As I write this, we’re 47 days away from the November 8 general election — voters will elect candidates to all 435 US House seats, 35 US Senate seats, and other offices that vary from state to state.

As close as that sounds, in some places it’s even closer. “Early voting” begins 46 days before Election Day in Minnesota and South Dakota, 45 days early in Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming, 40 days early in Illinois and Michigan, and with shorter windows in most states.

It’s time to start making some decisions. Not just on which candidates to vote for, but on whether to vote at all.

The usual answer to the question “should we vote?” is “of course!” Some consider it a “civic duty” and even suggest making it mandatory. It’s how the system works. If you don’t vote you have no right to complain about the outcome.

Some anarchists, libertarians, and other contrarians take things in the opposite direction. Voting, they say, signals consent to the results, and approval of a bad system. It’s a moral crime. If you vote you have no right to complain about the outcome.

Personally, I consider voting neither a civic duty nor a moral crime.

If I don’t like my choices (or the overall system), I’m under no obligation to pretend I do by voting.

On the other hand, the system does exist, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future whether I vote or not, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t register my preferences as to how it operates and who runs it, if I feel like doing that.

I’m not going to try to convince you to vote. But I am going to try to convince SOME of you to NOT vote.

If you haven’t taken the time to familiarize yourself with the candidates and issues on your ballot, you shouldn’t vote.

If you’re familiar with some of the candidates and issues but not others, you shouldn’t vote on those latter candidates and issues.

Voting on things you neither understand nor particularly care about is just a waste of time, effort, and maybe gasoline. And while the chances of your vote being the deciding vote in any given election are about as good as your chances of winning a billion-plus-dollar lottery drawing, why take the risk of causing the “wrong” result by voting from a position of ignorance?

If you’re not sure you should vote, you probably shouldn’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The US Department of Defense has ordered “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” the Washington Post reports. The apparent reason for the review is an August disclosure, by Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, that Twitter and Facebook, of social media accounts opened under fake identities and used to feed disinformation to “audiences overseas.”

That’s all well and good, but while they’re at it I wish the Pentagon would also review — and cease — its information warfare campaigns against the American public.

Among supposed American constitutional values are separation of the military from politics, and its subservience to civilian government. While those values have always proven more noticeable in the breach than in the observance in wartime, the post-World-War-Two national security state has turned that breach into a well-funded, 24/7/365, campaign of political influence.

Senior military officials routinely attempt to affect policy (and politicians, and voter sentiment) with public statements designating the next Enemy of the Week and begging for more money and more operational authority to fight the wars it chooses rather than the wars Congress declares (the last time Congress was willing to take that kind of responsibility was  in 1942, when it added Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to its list of World War Two opponents).

The Department of Defense maintains an “Entertainment Media Office” to support filmmakers with military resources. Needless to say, only productions which glorify the US armed forces need apply. The most recent prominent example (involving no fewer than two US Navy aircraft carriers, multiple aircraft and military pilots, etc.) is mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick.

In 2015, the public learned that the National Football League’s apparently heartfelt love of military pageantry —  color guards, tributes to veterans, even aircraft flyovers and parachute jumps — was actually just a bought and paid for (with millions of taxpayer dollars) DOD marketing scheme.

And yes, they’re constantly coming for our children. I was recruited into the US Marine Corps in high school myself in the 1980s, but even I was surprised at the sheer volume of mail my own kids received from armed forces recruiters from about the time they hit the age of 16 a few years ago. They’re all over the public schools, not just to fill their recruitment quotas but to make positive impressions on future voters.

The up side for them is obvious: Spending millions of taxpayer dollars on psy-ops directed at Americans gets them hundreds of billions to spend on other things.

The down side for us is equally obvious: Instead of armed forces doing as the civilian government directs, we have armed forces using taxpayer money to influence how the civilian government directs them. That’s a non-trivial factor behind three decades of constant war.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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When I wrote my last column on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s latest scheme to use  his state’s treasury as a presidential campaign fund, the whole thing looked pretty silly and counter-productive. With more than half a million unfilled job openings in his state, why is he scooping up immigrants and flying them to Massachusetts instead of letting them improve Florida’s economy?

At the time, I didn’t know the half of it. The whole thing is starting to look, to steal a phrase from Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, “fractally weird.” That is, any single part of it is just as weird as the whole thing.

Let’s start with my first big mistake (or, rather, the first fact I hadn’t known or noticed when writing the previous column):

Ron DeSantis didn’t pay Vertol Systems, Company Inc. $615,000 to fly immigrants from Florida to Massachusetts. He paid Vertol Systems, Company Inc. $615,000 to fly immigrants from TEXAS to Massachusetts.

Wait, what?

Yes, really.

For all his posturing about immigrants being such a thorn in Florida’s side that he needed a $12 million legislative appropriation to “deport” them to other states, he had to go all the way to San Antonio (nearly a thousand miles from Tallahassee) just to find enough immigrants to fill a plane for his stunt.

Is that even legal? Here’s where it gets even weirder. The $12 million appropriation specifically calls for “a program to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state [Florida].”

Not Texas, Florida. Addressing that issue at a press conference, DeSantis threw a Hail Mary.  Many of the immigrants were “intending to come to Florida,” he said, so “you got to deal with it at the source.”

If you hold your mouth just right and pretend words don’t mean things, he was just generously saving them some travel time, see?

But it looks like he partly covered his bases on the legal end, too. He had the immigrants flown from Texas to Florida before flying them from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard.

So it’s all good, right? Except one wonders where he got the money to import those immigrants to Florida before exporting them to Massachusetts. The appropriation doesn’t seem to cover that.

Perhaps weirdest of all is his choice of Martha’s Vineyard as a destination. I hear conservatives chuckling about giving the “coastal elites” a dose of immigrant presence, but the island in question isn’t exactly an elite place, or light on immigrant numbers. Fully 20% of its population are Brazilian immigrants, not counting people from other countries, and its per capita income lags both Massachusetts’s as a whole …  and Florida’s.

Sure, a lot of the “elites” vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. But they vacation AND retire in Florida. And hey, we’ve got TWO coasts. How “elite” does that make us?

The only one way to make any sense of this whole circus is to treat the $12 million appropriation as a taxpayer contribution to Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fund. He’s a poster boy for the old saying  that politics makes people stupid.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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