Why I'm Voting Republican for the First Time Ever

The "left" has abandoned peace, freedom, and working folks—they're now warmongers, censors, and corporate shills

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A few years ago, if you’d told me I would ever vote for a Republican not named Ron Paul, I’d have said you were out of your mind. For most of my lifetime the Republicans seemed the more obnoxious wing of the two-party duopoly. They were sanctimonious hypocrites preaching family values while banging interns; smug phonies who’d do and say anything for corporate money; rabid militarists who incited hatred of Communists during the Cold War, then Muslims during the 9/11-triggered War on Islam; mass murder profiteers whose mission in life was to drench the military-industrial complex in blood money and lap up the leftovers. My overall impression was that Republicans were either socioopaths (the smart ones) or simple-minded gullible fools (the rest). Compared to them, Democrats often seemed at least slightly more honest, reasonable, sophisticated, and genuinely concerned with ordinary folks.

But today I’ll be voting for a bunch of Republicans, starting with Senator Ron Johnson,* in the midterm elections. I even knocked on doors for Johnson—the first time I ever did that for any mainstream party candidate.

What happened?

My Democrat friends and family members undoubtedly think I’m nuts. But I think it’s the Democrats who’ve gone crazy.

When I was young, the left stood for peace and freedom. That was actually the name of the left-wing third party I often voted for: the Peace and Freedom Party. The Democrats, who stood to the left of the Republicans, were the natural home of mainstream voters who didn’t like the Vietnam War, didn’t like the Cold War, didn’t like the wars on Nicaragua and El Salvador and Panama and Grenada and Angola and so many other countries, not least of all Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Democrats, more than Republicans tended to oppose any attempts to censor criticism of the rich and powerful. Even in the most controversial cases of free speech vs. censorship—such as Nazis marching through the Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois—liberals, leftists, and Democrats stood up for free speech. Conservatives and Republicans mostly didn’t.

The Democratic Party probably would have ended the Cold War, and with it the American Empire, in the 1960s, if Republicans like James Jesus Angleton and Allan Dulles (and at least one treasonous Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson) hadn’t helped Israel murder the Kennedy brothers. Though the pro-peace faction of the Democratic Party never managed to force a real investigation of the JFK and RFK killings, it took down Johnson and contributed to ending the Vietnam debacle. Many Democrats, and few Republicans, have been murdered by the national security state—not just JFK, RFK, and JFK Jr., but also Dorothy Kilgallen, Hale Boggs, Mel Carnahan, and Paul Wellstone. Dennis Kucinich, one of my favorite progressive Democrats, was nearly assassinated, as he recounted during our interview last year, and one or more of his family members may have been targeted to scare him away from his pledge to investigate the 9/11 put options.

Terrible, unspeakable truths about the almost unbelievable corruption infesting the highest echelons of the American Empire have, until recently, been spoken more by leftists and Democrats than by rightists and Republicans. If, back in the 1960s and 1970s, you wanted at least some of the truth about the JFK assassination, you had to read left-wing magazines like Ramparts or your local (leftist) underground newspaper. Left-leaning Democratic columnists like Warren Hinckle in San Francisco were the only people breathing a word of truth about the JFK coup to mainstream audiences.

Fast-forward to 2022, and suddenly, somehow, the Democrats have become the war party, the censorship party, the “anti-conspiracy theories” (i.e. anti-hard-truths) party.

The Democrats, more than the Republicans, launched the current War on Russia Through Ukraine. Obama presided over the overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian government in 2014 and the installation of a rabidly anti-Russia neo-Nazi regime. Biden, for his part, shredded the Minsk Accords, approved the continuing UkroNazi genocide of Donbass, and cleared the path for Ukraine to be absorbed by NATO—a euphemism for “US military occupation.” Clearly Biden’s policy, supported by essentially the entire Democratic Party, is to use the Ukraine war to bleed, break up, and loot Russia.

Republicans, for their part, are far less unanimous in their anti-Russia warmongering. Some of them, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are promising that a Republican victory in the midterms will stop the rush to nuclear apocalypse.

Since war and censorship tend to go together, it isn’t surprising that the Democratic warmongers are now rabidly pro-censorship. Stealing a line from Henry Kissinger, the Democrats reacted to Trump’s rise by saying, in essence, “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go fascist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” From the Democrats’ perspective, the American people had become too irresponsible to be trusted with free speech. A wave of social media censorship, mostly targeting Republicans and conservatives, arose in 2016 and grew larger every year. Then when COVID-19 hit in 2020 the wave crested and broke, washing away the last remnants of pre-2016 internet freedom.

Not satisfied with merely becoming the party of war and unfreedom, the Democrats have also decided to one-up the Republicans in shilling for corporate greed and corruption. By far the most extreme example of systemic corruption in the American corporate sector is Big Pharma, whose tentacles are wrapped around the academic and scientific segments of the public health sector—distorting research through systematic bribery, reaping multi-billion-dollar profits on toxic products, killing hundreds of thousands, and working closely with the $100 billion biological warfare industry. (For an introduction, read or watch The Real Anthony Fauci and check out Ron Unz’s e-book on public health scandals.)

Prior to the capture of health and medicine by Big Pharma, the Democrats were the voice of relative sanity on public health issues. Today, the Democrats, with the lone exception of RFK Jr., are the rabidly mindless shills of the Big Pharma billionaires.

Some of my friends, including Allan at No Lies Radio, object that despite the Democrats’ newfound status as warmongering censorship-loving corporate shills, they are at least better on economic issues. Republican Ron Johnson, for example, wants to put Social Security on the table for funding and benefit cuts. Given that skyrocketing inequality is the root cause of much of the destruction of American society, Allan suggests, shouldn’t we view Democrats as the lesser evil?

One of Allan’s favorite economists, Michael Hudson, says “no.” Ron Unz just sent me the following quote from Hudson’s recent interview:

DLJ: Economies are interdependent. I.e., it would still be a question of the Chinese working class and the American working class building bonds across nations.

MH: The Democratic Party has produced such an anti-Asian, hate-filled racism, that I don’t think that can be. The Democratic Party has done everything it could to spur an ethnic war between the black and Asian populations. You see that here in New York by the attacks on the subways, on the street, mainly by blacks against Asians. The Democratic Party, by pushing this ethnic identity, has pushed ethnic hatred. That’s why the Democrats are surprised that the Hispanics and Asians are moving towards the Republicans. The Hispanics and Asians realize that the Democrats have a race-hatred policy, much like the Nazis. I don’t believe that any political progress can be made in the U.S. until the Democratic Party, certainly the current leadership, is swept away. There cannot be any progress in America today led by the Democratic Party, which is today the ideologically Right-wing party that has turned what should be an economic problem into an ethnic and non-economic problem. It’s like the old industrial capitalist was supposed to have said, “if I can get half the working class fighting against the rest of the working class, then we have won.” That’s the Democratic Party. They asked, “how do we do it?” We divide the working class into ethnicities, ethnic identity, gender identity.

DLJ: You can have the working class cancel each other.

MH: Yes.

Hudson is right: The billionaire oligarchs’ most effective weapon against ordinary working Americans is the madness of identity politics. And the ID politics weapon is being wielded by the Democratic wing, far more than the Republican wing, of the oligarchs’ two-party duopoly. By framing the wars on Russia and the Islamic world as crusades to make the world safe for drag queens to groom children and biological men to crush women in female athletics, they’re inviting a whole lot of Americans to cheer for the other side.

So I am voting for Republicans today not because I am thrilled with all of their policies and positions—I definitely am not—but because they have somehow become marginally better than the Democrats…which admittedly isn’t saying much. By participating in a likely Red Wave, I hope to help deliver a stinging rebuke to the Democrats’ warmongering, censorship, shilling for Big Pharma, and promotion of identity-politics-based mass psychosis whose only beneficiaries are the billionaires.

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*I don’t agree with Ron Johnson on all the issues, but I admire his courage and integrity. Sen. Johnson is taking on Big Pharma and the allied biowar industry by vowing to investigate COVID scandals including the mega-scandal of COVID origins.