I’m Begging You to Cool It with the Anti-Biden Posts for a While

It’s less than three weeks til election day, and here in this home stretch, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern: An uptick in social media posts attacking Biden from the left. These post might be memes, videos, articles, or comments. Most of them convey, either explicitly or implicitly, that Biden would be no better as president than Trump. This observation is anecdotal, sure, but I’ve seen enough of it in the last few days that I feel it’s warranted for me to clear my throat and humbly beseech anyone I know who’s sharing this content: Please stop. Please hold off. Just for a little while. Just until we get to the other side of this election that’s less than a month away. I know, I know…

I’m not asking you to give the old man a pass. Go ahead and clog my feed with anti-Biden memes in the lame duck period. Slam him in comments sections across the internet after — or, hell, during! Live-tweet the thing! — his inauguration. There was no shortage of left-leaning anti-Biden content all over the place during the primaries, and that was all peachy with me. It was hilarious and incisive and necessary, just as it will be on November 4 and beyond.

Just please, please take it easy for now. Just for these next two weeks or so. If there was ever a time to give it a rest, it’s during the general election. The only effect that attacking a nominee — that is, attacking a candidate after the primaries and before election day — can have is to boost that nominee’s opponent. That means that right now, your anti-Biden content is pro-Trump content. In the general election, there’s effectively no difference between sharing an anti-Biden meme and MAGA shit-posting. Don’t be a mouth-breathing, shit-posting MAGA cretin. You’re so much better than that.

Honestly, I’m no Biden cheerleader. I would have preferred a much more progressive nominee, and I didn’t vote for him in the primaries. Once the election is over, I won’t just cease to object to progressives making noise about his shortcomings — I’ll encourage it. I’ll join in. We’ll need to make sure he doesn’t forget that the future of the Democratic Party is represented by the AOC wing, and that he must act accordingly. So this isn’t me defending Joe Biden or clutching my pearls at the audacity of anyone who would deign to dislike him. This is me imploring you — nay, begging you — not to do anything that might help doom us to an extension of the Trump years, because I simply cannot take any more of that asshole. I just can’t. He worsens my quality of life on a daily basis, and I’m far from alone in that.

We are so, so tantalizingly close to getting Donald Trump out of our lives, to waking up from this relentless nightmare that’s 5-plus years running now, and to starting the work of addressing Trumpism as a whole. But the last presidential election gave us a sobering lesson in the effect that propaganda disseminated over social media can have on electoral outcomes. Internet content has an impact; attacking Biden online could convince people not to vote, and cost him the election. It doesn’t take much to persuade an already voting-averse public to cancel their voting plans and stay home. And the notion that we might finally succeed in building a coalition to beat Trump just to see him win again thanks to anti-Biden Facebook memes from the left is not just aggravating to me; it’s terrifying.

I’m not going to try to persuade you to vote for Biden — though I really wish you would — or to vote at all. I’m not going to break down the reasons I think Biden is better than Trump. I have no interest in insulting your intelligence. If you believe that there’s no meaningful difference between the two candidates, that’s your journey. It’s wrong as hell, but it’s yours, not mine.

I’m interested, though, in following it to its logical conclusion: If you truly believe neither candidate is any better or worse than the other, then it must not matter to you what happens with this election. You must not care who wins. Either way, it’s all the same to you, because both candidates are equally shitty. And that’s fine. But if you do care about me, then for my sake, if for no other reason, please tone down the anti-Biden content for a sec. And it’s of course not just me: There are a lot of people — including, I’m sure, many people you care deeply about — who will be devastated if Trump wins this thing. As someone who doesn’t care, who thinks the election is a wash because both candidates are equally bad, you’ve got nothing to gain by posting this shit. As people who in fact care deeply, the rest of us have everything to lose. Tone it down for us. Because while you might not care, we will be ripping our hair out of our heads if Trump gets another term just because people couldn’t keep their finger off the “share” button until November 4.

There are really only 3 possibilities: Either you think Trump is better, in which case you should just own that and post pro-Trump shit; or you think Biden is better, in which case you have no reason to post content that could undermine him in the election; or you think they’re equally bad, in which case you should divest, and not post content that might affect an election that other people actually care about. For just a couple more weeks! Pretty please!