Gary Johnson, a Libertarian nominee so baldly ill-equipped to win the presidency that his own VP Bill Weld semi-openly supported Clinton, has done his part—to the tune of a historic 4 million votes—to help ensure a Donald Trump presidency. Fuck you, Gary. We see you, and we won’t forget this.
Sometime in the near future, the good people left in this country will need to rise above vindictiveness in order to adequately face what’s about to happen here. Our fury will need to widen far past one bumbling, athleisure-clad narcissist and his delirious left-wing counterpart in order to lodge a productive resistance. Not today, though.
Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, endeared himself to America’s drooling undecideds this election season through his love of weed, his “small government” twaddle, his ability to climb big mountains, his breathtakingly inadequate grasp on foreign policy, and a supposedly affable demeanor that increasingly crumbled when he was questioned on his paper-thin policy ideas, at which point he did things like this:
Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 1% of the popular vote to Johnson’s 3%. Clinton won the popular vote by about 220,000, a fraction of a percentage point. In key swing states—New Hampshire, for example—this combined leeching had an enormous impact. That’s not to say Trump happened entirely because of the third party candidates; the United States caught a virus that’s been going around, a virus that we were uniquely susceptible to; one that we refused, over and over and over again, to inoculate ourselves against. But many so-called protest voters, deprived of additional choices, may have made a different one.
Gary Johnson knew—he had to know, right?—that he was never going to be president. But he went ahead and positioned himself as the only rational choice in a contest against two equally repugnant monsters, a tremendous lie that a significant swath of the country came to believe. “This is a year when voters looking at the two establishment parties are thinking, I’m watching a scary movie and I can’t change the channel. You can change the channel!” Gary Johnson said in a Fox Business News interview.
We certainly have changed the channel, except now it’s the only channel, and it has a Russian accent, and it’s telling people to hurt each other and destroy the planet. Despite about 1.3 million years of evolution and progress, adult human beings have apparently forgotten, with astonishing speed, that bad things can actually happen to them as a result of inaction; that the world might not always be gentle with their whims; that refusing to choose is a choice, and nearly always the stupidest choice you can make.
Sleep well, Gary, you unbelievable prick. And go fuck yourself.
This post has been updated to reflect current popular vote results.
