his developer days, the marital cheating, the humiliation of Ted Cruz, calling a roomful of generals “dopes and babies,” appeasing Kim Jong Un, negating the tax cuts’ benefits with tariffs - here.

Let’s look at more recent evidence.

How about calling Mark Robinson, who has called gay people “filth” (and I suppose I should make clear where I stand; I oppose the Obergefell SCOTUS decision, not because I harbor animosity against those who experience same-sex attraction, but because it is definitionally impossible for two people of the same sex to be married), and who is a Holocaust denier, and, who, by the way, won the North Carolina primary race to be that state’s Republican candidate for governor, “Martin Luther King on Steroids” and said he was “better than Martin Luther King . . . Martin Luther King times two”?

How about his continued peddling of the claim of election fraud in the 2020 election?

Let’s consult the man his team hired to look into that:

It amazes me that the most straightforward explanations for Trump’s loss are overlooked. After recounts, audits and even the Cyber Ninjas, no one has brought forward a credible and provable claim of massive voter fraud in Arizona.

And let’s be clear: There is no evidence that Arizona election officials certified the wrong winner in 2020 or 2022, even with the races being as close as they were. Trump lost by less than 11,000 votes.

I should know. I’m the man the Trump campaign hired to find those fraudulent votes.

I only found a handful of fraudulent votes

The day after the election, I was asked to look for dead and duplicate voters for every mail ballot cast in each of the swing states in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I found fewer than 200 duplicate mail-in ballot votes fraudulently cast from all of the swing states combined.

The Trump campaign chose not to do anything with these fraudulent votes to avoid calling attention to the small amount of provable fraud my team and I had uncovered, including about a dozen so votes in Arizona.

Speaking of Arizona, let’s expand our scope beyond the Very Stable Genius and look at some fresh evidence that the GOP is now completely the party of cowards, nuts and sycophants.

Look at this poster for a fundraising event for Kari Lake’s Senate campaign, to be held later this month in Washington, D.C. The “special guests” list includes a lot of folks you’d probably assumed to be sober individuals: John Thune, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn. What in the hell are these people doing associating with this walking embarrassment?

Now, Damon Linker has a very passionately written piece at his Substack today. He says much with which I concur. But his exhortation for actual, fusionist conservatives to become Democrats with some kind of notion that they’d provide sufficient heft to bring that party’s locus of power closer to the center strikes me as fanciful.

I think there was some of that in the air at the recent Principles First summit in D.C. as well. I can resonate with the understanding such folks have concerning the stakes of all this, but their prescription doesn’t cure this critically ill patient we call the United States of America.

I cannot abide by the current administration’s halting of liquid natural gas exports that our European allies had been counting on, a move that is futile anyway, since those allies will look for another source, which will undoubtedly be less Western in orientation.

I cannot abide by its organizing of a “strike force” to go after “corporate greed” and “price gouging,” leftist-speak for increased prices of goods which is actually due to rising labor costs and the administration’s imposition of costly regulations.

I cannot abide by its foot-stamping about a ceasefire in Gaza, when the obvious hangup is Hamas’s insistence that such a ceasefire mean a withdraw of Israeli forces and Hamas’s refusal to state how many of the hostages it still holds captive are still alive.

I cannot abide by its continued efforts to forgive student loans or its Secretary of State urging department staffers to avoid terms like “mother” and “father” because they’re “problematic.”

Nope. Cannot do it. Can. Not. Do. It.

I will not give one subatomic particle of support to either the party of cowards, nuts and sycophants or the party of militant identity politics, climate alarmism, and wealth redistribution.

It’s precisely because the stakes are so high that I’ve conclude the only moral course of action is to stay home in November.

And to be as vocal as I possibly can about communicating that in the days and month before then.

A quixotic stance? Surely, but it’s one that will allow an actual conservative to sleep well at night.