Postmortem Post for the 2024 US Presidential Election

At least one of my family members read my post last week and wasn't happy about it. I knew that might happen. I'm not (usually) stupid. But Lord knows it's not as if I didn't try several times to communicate with her before I resorted to venting my frustration online. I never tried to change her political philosophy, only to show her that Donald Trump is incompatible with it. She wants limited government and adherence to the Constitution. Donald Trump will give her the opposite. But she literally just ignored everything I sent her about Project 2025 because it wasn't from the one news source she reads, and to her apparent shock, that didn't exactly convince me that she'd put a lot of rational thought into a legitimate alternate viewpoint that deserved my respect. I'm not sorry for anything I wrote.

I can't say I stand by everything I wrote, though, because I said I thought Harris would win in a landslide. Why did I think that? First of all, although he doesn't predict margins, Professor Allan Lichtman predicted a Harris victory with his thirteen keys model, which was developed by studying elections going back to 1960 and had successfully predicted every election since 1984 (with an asterisk for 2000 because thousands of votes for Al Gore were wrongfully thrown out). He predicted Reagan's re-election at a time when his popularity was historically low and 60% of Americans thought he was too old to run again, and he predicted Trump's first victory when all the polls said Clinton would win. He's since given his thoughts on why the keys didn't work this time - unprecedented misinformation about the economy and border security, unprecedented trashing of the incumbent president by his own party, and racism and misogyny. I know any conservative who reads this will roll their eyes at that last part, as if their side hasn't been launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Harris from the moment she announced her campaign. I said I thought her race and sex would be advantageous because they'd energize young people who want something different, and all the racist and misogynists were going to vote for the racist and misogynistic candidate regardless. I overestimated young people a lot. More on that later.

​But Harris objectively did generate enthusiasm. Her campaign announcement was followed by record-breaking donations and a massive spike in voter registration. It makes no sense that she got fewer votes than Biden. I also thought, like many, that women would flood the polls in droves to elect her because they're so pissed about losing Roe v. Wade. That didn't happen. In the states where abortion rights measures were on the ballot, they got significantly more votes than Harris herself did. That makes no goddamn sense at all. Voting for abortion rights and the guy who took them away in the first place is like... well, I won't even bother coming up with a comparison because it's self-explanatory. Anyway, I didn't see the same enthusiasm for Trump. Voters rejected him and his ilk in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The midterm "red wave" we were supposed to get didn't happen. Why would I have expected it to happen now? Despite the persistence of hopeless MAGA cultists who would suck Trump's dick if he dismembered their children in front of them, I hardly imagined he could be as popular now as when he lost four years ago. Within that time, he led an insurrection to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, he was found legally liable for rape, he was convicted of 34 felonies, his brain turned into cottage cheese, and several former members of his administration begged us not to vote for him. Attendance at his rallies dwindled, and hundreds of people left early while he rambled about Hannibal Lecter, sharks, and windmills. But now he wins the popular vote for the first time? What the fuck?

I certainly hope the possibility of fraud is being investigated. I said possibility. I'm not asserting that there was fraud just because I hate the outcome, and if no evidence of fraud turns up, I don't advocate for liberals to storm the Capitol and file scores of baseless lawsuits. But the results are sketchy and should be investigated. Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of the things they do themselves, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this were another such instance, especially since they have a 900-page blueprint for creating a dictatorship now that they control all three branches of government. It's not hyperbole, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's right there in their own words that have been available to the public for a long time. If we don't have a Christofascist theocracy within the next four years, it sure as hell won't be because Republicans didn't try. It will be because Americans stopped them.

Getting high the night before the eleaction to calm my nerves was a mistake. I should have gotten high the night of the election. I thought I'd want to be sober while I watched the results, and then Harris would win and my stress would dissipate. Instead, as I feared, I became suicidal for two days. When I was high, as I often do when I'm high, I grappled with my mortality. The high is more intense every time, and this time, I thought my heart might stop at any moment, and I felt so out of my body that I felt like if I relaxed completely, I would drift away from it and possibly never return. I had a one-sided argument that I couldn't die yet because reasons. I told this unseen and possibly imaginary something that if I could die temporarily and have a near-death experience right now, that would be great, but I didn't trust it to bring me back. And there was a whole other thing where I wondererd if the water heater on the other side of my bedroom wall would explode and kill or horribly disfigure me, but I decided that I trusted the homeowner to keep it well-maintained, so that was fine. I also heard a helicopter that sounded close enough to crash into the house. Anyway, the high was pure bliss, and if that's what actual death feels like, sign me up.

But instead I was in this reality where the worst person in the world just became my president again, this time with virtually no guardrails. I had to talk to a suicide hotline and several friends to upgrade to feeling nothing. (I also mentioned it to the aforementioned family member, who responded, "You could move to Costa Rica.") Of course my friends wanted me to stay alive so they wouldn't be sad, but they were miserable too, and none of them could promise me that the rest of my life won't suck. I do believe my life will get much worse next year when Trump raises the price of everything with his dumbass tariffs and puts an anti-vaxxer with a brain worm in charge of healthcare and food. My life will continue to get worse in the long term as Republicans gleefully shit all over the environment. Depending on how bad things get, Trump may run out of Democrats, journalists, and late show hosts to persecute and send the military after me for criticizing him since 2015. But I'm not just worried for myself, because unlike my conservative family members (yes, if you're reading this, I'm calling you out again. Bite me), I'm capable of empathy for people who are different from me. I feel deeply for everyone who's explicitly targeted by the GOP's Christofascist agenda and has more reason to be afraid than I do. Empathy is excruciating. I can understand why my family members and everyone else who voted against their fellow humans' lives prefer not to be burdened by it.

But of course, Trump voters have metaphorically stabbed themselves too. They lost big on Tuesday. They just don't know it yet. They're about to learn the hard way just how few shits their orange savior gives about them, and when they do, I hope I'm not too mature to rub it in their faces. At this point they have no excuse for not knowing better.

Beyond the specifics, though, what really crushed my soul and sapped my will to live was the realization of just how fundamentally vile this country is. It could have shown girls that they can do anything, but instead it showed boys that they can lie, cheat, and rape to their hearts' content and become the most powerful person in the world with no qualifications. I thought fascism would be defeated with a few elections and a lot of funerals. Now I see that it's deeply woven into the fabric of American society. I had heard that Gen Z boys were more racist and sexist than previous generations because of influencers like Andrew Taint and Nick Fuentes who for some reason haven't been shot yet, but I had no idea how bad it was. I suppose I should have guessed. A few months ago I documented my own experience with speaking out against sexist comments on social media and immediately being targeted by scores of men who accused me of trying to get laid because that's the only motivation they could imagine for treating women like people, but I thought they were a really loud and annoying minority. The phrase "Your body, my choice" went viral after the election. I recommend that all women carry firearms. Women aren't the source of this country's gun violence problem, so I have few concerns about them abusing said firearms. Also, doxxing white supremacists is not wrong. I don't 'understand why that's even a debate.

Speaking of cesspools, I just joined the mass migration from Twitter (where I've been suspended since June for refusing to delete my response to a racist who said that Juneteenth isn't a real holiday) to Bluesky, which is like Twitter except it isn't crawling with Nazis and isn't owned by a douchebag billionaire (yet). Actually, the CEO, Jay Graber, is a woman of color. Again, as I said last week, that in itself wouldn't be a sufficient reason to use the site, but it is a nice bonus that I get to support diversity in the software industry at the same time that I'm not supporting Elon Musk. I've already reunited with some of my ex-Mormon and progressive Mormon friends from Twitter, but the conservative Mormons who base their entire personalities on hating gay people and apostates are conspicuously absent. The downside is that I don't know who I'm supposed to argue with now. My feed is full of anti-Trump sentiments, inspirational quotes, Nancy comics, Homestar Runner screenshots, pictures of astronomy, and pictures of people's pets. How am I supposed to work up any righteous indignation over that?

If I were still in the LDS Church, I would have gone today and been surrounded by people praising Jesus that a rapist was re-elected president. Instead, I met with the Cache Valley Unitarian Universalists, and we shared words of mourning and comfort during this dark time for all of us. The religion doesn't endorse parties or candidates, of course, but its values are diametrically opposed to everything the rapist-in-chief stands for. I love this community. And I think what all of us who are struggling will need the most is community. When our external circumstances suck, life can still be worth living if we share the suckage together, like my friends and I did. I've also decided that even though I wouldn't have chosen to live through such times for anything, they give me the opportunity to fight for what's right more courageously than ever. I'm willing to die for the rights of people who are different from me. I probably won't. My resistance probably won't be that sexy. It will probably consist for the most part of boring, run-of-the-mill political advocacy and donating to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Earthjustice, and the Environmental Defense Fund. I wish I had more money to donate. I might soon, in the unlikely event that my book sales are stronger than Trump's tariffs.

​Anyway, these are dark times. The future will suck more than most of us hoped. We may need to take breaks, to mourn, to practice self-care. But if we give up on this nation's future, we doom our fellow Americans and people all over the world, and we give the fascists exactly what they want. Dictatorships get a lot of their power from people capitulating to them before they've even done anything. So let's not do that. I'd rather be on record preemptively telling our new overlords to go fuck themselves in every possible orifice. And don't forget to keep joking even when the more rational reaction is to scream. It will keep us sane, and fascists hate being laughed at. Jimmy Kimmel can attest to that.