There’s really no excuse to dither about your vote, now that one party is pro-life and the other is the party of murder. Everyone agrees on that much.

The murder party is consistent in its embrace of death and destruction from the top down. If we’re all in a bus speeding toward climate catastrophe, their solution is to pipe in Christian music and tie a boulder to the gas pedal. If we’re running out of clean water, their solution is to use what’s left to blast methane out of rocks and bottle the remainder for profit.

Basically, one of our major parties is serving up a vegan casserole that many will find disappointing and mockable, and the other party is offering a bile loaf with arsenic dressing.

The murder party gives Putin a pass, winks at authoritarian tyrants, and plots to achieve their power. The party of death does not care who dies at all, as long as billionaires get to keep all their treasure without being subjected to work requirements. They don’t care who gets mowed down in the streets and schools as long as citizens, preferably the white ones, have the freedom to own weapons of war. It’s all about freedom, for them. Children retain the freedom to cower under their desks and grown women have the freedom to let the state decide if they must bear children. From the think tanks to the State House to the Capitol, the murder party is convening Death Panels to decide who will be sacrificed to enrich the rich.

Yes, the imminent dismantling of our livable environment is the worst of all this. It’s beyond criminal. It’s God’s Trump Card, as it were: even Hitler wasn’t in a position to murder everyone on the planet. But it’s in the littler things that the murder party really gets personal.

Many on the left wing liked to speculate, not that long ago, that the recent violent outbursts against blacks, and Jews, and Muslims, and your browner immigrants, and queers—all that was a sign of weakness, the death-rattle of a heretofore dominant race losing its perceived position of power. It was, in other words, going to pass.

But it won’t, if the murder party keeps its knee on our necks. Because the murder party needs enemies and it can fabricate as many as it wants. It can paint desperate asylum seekers as violent criminals, and Blacks as shiftless and malevolent, and Muslims as terrorists, and Jews as the evil power behind the scene, and queers as predators, and Democrats—what is more harmless, more feckless than a Democrat!—as pedophiles, and with enough hysterical demagoguery and a few video clips out of context, they can find willing consumers of their hatred and cruelty. Hatred is energizing. Hatred erases thoughtfulness and ambivalence. Hatred is pure.

And if you can somehow get people to believe drag queens and grade-school teachers are a threat to their children, you can do anything. You can empower citizens to be bounty hunters. You can recruit vigilantes. You can murder.

Murder is what they’re all about. Do not be deceived: all the queers, and those who look like they might be queer; the Blacks portrayed as violent, by violent people; the immigrants, or people who look like them; the Jews, of course, plenty of precedent there; the occasional spouse of a prominent Democrat, or the Democrat herself; the faithful precinct worker in a swing state; all those who will be killed will have been murdered by the murder party. The murder party holds the gun, they aim the gun, and they have all the bullets they need, among the aggrieved, the ignorant, and the armed. The murder party grew that ammunition themselves, from a damp smudge to a thriving colony, like virulent bacteria.

But if they are not all holding the gun, there isn’t a one of them willing to stop it. If the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with the gun, they don’t know any. I don’t know how every member of the murder party has become so compromised. But they’re all willing to open up their property for the shooters. The most horrifying slanders against whole groups of people continue to go unchallenged by the murder party.

Give them your vote if you want. Just remember they don’t care if you die, unless you’re 34 weeks from being born yet, and no one yet knows you’re queer. They will tell you a blastocyst is fully human and a grown woman isn’t. They will tell you what they want you to know and burn the books they don’t want you to read. They will let you starve. They don’t care if you die.

If their own kids are queer, they don’t even care if they die.