Here We Go Again: Colby Keller Tries (And Fails) To Explain Trump Vote In Advocate Op-Ed
For at least the third time since his initial public announcement last October, Colby Keller is yet again trying (and failing) to explain why he voted for a deranged and disgraceful white supremacist sympathizer to occupy the White House. If you recall his oft-repeated reasoning, Keller voted for Trump not because he supported his policies, but because he hoped it would “destabilize” the corrupt American government. (Keller identifies politically as a Communist.) Keller has an op-ed in the Advocate today, and he starts by saying that people are only mad at him because he’s exposed them to the fact that our democracy is a sham, or something:
Porn is fantasy. That’s no surprise. To say that our democracy is equally invested in the projection of certain fantasies, however — or, more to the point, is a fantasy — has the potential to anger many Americans. I’ve been the focus of that anger lately.
K.
He goes on to give a history lesson for those of you who didn’t graduate high school, and then he explains that because the United States is a “farce,” he decided to go ahead and vote for someone who best represents that farce:
It began with the Constitution. Our “forefathers,” a cabal of elite owners of property (which included human beings), carefully crafted a document that has serviced their own interests — to preserve and protect their property.
This isn’t the story we receive as innocent children, about George Washington and his cherry tree, or Abraham Lincoln and his log cabin. The story of our great democracy is a fairy tale, a fantasy that continues now.
Today, the political class of both parties goes to great lengths to sow division where there should be unity.
We now know that the Democratic National Committee chose Donald Trump as its preferred candidate, thinking it could easily defeat him. He was the official DNC tool of division. It’s the same old divide-and-conquer strategy that dates back civilizations. I chose Trump because democracy in the United States is a farce.
No one better represents this farce than an orange-haired comic book villain groomed on television — decade after decade — to caricature the rich. It is the rich who benefit from the endless war and economic deprivation that punishes the rest of us.
Those who are angry after reading about the YouTube video I posted last month explaining that I don’t support Trump, even though I voted for him, should also know the context of that vote.
He then goes on to list all of the ways that America is bad (dropping nuclear bombs, economic corruption and inequality, fighting and killing in endless wars, jailing whistle blowers, destroying the climate, etc.), which is true! And yet, he’s still unable to logically explain how his vote for Trump is in any way a remedy for any of that. Instead, he seems to be arguing that his vote for Trump was a protest of the Democratic Party?
So when I cast my vote last November, I knew that tying our many political successes in the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ liberation to an institution in rapid decline, like our corrupt Democratic Party, is not a strategy to preserve those gains into the future. Maintaining our rights in a world destroyed by climate-related chaos will require tremendous perseverance and fortitude.
[…] One political party (of our miserly two-party state) rigged the political process to rob its constituents of a truly popular candidate, forcing their own choice on a beleaguered nation, a nation devastated by financial crimes the previous administration, from the same party, worked fervently to enable, failing to pursue a single criminal prosecution for the 2008 financial collapse. That these same criminals bankroll both parties and their candidate of choice shouldn’t surprise.
[…] Like it or not (and most of us dislike it, including me) Trump — the self-financed independent billionaire — represented a vote against a corrupt system.
With so many holes in Keller’s baseless and meaningless explanation, it’s hard to know where to begin. For one, if Trump is in fact a so-called “self-financed independent billionaire,” he became that way because of the very corrupt American economic and social system that allowed him to prosper. So, Colby Keller’s vote for Trump was effectively honoring and perpetuating American capitalism, not rejecting a “corrupt system.”
Trump’s entire campaign was fueled on racism from day one (and even before he launched his campaign, his political popularity was rooted in racist birtherism against Obama), and the bigots and racists who voted for Trump are in fact so emboldened by him today, they are literally taking to the streets and committing murder. So, Colby Keller’s vote for Trump was effectively emboldening racism, not rejecting a “corrupt system.”
Trump has already bombed Syria, threatened to invade Venezuela, and suggested we will inflict “fire and fury” on North Korea, so Colby Keller’s vote for Trump was effectively supporting more of the same U.S. warmongering, not rejecting a “corrupt system.”
Colby Keller obviously didn’t do anything to destabilize anything when he voted for Trump (and in turn, the Republican party, to which Trump is beholden), and the least he could do is admit that now? Unless, of course, he truly believes that Trump is still an “independent” force who will upend the system, in which case Colby Keller is no smarter than the average Trump voter who truly does support him.
If he actually understood any of his reasonable complaints with the U.S. government, Colby Keller could’ve not voted for anyone. Or, if he actually cared about what he was talking about, he could’ve just wasted his vote on Jill Stein. By voting for Trump, he’s proven that he actually doesn’t understand or care about the issues at all. And unless he enjoys the endless barrage of negative responses and bad press, Colby Keller might want to stop wasting his time doing mental gymnastics every few months failing to explain a discordant political position that only makes him look intellectually dishonest, if not completely clueless.
