Picture a nice looking, white man, sitting on a stool, with a MAGA cap. He looks ‘normal’.
I’m standing next to him with a microphone, talking about him as he watches.
I say: “This is an American adult.
In America, we give adults powers. We give them rights, and trust to use them responsibly.
This adult can go to the gun store and buy a gun. (Viedo of him doing so.) We give him this right knowing he COULD use it to then go to the mall and shoot innocent people.
We give this adult the right to own and drive a car on the road. (Video of him driving). We do this knowing he COULD choose to speed into oncoming traffic and kill innocent people.
We give American adults all kinds of rights and power and trust them to use them responsibly.
But let’s talk about one right in particular and its responsibility — the right to vote.
We give him the right to choose his leaders, his laws, his country’s policies on spending and taxing and war.
We trust him to use this power responsibly.
He CAN use the power to destroy the country — to vote to end it, or to blow it up, or to bankrupt it, or to burn it to the ground, or to kill innocent people. It’s his right to vote for any or all of that.
He can use his vote as a ‘protest’ to try to cause harm and destruction and cause that harm.
But we trust him not to do that. To act responsibly and vote for ‘good government’.
But many voters today for whatever reason have decided to do just that — to not act responsibly but to vote for great destruction, by voting for today’s Republicans, as some sort of ‘protest vote’.
These are votes risking wrong war, risking ending healthcare for tens of millions of Americans, voting to transfer the wealth of the American people to the few wealthiest people in the country, to let people who want to profit by causing harm — to people, to the environment — do so freely, without accountability to the American people. They are choosing to destroy the country’s wealth and environment and climate for future generations as some sort of protest.
I don’t know what causes this sort of mental issue for any of these people to want to cause this harm as a protest — the mall shooter, the wrong way driver, the Republican voter.
But that is the choice they are making — and of the list, the Republican voting is thousands of times more harmful than the others. Killing a few people wrongly is horrific — but destroying the principles of the country, the wealth of its people, the natural environment, having hundreds of thousands of American people lose their lives annually for lack of healthcare — those are much worse.
Just as when someone shoots a mall, and we don’t want to end gun rights for everyone; just as someone chooses to kill with their car, we don’t want to take away the right to drive a car from everyone; when voters vote irresponsibly to cause great harm, we don’t want to end democracy, to take the right to vote away from them. But we do need in all these cases to stand up against the harm they cause and fight for ending it.
Voting for today’s Republicans in some misguided protest is an abuse of the power to vote just as shooting strangers in protest of something is an abuse of the right to own a gun. These votes are motivated by the hatred, the fear, of something — but whatever that is, voting for these Republicans, who harm the country so terribly and would harm it far worse if allowed, is not the solution, just as shooting strangers is not the solution to whatever that problem is.
He is an American adult, and we give him power and rights, and he has abused them in recent votes.
And just as we need to try to stop other abuses of rights and power, we need to try to stop this one.
If you want to protest, fight for positive change, for better candidates and policies, and if you cannot get them in an election, you can exercise your right to protest by not voting.
.It’s important to vote for the better candidate — but not to vote for a protest candidate who is a menace to society, as donald trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and others are.
Your vote is a loaded gun. Use it responsibly — not to lash out in anger and cause irrevocable harm to the country and the American people.
I’m not quite sure how to close the ad, but I am trying to get across to the folks how they are acting crazy, which they don’t realize. They understand the analogies and need to understand it on voting.