Ethan was unbearable for practically this entire episode. I'm not voting against my own interests. I'm voting against YOURS. Your interests are in voting to steal money from those who have earned it and to give it to me, the poor, so that you can feel soooo good about yourself for being sooo nice! It turns out that there's nothing charitable about that. I'd rather die before I take handouts from politicians. You see, the difference between you and the people in the middle of the country, is that we have to LIVE with the policies that you champion. You don't have to deal with the catastrophe of a lessened police presence, with your multimillionaire mansion and gated community. You don't have to deal with entire communities becoming dependent on government. You don't have to deal with the shrinkflation of colleges, where we have to pay more, some even taking on massive debt, in order to become indoctrinated, brainwashed, and jobless in return. You made it, and you'd rather kick the ladder down than let us make it too. I don't want to be poor, I want to be as rich as I can possibly be, and I want the same for EVERYBODY. Democrats like yourselves NEED the American people to be as poor as possible, so you can swoop in with your savior complex and promise that you'll magically fix all of their problems and make all their dreams come true! I spit in the face of your sanctimonious, masturbatory, performative, paternalistic virtue-signaling. You'll never understand what it's like in the middle of the country, because you're as far removed from us as you could possibly be. Spiritually, ideologically, and morally. You don't want to understand us. You want us to shut up and take the Authoritarian Democrat Boot, promising that the sacrifice of our freedoms, and the sacrifice of the benevolent, woke corporations and billionaires, will fix all of our problems. Excuse me for wanting to take my future into my own hands. The solution to my problems is more ME, not more Government. If you take away my responsibility, you take away my rights. And I'll be damned if I ever willingly hand them over to the likes of you and the corporatists in silicon valley who couldn't tell a Utah Mormon from an Evangelist. You pretend like you have my best interests at heart. Until I defend my rights by keeping my firearms and voting to do so, until I refuse to go along with your attempts to compel speech, until I practice my religious beliefs, especially the ones that go against your utopian vision of the world. The only Church you go to is the Great and Abominable Church. You point and mock from the Great and Spacious Building, and you scoff at me for trying my best to act out a higher ideal, because you think it's useless, the foolish traditions of our fathers. You think you know better than we do about how to enact solutions to our problems. You don't get to spit at us and then give us your table scraps to lick from your dirty palms. We spit right back at you. We'll continue to give you and your ilk the finger with politicians like Trump. He's hardly an admirable figure. But he loves America, and he appreciates our values, culture, and way of life. And you hate him for it. You hate him, because you hate us. And you'll do with us as you did with him, everything and more. So I'm not sorry for not voting for YOUR interests, and no, I won't be cajoled or coerced into voting in all the tyrants you love. If you want to understand us, you wouldn't look down your nose at us. You're an elitist with none of the talent. And thus you'll be forever, unless you can ever dain to extend an olive branch outside your echo chamber.

12-11-2024
I don't have disdain for rich people for being rich. You want to have a lavish birthday party and hire people to cater and all that? More power to you. But the constant preaching down to the people in the middle of the country juxtaposed with your lifestyle is immensely tone-deaf. I can't afford to vote for *your* interests. I'm interested in getting as rich as you, and earning it. Your interests keep me from doing that. So yes, I vote against your interests. You can afford to toss money to the government so they can waste it and put your state into more and more crippling debt. You can afford to do that so you can make yourself feel better. Government isn't charitable. I can't afford to deal with the layoffs that come with high tax rates. I can't afford the lack of economic growth that big governments guarantee. You can take the hit. I cannot. You could afford the lavish parties, and you would have it so that I could never afford them. I don't want to be on welfare and foodstamps. I want to work and to be paid to do so. I want to contribute, and I sure as hell don't want to be dependent on the political class, the elitists you consider among your rank. I don't want to fight for the table scraps you were "gracious" enough to give to the government after you voted that their gun be turned on you to subsidize my poverty. I don't want my success to be the success of the Government. I want my success to be the success of myself.