I mentioned that I voted, and they naturally asked me who I voted for. I said, “De la Cruz. Third party.”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that?”, one of them said, and the whole group looked at me a bit puzzled — so I reiterated, “De la Cruz, a third-party candidate.”
“…Wait, there’s a *THIRD* party?”
I voted Democrat in 2020 for whatever an overseas vote in a blue state is worth — the past four years left me without much need of convincing that the best strategy for US federal elections is indeed to vote third-party. Stateside “Seppos” will often experience some amount of cognitive dissonance upon learning that this is my informed decision, for my decision runs contrary to the civil-religious orthodoxy they were indoctrinated into practically since infancy. And the simplest way for such “Seppos” to deal with that stress is not to actually question their own indoctrination, naturally, but rather to convert their stress into aggression towards the stressor, which is in this case a non-binary second-generation immigrant on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
It is dubious at best that such “Seppos” will ever do anything actually productive with their stress — The whole of Seppoland is after all built cap-a-pie on this colonial psychopathology.