I have had the hardest time this election season.
It doesn't have to do with deciding which candidates to vote for -- and there are a lot in my voting district for sure. The sample ballot is two pages, full of US House and Senate candidates, state legislature aspirants and incumbents, judges and ballot issues, and I know whom and what I am voting for.
It has to do with the decision itself.
When we vote, a normal voter will look at the candidates, assess their positions on the issues, and decide who best represents their views on those issues. That often (too often) equates to simply looking at the party affiliation of the candidate and checking the box. Doing that is not the optimal way to vote -- especially for local office candidates where party labels can give little or no indication of local priorities.
Looking at the issues ... that's where I'm having difficulty. According to my fun 2015 thesis, The Cubbyhole Theory of Maturity, I'm more than old enough to be suspicious of anything I don't understand. I don't just accept it.
I stop and ask why.
I ask why, for example, it is to anyone's benefit to allow 20 million unvetted people to cross the border, as the people who told Joe Biden what to do did during "his" administration from 2021-2025.
I ask why European countries, completely in conflict with their centuries of national identity and pride, allowed Islamist radicals to pour over their borders, establish actual communities where their Sharia law is practiced to the exclusion of national law, riots are commonplace, and men are allowed to rape and kill women with impunity but people speaking out against it are jailed. Why would those countries just allow it -- and defend it when pressed?
I ask why the Democrat Party would allow Muslims with avowed sympathies for those radicals to run on their party's tickets, even for House and Senate seats.
I ask why district attorneys, with their positions bought and paid for by the Soros family, put criminals on the street with no cash bail, lower or even dismiss the most serious charges or fail to prosecute hardened criminals with long rap sheets -- and why any of them were voted into office in the first place.
I ask why state and city governments are willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid turning over illegal alien criminals to Federal law enforcement. I ask why they refuse to honor detainers to hold those illegals to be picked up by immigration police.
I ask why black "leaders" seize upon cases of people with long rap sheets and try to make community heroes out of them. Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and charged a cop, tried to grab his gun and was shot to death; they made a hero out of him. George Floyd died of an extreme fentanyl overdose (read the autopsy), but because he was being held down by police, they made a veritable saint out of him. Ben Carson separated conjoined twins, but he isn't even on their radar.
I ask, and I ask, and I don't get it.
When you vote the next couple three weeks, maybe you should ask the same questions.
As I've written here many times, when I ask "why" and no answer appears, I default to the logical answer -- FTM (Follow the Money). And that's where you start to see an answer emerge from the haze.
To find that money, we have to thank, yet again, Elon Musk. In this case, his auditing team went in and followed the money, only to discover that taxpayer dollars were being routed to agencies like USAID, where the "deep state", the career "civil servants", were awarding contracts to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as, of course, the Clinton Foundation.
Those NGOs would then route a little bit of that funding to a good cause, but substantial portions of it in laundered contributions to the Democrat Party. If you don't believe that, check out how dismal the funding of the Democrat Party has been for this 2026 cycle, bereft of the corrupt dollars from unaware taxpayers.
Of course, that doesn't directly answer any of that "why" stuff I asked earlier. But of course if you think a little bit, it makes perfect sense.
In order for the taxpayer to let his congressman agree to fund agencies like USAID, there had to be a consistent need for the purported work of those agencies, working both at home and abroad. The "consistent need", of course, was turmoil. Rioting. Alleged starvation. Racism. You name it, if it was upsetting, they'd throw money at it, three times what was needed.
It's that simple. The more conflict, the more money. Peace is not an option, not overseas and certainly not in the USA.
In my "why" list earlier, I left out why it was so necessary to shut down schools and businesses during the COVID pandemic, a virus that had a fatality rate of less than one-fifth of one percent of those infected. I did that because COVID was the proving example.
No sooner had the virus come over to the USA than the Democrat machine seized on it as a primary example of the conflict for which the only treatment was -- you guessed it -- taxpayer money. When there was no time to raise revenue any other way, they simply printed it, inflation be darned, and found ways to authorize gargantuan spending.
That spending, of course, managed to find itself in the hands of Democrat-controlled NGOs, getting laundered and routed to Democrat operatives including those who pushed mail-ballot laws for the 2020 elections that were ripe for corruption -- you think Joe Biden hid in his basement for the whole campaign and still got those 81 million votes from 81 million actual voters?
Mr. Musk managed to DOGE the entire USAID into being a small part of the State Department, stripping down its budget and removing most or all its capacity for corruption. His DOGE team did the same for dozens of corrupted entities in the Federal government.
But the problem is not fixed. It is frighteningly possible that Democrats could gain control of one or both houses of Congress, and try to reverse what has been addressed to date. If so, you can expect to be asking yourself "why" as riots break out with minimal motivation, corrupt DAs let hardened criminals out on the street, and the borders are reopened without vetting.
That is the turmoil and chaos that the Democrats want, because it rationalizes the flow of taxpayer money into corrupt organizations that float Democrat candidates. They want that turmoil.
I hope you don't.
Follow the money. If you have to ask "why", that's the answer.
Copyright 2026 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.