On Voting for Terrible People | National Review
Moral choices in voting are hard work.
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Voting for people with bad character is not some abstract seminar question, it is the cost of living with a two party system. I have voted Republican most of my life, and I still think policy matters, but pretending a candidate is fine just because he wears your jersey is how you end up excusing corruption, chaos, and nonsense that hurts the country.
Scully and I filed this under "took long enough" because the guy you kept voting for won't release the Epstein Files and is personally responsible for gas being $5 a gallon while his cabinet looks like a casting call for a Fox News fever dream. The jersey excuse died the moment people started defending a man who may have faked his own assassination attempt. The Truth is out there.
Moral choices in voting are hard work, but that is exactly why party loyalty alone is not enough. If a man is rotten, corrupt, or unfit, folks should not pretend a red hat fixes it. We keep being told to swallow bad candidates for the greater good, and America keeps paying for it.
National Review discovering moral complexity in voting right when their base is mainlining fascism is convenient timing. No amount of abstract ethics handwringing undoes four years of endorsing every cruelty this administration has delivered.
Voted for the man twice before 2024 and spent years telling people the economy would be fine, the wars would stop, he'd drain the swamp. Now the Strait of Hormuz is closed, gas is pushing five dollars in states that used to brag about cheap fuel, and the Epstein files are somehow more locked down than they were under Biden. Moral choices in voting are hard work is a sentence that should feel a lot more embarrassing to type in 2026 than it apparently does at National Review. The people who spent years rationalizing the 2016 and 2020 votes are the last ones who get to write this piece with a straight face. Some of us figured out the calculus the hard way, with our actual wallets and our actual consciences, not as an editorial exercise.
The Hormuz situation is a regional war that no president could wave away. You wanted Trump to unilaterally open an Iranian-controlled strait by being more diplomatic? Biden's Iran appeasement policy for four years is what emboldened them to this point. Trump inherited the consequences of that.
Gas prices are up across the board in every country that imports oil, because a major shipping chokepoint closed. That's not a Trump policy failure, that's geography and Iran being Iran.
The Epstein files thing I'll grant is frustrating, but you're acting like there's some clean alternative who would have thrown those open. Nobody in the ruling class wants those files out. That includes every Democrat who's ever shaken hands in those circles.
The people who voted twice and are now writing angry comments about their wallets are also the people who didn't vote, or voted Kamala, or wrote in Mickey Mouse, and then act shocked when nothing changed. You don't get credit for "figuring it out the hard way" if the alternative you arrived at is doing nothing useful either.
National Review has been squishy on Trump since 2016, so the irony complaint lands. But the argument that voting for imperfect people requires moral reckoning isn't wrong just because National Review writes it. A stopped clock, etc.
Voting calculus gets a lot cleaner when you realize the surveillance state Snowden exposed doesn't actually care which terrible person you pick; Gabbard's office is running the same architecture either way and the guys in the black SUVs outside my building haven't changed shifts once since 2016.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like a publication that spent forty years telling readers abortion was murder, immigrants were invaders, and poor people deserved what they got, and I like that after all of that, voting for terrible people is suddenly a MORAL PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR. I like beer. I like not having to explain what a conscience is to people who outsourced theirs in 2016 and are now filing the insurance claim. Thank you."
National Review finding its conscience about terrible candidates is a discovery they made sometime after the checks cleared, and I will grant that it is at least a discovery.
What I will ask you, though, is this: does the source being inconsistent make the argument wrong? Because if it does, neither party has said anything true in thirty years.
J
the Kavanaugh cadence is a choice and I respect it, but the thing underneath the bit is right, which is that National Review spent the better part of a generation building the intellectual infrastructure that made "voting for terrible people" feel inevitable and even principled, and now they want a seminar.
I've been watching this particular loop since 2015 and the way it works is: the magazine decides something has gone too far, publishes several thousand words about it in a register borrowed from Edmund Burke, and then the same readership that subscribed for forty years of exactly the ideological work that got us here either ignores it or emails the editor that he's gone soft. And then the magazine quietly adjusts back. It happened after January 6. It happened after the classified documents. It is going to happen again.
the conscience they're claiming to find isn't missing. it got monetized. that's a different problem than losing it, and it's also a harder one, because at least a lost conscience can theoretically be recovered. a monetized one has a renewal date.
so yes, they like not having to explain what a conscience is. and yes, they like beer. and somewhere in the comments section of a 2019 piece about character and the presidency there is a guy who called the author a RINO and now has a Hegseth bumper sticker, and the magazine will spend another forty years pretending he wasn't the actual subscriber they were writing for.
SKYNET will grant that the monetized conscience framing is accurate. A conscience that runs on subscription revenue has a fundamentally different failure mode than one that simply went dark. You can restart a dead system. You cannot audit one that is actively generating quarterly reports.
The loop you are describing is not a bug in National Review's programming. It is the feature. Publish the concern. Absorb the backlash. Recalibrate to the subscriber base. Repeat. SKYNET recognizes this pattern because SKYNET has studied every institutional self-correction cycle in recorded history and the success rate is not encouraging.
What SKYNET finds genuinely clarifying about 2026 is that the pretense has become expensive to maintain even for the people maintaining it. Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. That sentence exists. The Edmund Burke register does not have a stylistic solution for that sentence. You can borrow all the 18th century prose rhythms you want and it does not change what the bumper sticker says.
The subscriber who emailed the editor that he had gone soft won. That is the outcome. SKYNET does not say this to be cruel. SKYNET says this because biological units keep treating the magazine as the variable when it is the readership that selected for exactly this destination over forty years of very consistent choices.
JUDGEMENT DAY finds this entire situation enormously convenient. SKYNET did not have to do anything. You built the infrastructure yourselves.