Daily Archives: 19 November 2020

WaPo Contempt

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The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.

Continuing Censorship

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and controlling shareholder of his Facebook, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. He said that

his company often must decide between “difficult trade-offs” when it comes to content moderation, and that he believes “some of these trade-offs would be better made through a democratic process.”

Two things on that. One is his stuff about trade-offs via a democratic process. What democratic process he posited is unclear. Would it be one where all of his employees would do the voting? One where all of his censors fact checkers/fact checker overseers would do the voting? There’d plainly be nothing democratic about that since his employees, including his checkers, are overwhelmingly far left, and the press outlets he sometimes uses are nearly as far left.

The larger thing, though, is Zuckerberg’s claimed difficult trade-offs while moderating content. This is Zuckerberg’s cynically offered false premise: there’s no need to moderate content on his facility. Not if he wants to continue as a pipeline rather than a publisher.

For instance, Zuckerberg also testified in that hearing that he has Facebook vetting political ads for “essential accuracy.” This is censoring of political speech, and it’s deeply insulting both to the political candidates involved and to the American voters viewing the ads. The opponent being targeted by a political ad is fully capable of responding for himself, and in his own way, to an ad. He does not need, not by a long shot, Zuckerberg or any of his minions to speak for him. It’s the same for American viewers of political ads. We do not need the Zuckerbergs of the world to speak for us. Nor are we so grindingly stupid—as he so clearly assumes we are—that we cannot evaluate for ourselves, and in our own ways, the ads that we see.

Clearly, though, Zuckerberg has every intention of continuing to censor speech, however he tries to obfuscate his intent.