By Aly Kamadia, Editor-In-Chief, iDose

Human history is marked with fundamental moments, and we find ourselves staring in the eyes of one.  

With thirteen days remaining until ‘election day’ in America, the decision couldn’t be more obvious.

Choosing not to vote for Joe Biden constitutes an act of insanity.

American voters who fail to vote for Biden increase the likelihood of a Trump victory, which will translate into unprecedented chaos for both America and the world.

Let us proceed by sampling some of the avoidable chaos.

1. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s assault on the environment pose an existential threat to humanity.

Is it not astonishing that the greed and incompetence of Trump threaten the future well-being of our very species?

In a very recent interview given by the “founder of modern linguistics” and “one of the most cited scholars in modern history”,[i] Noam Chomsky stated the following when asked about the threat of Trump and Climate Change:

“It [the Department of Transportation’s document on climate change and emission standards] is a careful environmental assessment from the Trump administration. It concluded that on our present course we will reach four degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. What is that? Total cataclysm. No one can even estimate the effects. Organized human life as we know it will be over. Of course, it will build up over the years, getting worse and worse with sea levels rising, extreme weather events, and so on. So, after describing this, they offer a prescription, and here it is: Let’s reduce emission regulations on cars and trucks.

“This is the most extraordinary document in human history. I can’t think of anything like this. The thing that comes closest is the Nazi Wannsee declaration in 1942, which was the formal decision of the Nazi party to wipe out all the Jews of Europe. Not even that said, ‘Let’s race ahead to make some money while destroying the prospects of all human life on Earth.’ Why isn’t this the headline everywhere?”

One needn’t agree with Chomsky’s general politics to acknowledge the aforementioned threat of climate change as a fact. It requires no sophisticated thought and is virtually common sense. No serious scientist or intellectual denies that four additional years of a Trump administration would inflict horrific and irreversible damage to humanity’s fight against climate change.

The choice not to vote for Biden literally translates into an increased threat to organized human life on our planet.

2. Roughly a quarter of a million Americans (220 000) have been killed by Covid-19. Trump is largely responsible for the excessive death toll and still couldn’t care less.

Covid-19 has claimed roughly the same number of American lives as 9/11, the American Revolutionary War, Korean War, Vietnam War and World War 1, all combined.

While the pandemic meant that American deaths were inevitable regardless of who was president, Trump’s unparalleled stupidity, profound negligence and utter indifference to American human life has inflicted a needlessly high death toll.

Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that Trump has effectively initiated a war against the one country that even the most prominent neocons had never thought of invading: America.

Even after being infected by Covid-19, Trump yet again (predictably) failed to display the sort of leadership that even mature toddlers can be trained to show. He has devised absolutely no federal strategy and remains resolute in his war against protective Covid-19 measures (e.g. who can forget the photo op of Trump returning from Walter Reed Hospital, while proudly taking off his mask, precisely before entering a White House while contagious and in the presence of staff?).

As recent as Monday, Trump could be heard barking about Dr. Anthony Fauci[ii], who he labelled a “disaster”, while complaining that Americans “are tired of listening to Fauci and these idiots”.  

The world continues to watch the most powerful country in human history utterly fail in it’s response to the pandemic. It has witnessed, along with Americans of course, that there isn’t the slightest sign that Trump has any interest in containing Covid-19, which brings us to another remarkable though true observation.    

The choice not to vote for Biden literally translates into the increased likelihood that more Americans will die from Covid-19 than were killed by Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany.

3. Donald Trump would love to destroy American Democracy, destroy American Civil Society, all while creating an authoritarian form of government with him as America’s Dear Leader

When asked whether he is committed to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the 2020 election, on each and every single occasion, Trump has never promised that he even recognizes the importance of this American and democratic tradition. (To be fair, any such Trump promise and/or assurance would be meaningless.)

Rather, Trump has stated that if he were to lose, it would surely be the consequence of a “rigged” election.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and the Republican Party have forcefully attacked the US postal service; spent tens of millions in courts across the country to make it harder to vote; engaged in illegal voter intimidation (early voting is well underway and hitting unprecedented numbers); spread propaganda claiming the fiction that mail-in ballots contain high degrees of fraud; are in the midst of installing a radical right wing judge on the Supreme Court who helped George W. Bush’s legal team in the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Indeed, at the forefront of the current Trump campaign ‘strategy’ is the hope that a Biden victory is as slim as possible, so that it becomes easier to spread confusion and dispute the results. (Both iDose and this author have warned about the threat to the peaceful transition of power on numerous occasions. For a recent example, see this article.)

The issue of a peaceful transition of power is something that was methodically examined by, among others, a group named the Transition Integrity Project. The group consisted of over a hundred “current and former senior government and campaign leaders, academics, journalists, polling experts and former federal and state government officials.” It was a short-term project whose objective was to, “conduct scenario-based exercises aimed at identifying potential risks to the integrity of the November 3, 2020 election and transition process.”

In it’s final report, one of the three findings was that the “concept of ‘election night’ is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous”, based on an assessment that no winner would emerge on “election night” (one reason being the inability to complete counting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots).

Another key finding was that a “determined campaign has opportunity to contest the election into January 2021.”

Of course, even without the noted report and comments by other astute observers, Trump’s behavior over the past four years has verified that he would literally do anything to both maintain and increase his power.

That includes everything from dismantling US democracy to crushing American civil society. And Trump would welcome any form of government if it served his needs – be it an authoritarian ‘democracy’ or a totalitarian dictatorship.

This reveals yet another undeniable truth.

The choice not to vote for Biden literally translates into the increased likelihood that American democracy continues to weaken and risks being destroyed altogether in the not-too-distant future.

In the end, any reader who is not certain that they will vote for Biden should ask:

Do you want to empower a man who is dedicated to destroying the environment and potentially organized human life?

Do you want to empower a man whose negligence on Covid-19 may very well kill more Americans than Hitler and Nazi Germany did?

Do you want to empower a man who is happy to destroy democracy and civil society so long as it suits his pathological obsessions?

You don’t need to love Biden. But only a fool would deny that Trump is literally the devil without a brain.

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Aly Kamadia is Editor-In-Chief of iDose. To read selected articles by Kamadia, click here.

Notes

[i] https://linguistics.arizona.edu/user/noam-chomsky

[ii] Fauci is a lead member of the US Covid-19 task force and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infect under the National Institutes of Health