Welcome to the 'Vote Joe Biden You Dumb Pieces of Shit' Election

Vote-shaming is set to reach an all-time high in 2024. We are banning it from this website.

Mandel Ngang/AFP via Getty Images; Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

As you have probably figured out by now, we have arrived at the year 2024. There are so many exciting things happening. If you’re into mind-numbingly dull cartoon characters, you’re in luck because Mickey Mouse is now partially in the public domain. If your top issue is teaching cursive to children, you’re a weirdo and you’re in luck because California now has a law mandating that. And, above all, if you hate yourself, other people, and the world in general, you’re super-duper in luck, because there’s a presidential election this year.

Yes, we are somehow here again, and since this is the first Discourse Blog blog of 2024, I felt obligated to kick off the year by acknowledging the diseased, freakish elephant-donkey hybrid in the room. (Think of it as a pigeon-rat, if both the pigeon and the rat really loved sending weapons to Israel.) Come November, America’s top genocide-loving skeleton Joe Biden will face off against America’s top genocide-loving psychopath Donald Trump in what MSNBC types call “a solemn moment for our nation” and I call “possibly the worst rematch in human history.” Two bad, old, unpopular men with visibly declining grips on reality forcing us to watch them run basically the same campaigns they ran four years ago: this is what democracy is all about.

There are so many things that I am not looking forward to about this election, but today I want to focus on just one of them because it’s perhaps the most annoying of all presidential traditions: vote-shaming.

That noise you hear is the quadrennial army of hacks gearing up to shout at anyone who points out that Joe Biden might be flawed and attempting to persuade them to back him by calling them dumb pieces of shit over and over again. And since most people don’t like Joe Biden and/or think he is too old to be the president, “Vote For Joe Biden, You Dumb Pieces of Shit” is likely to be one of the top themes of this election. It’s going to be eleven straight months of “SO YOU WANT DONALD TRUMP THEN?!” or “I DON’T CARE IF JOE BIDEN PERSONALLY EATS BABIES, WE NEED TO STOP FASCISM” or “SHUT UP AND JUST VOTE, YOU CAN COMPLAIN NEXT YEAR” discourse. My teeth are already grinding just thinking about it.

There is nothing more tedious or pointless than having to endure the one billionth reminder that it’s a two-party system, or that Donald Trump is dangerous. We know! And you know. And everyone else, you guessed it, also knows. So please, I beg of you, talk about literally anything else.

This leads me to a specific Discourse Blog-themed thing I want to bring up. All of you will come to your own decision about whether or not to vote for Biden in the fall. That’s your business. I have no power over you. But, as the editor of Discourse Blog, I do have the power to say this: for the love of god, keep vote-shaming away from this website. We don’t want to hear it. If you find yourself about to indulge in it, curb the instinct. I would go so far as to call this our most important rule for 2024.

You are going to read a lot of criticism of Joe Biden on this website between now and November. That is because Joe Biden frequently does bad things. To pick just one example at random, he is currently facilitating Israel’s campaign of slaughter in Gaza, one of the most heinous and morally bankrupt actions in modern history. We are not going to somehow forget that he is doing this, or anything else we don’t like, just because it’s an election year.

You’re also going to read a lot of criticism of Donald Trump, because duh.

We are not Democratic Party operatives. We don’t work for the Biden campaign. It’s their job to get Biden re-elected, not ours. (Crazy thought: maybe Joe can pick up a few more votes by not supporting ethnic cleansing!) Our job is to write what we think, honestly and openly, and that is how we will cover whatever happens in 2024. I don’t say this because I feel like we’re particularly noble citizens—I say it because it is literally our job. If we didn’t do that, what would be the point of this place?

Now, Discourse Blog readers are almost uniformly awesome and intelligent, know all of this already, and are supporting us because of all these things. We never take that for granted. We love you, and we trust you. But we still have to be serious about these kinds of threats, and that is why I am issuing this advisory. I want there to be absolutely no doubt about where this site stands on this matter.

So consider this your warning for 2024. If you want to yell at someone about voting, take that energy to Rupar’s blog. If you want to yell about the general state of the world…welcome. We’ll get through this nightmare together.