Red vs Blue In The Age Of Information

By Evan Feeley

Let them hear us roar during primary season, and let us hear our shouts drown in a vat of fear mongering to vote the lesser of the evils in November. Red vs Blue, that’s there is to it. We’re all Republicans or Democrats, right? Mine are the Good Guys and yours are the Bad Guys. After fourteen months of Bernie, and a barrage of betrayals, it all seems so absurd. We now know without a doubt that not only do Oligarchs finance the majority of campaigns on both sides of the aisle, but that they work some kind of black magic behind the scenes that make the people’s voice all but paper tigers to be swooned over by the media.

I thought that was why we Democrats fought the Republicans, because of all their dirty money. All that corruption, all that bribery, all that gerrymandering, all that voter suppression and election fraud. Weren’t we Democrats against that? Weren’t we principled? Or were we just against it when the Republicans did it? Now somehow all of that has become ok within our own process because ultimately we must rally behind the nominee.

The Democrats are still the good guys right? It was Bush who stole the election from Gore and the Democrats in 2000. Back then we said the Republicans were corrupt and I grew up believing that. I grew up supporting the Democrats because I thought we were fighting against the cheating, lying, thieving, bribing, warring Republicans and their hoard of uninformed, racist, sexist voters. Now, after this so called “Democratic” Primary I can’t say I buy into that dichotomy anymore.

I can’t say with any certainty that one party is wholly less to blame for wars or poverty than the other. After Hillary, the Democratic National Committee and its constituents muscled their way through this election I have zero trust in this party. This is the Information Age and being a Millennial I don’t watch tv. I get my information from the internet. Mostly the weirder parts of the internet. The parts with some of the rawer information, wikileaks, anonymous, and hoards of hackers unloading troves of private documents where the reader is left to their own devices to decipher. MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, might possibly give passing mention to this news, once it had been thoroughly spun. But they don’t go into detail and it’s all black and white, and freedom vs terrorism, which is harder and harder to stomach.

This is the age of information and hackers are the hunters and gatherers of that information. Some do it for the good, others it for money. An amazing article, the likes of which would never see the light of day in the Washington Post or New York Times--was written on those hackers who do it for money. Hacker’s who are actually paid monthly to work their digital dark arts for political campaigns. I see these hacker tactics all over Hillary and the DNC’s campaign. From fake social media accounts, purging voter registrations, to flipping votes cast using electronic Diebold voting machines. We on the internet see these things happening because real people record them happening and upload their experience to youtube.

Then there’s the drastic reduction of polls in nearly every state by the Democratic Party itself, contrasted with high voter turnout. Millions of people across the country from Arizona, to New York, and back to California, and practically everywhere in between being given throw away affidavit ballots. On the internet, where I get my information not TV, there are hundreds of first person video accounts speaking to these issues. Actual, real citizens speaking about how they were personally prevented from having their vote counted.

Tactics include missing names on voter rolls, not enough ballots, voters given fake ballots, or affidavit/provisional ballots (which are largely thrown away), broken voting machines, voting machines that give the wrong candidate your vote, people being made to wait up to seven hours in some states, all in front of the inherent impossibility of conducting honest independent audits of any election anywhere. These people who upload these videos aren’t people who are paid to be on TV by some multinational media conglomerate. They’re real people. If you think this is fake or that I’m lying, or that I’m crazy, remember this is the age of information, and it’s all out there so look at it.

I saw it myself while watching Polk and Buffalo counties in Wisconsin the day after their primary at 10:42 am 650 votes added to Hillary Clinton’s count. A group I am a part of on Facebook called the Wisconsin Board of Elections and alerted them and had it changed back. But it happened. How many times did it happen in other counties and no one saw?

I know it sounds crazy and no one wants to believe that in America, the Land of the Free, that our Democratic Process could be so easily manipulated. Isn’t freedom our biggest export? Isn’t a huge part of that freedom setting up Democratic Elections in former dictatorships like Iraq? Don’t you remember the women in hijabs and their inked fingers and the triumph of Democracy? If we believe that the American Democratic Process can be so easily manipulated and is in fact a sham, doesn’t that mean we have to call into question not only what we believe makes us a Democrat or a Republican but what it truly means to be an American?

Even though that is hard to do, I am shocked that more Democrats are refusing to do it. I thought being a Democrat was about seeing reality objectively and being honest about doing the right thing even if it was the hard thing. Remember how we Democrats scoff at the Republicans for denying that Climate Change exists? Remember how we said they were mentally ill for not seeing what the entire world could see?

Well now it’s their turn to scoff at us for denying that the frontrunner for the Democratic Nomination is a usurper of the Democratic Process and no better than any other world leader who does the same in their own third world country. Surely the Republicans would have done the same to Donald Trump if he weren’t so popular, but at least for now they haven’t fabricated votes for Kaisich or Cruz. Forget Hillary’s emails, forget the Clinton Foundations racketeering, forget Haiti and Honduras, forget Benghazi, forget it all if you can. If you judge Hillary Clinton solely on how she has run her campaign through the Democratic Primary you should be appalled if you Democrats were the principled party that I thought you were.

How far do we have to go in this relationship before we realize it is abusive? I am surprised by you Democrats who are so willing to put up with all these lies, even willing to pretend they don’t exist and accuse those who see the election fraud of being crazy conspiracy theorists. I am embarrassed that it took me so long to see how much of a sham the two party tyranny really is. As I’ve said before, this is the Information Age, their treachery is all a part of public record. The question is will you look at it even when it reveals the hideous hypocrisy of our once proud nation? That hideousness which is a conspiracy that has been going on for so long, has been documented, and is now finding it’s way into the homes of everyone in this country and the world through our computer screens that is no longer just a theory but a matter of public record.

I guess I was wrong. It’s just Red vs Blue isn’t it? It might as well be Baseball the way we talk about these things on social media and in our lives. We forget that we are not in a vacuum. We forget that when we say that the United States of America is a world leader we don’t just mean our voice is louder at the U.N. We mean that the wars that we have thrust upon the world in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to get thousands of people killed every year and further destabilize entire subcontinents, thrusting millions of refugees on the world.

The European Union is falling apart as we speak because of the refugee crisis our wars have created. I wonder if America could even put a stop to our violent relationship with the world if we actually wanted to halt the propagation of endless war. Let’s not forget that when we Americans, Democrat or Republican, vote for our leader, our President, we are telling the world that we are lining up behind this person and what they stand for. When that person, who is our President, kills people with our Army, he or she is doing so in our name.

That makes us all complicit in those countless overseas killings, which also makes us, the people of the United States, complicit in any and all terrorist activities in the entire world that have been born from our wars and the sale of our weapons. America is a weapon of mass destruction and we the people are voting for it’s ever continuing prosperity not just by falling in line behind candidates like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but by being unable to break out of the two party narrative that they are the only candidates who even exist. Gary Johnson is running for president as a Libertarian, as well as Jill Stein on the Green ticket, but we only see these fear mongers.

It would’ve been nice to be complicit in electing a Presidential nominee who stood against the tides of war. It would’ve been nice to say to the world, as a world leader, that the American people stand behind someone who stands behind them and not the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street Greed. As a Democrat I thought it was our responsibility to do that for our country, so as a country we could do that for the world.

But I was wrong. With the end of the primaries comes the bottlenecking of revolutionary fervor and the quelling of domestic unrest once again” and now it’s time to play that old “lesser of two evils game “and “get behind the candidate,” like so many pod people, no matter the cost. Well, you all can go ahead and play ball, I’m out. I’m done playing their games. It’d be nice to channel this energy into a Purple party but for now the only alternatives chances of winning are bleak. Who knows how Bernie will continue this “Political Revolution” after the Democratic Convention. But if he is not the nominee, which is likely, I’m not bleeding Democrat blue anymore and I’m not arguing with Red Republicans in their name. I’ll be the one up front holding the mirror so you all can see if you can still recognize yourselves after you’ve shoved your beliefs onto one or the other side of that same oppressive coin.

Let me remind all you good Democrats and Republicans out there, the diminishing group that you are, while you’re all watching that supposed coin toss of our elections spin into the air and praying for some semblance of vindication in it’s heads or tails; Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the rest of the Oligarchy will be plotting their profits and counting their coppers in the wasted lives of laborers, soldiers and poor people from all over the world, and they do it in our name.

But excuse me, I didn’t mean to interrupt your regularly scheduled dose of propaganda. You all can return to your illusion of choice. I’ll just be over here vomiting at the thought of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren engaging the Big Bad Wolf Trump on Twitter, contemplating the missed opportunity in Sanders and wondering how the fuck it’s come to this.