Not voting makes a statement: ‘You don’t have my moral consent’

By David McElroy · June 3, 2014

It’s election day in Alabama, but I won’t be voting. Most people have been brainwashed to think that a “good citizen” must vote. They believe it’s a moral issue. They’re right that it’s a moral issue, but they’re on the wrong side of the question.

Those who have been brainwashed into believing they must vote are fond of saying, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,” but that’s illogical. A truthful way to phrase it would be, “If you consent to the legitimacy of the system by participating, you have no right to complain when someone else gets his way — and you’re agreeing to obey.”

If you vote and participate, you are agreeing to the legitimacy of the system. You are agreeing to be bound by the results. You’re agreeing that it’s morally legitimate for some group of voters to select people to give you whatever orders they please. You are agreeing to be their slave.

But most people are so locked into the battle between the two sides of the political mainstream that they can’t even consider this point of view. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the philosophical reasons for not voting to people who are only interested in winning elections.

A friend of mine posted an interesting thought experiment today. Steve Smith asked, “Would you rather have the Crips or the Bloods running your neighborhood? Two rules: 1. Not having one gang or the other run things is not a choice. 2. If you decline to state a preference, you can’t complain about anything that either gang does to you, ever.”

This is what voting is. You’re not allowed to question whether you want to be ruled. You’re only allowed to choose which of the two (very similar) groups you want to control you.

Those who agree to be controlled and who agree that it’s moral to force other people to obey call us utopians, but we’re not. We’re the realists. They’re the utopians. An anarchist who I casually know on Facebook had a great line about this a couple of years ago. Brad Spangler said, “Anarchists are the hard-nosed realists. People who have this fixation on some ideal government, which isn’t fundamentally just a criminal gang with flags, are the starry-eyed dreamers without a firm grasp on reality.”

Electoral politics is a great game. Seriously. It’s fun. It’s hard and tough and competitive. There are few things like the exhilaration of winning on election night. As long as you can ignore that you’re selecting people to rule over others, it’s a great game.

I’ll be checking the election results tonight. I have a couple of friends who I’ll be hoping to see win. I know other people who I’ll simply be hoping will lose. In other words, I’ll be looking at it with the same rooting interest as someone who’s watching football or baseball scores come in. It’s a game.

I refuse to give my consent to anyone who wants to claim the right to rule over me. Those people can use force and the threat of force and I’ll obey, but I’m obeying because of the potential consequences. I refuse to participate in their sham and pretend that they’re giving me a real choice. I refuse to pretend that what they’re doing is moral.

I don’t agree to be ruled. That’s what my non-voting says. If you understand what voting means, you’ll find that not voting is the only moral choice.

Note: You can get t-shirts and other products with the great “slave’s suggestion box” graphic by Dan McCall at this link. It’s a great conversation starter.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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