How to Spot a Hillbot: Entitled Shill Is Entitled

It's always slightly saddening to see one online poster respond to another by typing nothing more than "Troll."

It's not sad because trolling is sad. Sometimes trolling is funny.

It's not sad because the epithet is meant to shut down online arguments. Many online arguments need to be shut down.

It's not even sad because it's name-calling. I'm pretty sure the internet was invented for name-calling.

It's sad to see that one-word response because it's a lazy and witless way of asserting what we used to assert with a gloriously lulzy four-word formulation: "Obvious troll is obvious."

So part of me wishes that instead of reflexively labeling Hillbots trolls with a single word, we would all just go the extra mile and type out "Obvious troll is obvious" in our responses.

But that doesn't really go far enough. We should actually type "Entitled shill is entitled" because entitlement is what their primary argument ("Opposition to Clinton is support for Trump!") boils down to.

Seriously. The Hillaryans genuinely feel entitled to our votes.

It's not Clinton's job to earn our votes. It's our job to justify voting for anyone else. But of course, if we try to justify voting for any other candidate, we can't even finish our first sentence before the Hillbots interrupt with indignation, "But don't you see that if you vote for [insert candidate here], you're just throwing your vote away and helping to elect Donald Trump?"

No, I don't see that at all. The way I see it, the Democratic Party is electing Donald Trump by presenting us with an alternative who is a warmongering advocate of the carceral state with a track record of lying and a deeply unprofessional aversion to press conferences. Although she has a slight edge over Trump in the polls at the moment, history demonstrates that the longer Clinton remains in the public eye, the less people can stomach her. She's going to lose not because I refuse to give her my particular vote, but because she is unelectable. And when the Democratic party's unelectable candidate goes down to Donald Trump, the real finger of blame should point at the superdelegates who insisted on nominating an unelectable candidate--not the voters who failed to achieve the impossible by electing the most unelectable candidate in history.

That response only makes Hillaryans laugh because they are convinced that my vote started out belonging to Clinton and that any attempt to cast it for someone else is a deep perversion of immutable justice.

But the thing is my vote NEVER belonged to Clinton. I'm one of those pesky independent voters--you know, the folks who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans and wait for some candidate to step forward and win our support.

Of course I won't give that support to Trump. He's terrifying because, as Clinton says, his ideas are "dangerously incoherent." But neither will I support Clinton. Her ideas are terrifying because they are "dangerously coherent." I know exactly what her agenda is and that she has the political chops to accomplish it. I just happen not to be in favor of more police brutality, more displaced populations throughout the world, more poisoned water, more poverty, and more consolidation of power in the hands of those who are already abusing it. 

To say so, however, is to invite the scorn of countless Correct-the-Record minions who will gleefully point out that whatever atrocities Trump permits will be on my hands.

To which the first response is obviously that at least the atrocities Clinton would have perpetrated won't be on my hands.

But the second (more important) response is that if I can't vote for Bernie Sanders, then I'm going to vote for the candidate whose values correspond most precisely to my own. That candidate is neither trump nor Clinton. It's Jill Stein.

If we reach November and Clinton and Trump really are still the major party nominees (a matter I hardly take as settled), then I'll vote for Stein not as an act of petulance, but in the hope that enough other people will be disgusted enough by the Trump-Clinton binary to do the same.

I know that Hillaryans can't take that claim seriously. They understand that Trump is utterly loathsome and repugnant, but they can't grasp that their candidate is equally loathsome and repugnant. They know that the prospect of a Trump presidency is terrifying, but they can't grasp that the prospect of a Clinton presidency is even more terrifying to a lot of us.

Any attempt to express these sentiments to them prompts a sarcastic, "Thanks for electing President Trump"--to which the suitably sarcastic reply is, of course, "You're welcome."

Followed by: "Entitled shill is entitled to Trump."