Conservative New York Times Choad Proud To Not Vote, Please Don't Notice All The Times He Voted

Maybe the piece should have just been titled 'I Don't Want Liberals to Vote.'

Fascist-looking douchebag calmly requests you not vote against fascists.

Maybe The New York Times could start vetting its guest opinion writers a little better, or editing them a little more closely, or make them come to the occasional work party so the powers that be can meet these people and determine if they might be insufferably idiotic chuckleheads? Of course that would require said powers that be to take a brief break from publishing ZOMG JOE BIDEN IS OLD stories every other minute, but we think their readership might enjoy such a pause.

On July 4th, the Old Gray Lady turned some of her precious column inches over to Matthew Walther, an occasional contributor of meanderings so charmless they might as well have been scratched out with a rusty nail on the wall of a jail cell. Walther’s piece — again, published on the nation’s birthday when we celebrate the 248 years in between freeing ourselves from monarchical rule and the moment last week when the Supreme Court brought it back — is a screed against voting entitled “Why I Don’t Vote. And Why Maybe You Shouldn’t Either.”

Why doesn’t Matthew Walther vote? Who gives a shit, but he’ll tell us anyway:

“Why does anyone vote?” I ask myself. The answer cannot be that we believe that by doing so, we will influence the outcome of an election. My vote, were it not withheld, would have no such effect. […]

If voting is expressive, then the same is true, surely, of not voting. My indifference is, among other things, a reflection of my view that the real problems in American life are deep-seated and structural.

So this piece goes up on the Times website, and in about five minutes the Internet checks the voter file for the state of Michigan and lo and fucking behold, Walther does indeed vote, and has in the last two national elections:

Our man votes in midterms even! Good for him! That’s the kind of civic duty … LOL. He doesn’t like “civic duty” either. In fact, he equates it to slave patrols hunting down human beings.

Would the Paper of Record like to issue any sort of correction? No, but after a few hours of social media inundating the Times’ accounts with visual confirmation that it had printed an easily fact-checkable lie, the powers that be did take one step: They removed the second half of the title of the piece so it read simply “Why I Don’t Vote.” Like so:

Then hours later they changed it again to “Why I Won’t Vote.” Which is a very different thing!

We know the Times is busy, but someone should really try to keep an eye on what its regular contributors are writing at other outlets. Like this piece Walther wrote for The American Conservative in 2022, after he had started contributing to the Times, where he discussed all the voting he has tried to do, only to be thwarted by his own laziness:

When I arrived at what I thought was my designated polling place, I was turned away at the door. According to the designated election watchers, a pair of gray-haired lady librarian Democrats of a kind that is now vanishingly rare, I was not registered in that ward. Moreover, they said, my driver’s license was expired. They simply could not allow me to cast even a provisional ballot.

So he tried to vote without looking up where, learned his lesson, and then got everything in order so he could vote in the next election, yes?

Ha ha ha, no. He moved to Washington DC for a few years, then moved back to Michigan, where a clerk at the DMV forgot to ask him if he wanted to register to vote while he was obtaining his new driver’s license. So then this happened:

This meant that a few years later when I tried to slip away from work for a few minutes to vote for Tulsi Gabbard in the 2016 Michigan Democratic Primary, I was once again denied my “voting rights.”

Pesky having to register to vote, to vote! Yr Wonkette would like to thank the anonymous and incompetent Michigan DMV clerk for her service.

Then there was this, written, like the rest of the post, in the haughty and snarky tone of one who discovered contrarianism at the age of 12 and has yet to outgrow it:

I am solemnly assured by Democratic politicians, including our president during his recent trip to Georgia, that both of these seemingly anodyne incidents were not the consequences of my own laziness (and low-grade criminality) but privations worthy of Jim Crow.

For you, a white man in Michigan, no. For Black Americans, particularly in Southern states like Georgia, where we once again would note is where the president was speaking? Yes, in those places there has been a concerted effort to deprive people of this right for over a century and a half on the flimsiest of pretexts. Christ, read any history book written since, oh, 1880 or so.

I should be clear about my own views: It would be a merrier world if we did not vote at all.

Not voting at all is a theme that pops up again and again in Walther’s writing, such as this piece he wrote for The Week in 2018, which is basically all the same argument for the Times on Thursday, only with the added benefit of a) adding in some of the stuff about his own laziness, and b) admitting he has in the past supported the candidacies of Ron Paul and Bob Barr, and also c) imagined that his “disinterest” allows him to be more clear-eyed about this stuff than partisans.

No, he just once defended Sarah Huckabee Sanders from people saying mean things about her because he’s so darn good-hearted, why can’t we all be so nice and polite to fascists.

Give Sarah Huckabee Sanders A Break? The Fuck We Will.

Ha ha, not partisan, you got it, buddy.

Maybe the Times piece should have been titled “Why I’m Totally Voting But Would Prefer It If the Mostly Liberal Readership of the Times Did Not Vote,” which seems to us to be much more telling about what is going on here.

[Archive of New York Times article / American Conservative / The Week]

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