Actor Josh Duhamel posted a video on Instagram telling Minnesotans to go vote. He did not name a candidate. He did not name a party. The internet named one for him anyway, using the forensic evidence of who he said "thank you" to.
"I would never tell you who to vote for, but I would say that it is your job as an American citizen," Duhamel said in the video, as reported by Breitbart. "Let's get 100% turnout. Everybody please vote in this year's midterms."
That's it. That's the whole video. It's a public service announcement that could run before a high school football game, right after the one about not texting and driving.
Then the comments came in. Some said "vote red." Some said "vote blue." Duhamel replied "Thank you!! Please share with 10 people you know" over and over, and according to Breitbart, the replies landed under the people saying "vote red" or that they had voted for Republicans like Michele Tafoya.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a man got canceled for good manners.
"So you're only commenting under the vote red replies? Very telling," one user wrote. Very telling. This is the "Real Housewives" reunion where somebody gets confronted with a screenshot, except the screenshot is two exclamation points and a request to share.
Over on Reddit, users moved quickly from investigation to sentencing. "I can't believe I used to think he was hot," one wrote. "Aged like milk," wrote another. On Bluesky, someone called him a "MAGA chud," which is the kind of thing you say when your argument is in the shop.
Let's review the charges. A man asked people to vote. He thanked people for agreeing to vote. He liked Minnesota so much that, in his words, it's his "second favorite state in the whole country — right behind North Dakota." The North Dakota thing is the only genuinely controversial statement in the video, and nobody even brought it up.
This is what happens when you spend all day online. You stop reading what people say and start reading what they "liked," like a detective whose only clue is the tip line. Somewhere there's a cork board in a Minneapolis apartment with red string connecting "Thank you!!" to "Please share."
Meanwhile, regular Minnesotans are dealing with actual stuff: the grocery bill, the heating bill, the snow that's coming whether they vote or not. The man said vote. They're going to vote. Nobody needed a congressional hearing about his reply etiquette.
Duhamel, a Transformers star who has mostly kept his politics to himself, now knows what every guest at a family Thanksgiving already learned. You can say nothing political for twenty years, and someone will still find the one dinner roll you passed to the wrong side of the table.
So the video still says vote, the comments still say thank you, and the internet's ruling stands: guilty of being polite in the wrong direction.
The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on real news reports; jokes, exaggerations, and fictional details are not factual claims.
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