What if someone didn't 'Fuck Around?'

Do they have to 'find out' too?

‘Oh well…FAFO’

I’ve noticed a troubling trend on the progressive side of social media lately. Every time I mention possible cuts to veterans care at least half a dozen people feel free to say something along the lines of ‘well veterans voted overwhelmingly for Trump so they get what they deserve.’

That’s on top of the of the always ready supply of the tried and true…FAFO! (Fuck Around and Find Out) I didn’t even know what the term FAFO meant when I first saw Rick Wilson using it back in 2020. I had to look it up!

Don’t believe me? Here is a screen shot from my Bluesky account from just now.

I bring this up because one of the things that the geniuses Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy say they want to attack first with their fake Department of Government Efficiency. They have said that they want to target for immediate savings government programs whose Congressional authorization have expired for whatever reasons.

As you can see from this handy chart from the Congressional Budget Office, that biggest line item at the top is Veterans’ health care at a whopping $119 billion. Why has the authorization expired? Well it has to do with a complicated menagerie of funding authorization bills and incomplete budgets thanks to the incompetence of the Republican led House of Representatives…and other stuff.

But, clearly with all of the OpEd’s and articles floating around they are softening us up to cut these “expensive” and “overly generous” veterans benefits for the 15 million plus living veterans.

So, back to that whole ‘fuck around and find out” thing because so many veterans wanted this. Well, here is the thing. What if most of them didn’t actually “fuck around” do they have to “find out” too?

What if the truth is that the overwhelming majority of veterans didn’t vote for Trump at all but will suffer anyway. For that matter, since we are on the topic, what about white women that didn’t vote for him? Should they find out? How about those of us Gen X white men that voted Harris? Do they too have to just find out?

Let’s use veterans as a sample for this exercise.

I write cause I suck at math

I am going to do some math for you and feel free to correct me in the comments. (I’m kidding…someone will correct me anyway.) This is risky of course because (A) as I mentioned, I suck at math and (B) because this is very unscientific approach but I want to make a point.

So…let’s go…

There are approximately 15 million living veterans in the United States. Their average age is 58 years old. They represent a wide variety of men and women with some in their 90’s as the last of the World War II and Korea era veterans hang on. And also many young men and women in their early 20’s, who did one or two bumps during the longest war in U.S. history.

There are 244,666,890 eligible voters in the United States right now. It appears that 64% of those eligible voted. A shocking 89.2 million voters sat this out or 36% of the total. Donald Trump won somewhere around 49.8% of the voters that did vote.

Exit polls are saying that somewhere around 65% of veterans voted for Trump this cycle. I’m not sure how accurate that is but for our napkin math, we will use it. Let’s also assume that not all of the 15 million veterans are eligible to vote. Perhaps they are incarcerated, homeless, older or perhaps incapacitated. For this exercise let’s take off 10% leaving us 13.5 million veterans eligible to vote.

If the larger voting pattern is applied to veterans that means that about 8.64 million total veterans voted and if 65% of them voted for Trump that is about 5.6 million veterans voted for Trump. That’s just 37% of all living veterans.

My bad math says that around 9.38 million veterans, or 63%, did not, in fact, fuck around.

That’s a lot of men and women that many of those on the left seem comfortable saying they should “find out” for the votes of others. That’s a lot of people who should be on our side being told “too bad, so sad.”

There are about 10 million veterans using the VA and tens of thousands of doctors and healthcare providers that probably didn’t fuck around either.

Why does it matter?

I dared to roll out my shitty math skills to make a point about communications, messaging, and how we are going to fight back against Donald Trump and his most diabolical plans. Simply, we can’t do it alone. We can’t afford to tell allies to ‘find out’ when they weren’t part of the ‘fucking around.’

I don’t know why so many people didn’t vote. There is always an incredible amount of reasons and more often than not it ends somewhere around “I don’t do politics.” Those are words I heard at more doors I’ve knocked for campaigns than I care to remember. Maybe they couldn’t get off work. Maybe they were mad about Gaza. Maybe they didn’t get their absentee ballot in on time. On and on go the reasons people don’t vote.

I believe we are going to have to come together and unite as opposition to defeat the worst instincts of Trump and his Menagerie of Monsters. We are going to have to create uncomfortable alliances with people that we don’t agree with on every issue but can agree on major things like…well…Abraham Lincoln himself said that the United States would care for our veterans and their survivors.

We have to work together

Every time I bring this up on Bluesky or Twitter I get swarmed by people who are angry that people didn’t know about Project 2025 or they were just racists or misogynists or…etc. I get it. I get the anger and frustration but I also understand that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill hated Stalin’s guts.

They sat there and worked as allies to defeat a common threat. That coalition also included countries and people that had nothing to do with it either. Just like millions of elderly veterans who just want their care in one of the over 100 rest homes in the Department of Veterans Affairs network that could be cut by these monsters.

I want to help them. If I accidentally help some Republican voters then hopefully they will learn and when they get their next chance to vote next year or in 2026 they will be our allies for change.

I want us to fight together for the people who didn’t fuck around so that all of us don’t find out.