Flashback: Celebrities Filmed Ad Advocating to Overthrow the Results of Presidential Election
A corrupt regime’s latest attempt to imprison its leading rival has an old video making the rounds on social media.
For those who have stopped keeping track of the U.S. government’s banana-republic-style tactics, special counsel Jack Smith announced Tuesday that a grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump on four charges related to Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, social media users have begun circulating a 2016 video that showcases the Trump haters’ election-denying hypocrisy. In the video, Hollywood celebrities urged Republican electors to overturn the 2016 election results by withholding Electoral College votes from Trump.
Louder with Crowder, conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s podcast, posted the video Wednesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “We’re just going to leave this here,” an accompanying tweet read.
We’re just going to leave this here. pic.twitter.com/EFYdwUT6Q7
— Louder with Crowder Dot Com (@LWCnewswire) August 2, 2023
Viewing the entire video requires a high tolerance for self-righteousness. Then again, connoisseurs of unintentional comedy will enjoy watching celebrities pose as constitutional scholars.
In short, a group of Hollywood leftists argued that the Electoral College should deny Trump the presidency.
The video opened with actor Martin Sheen, who once played a president on TV, putting on his glasses and trying to sound magnanimous, as if he forgave the electors for being Republicans.
[firefly_poll]
“Republican members of the Electoral College, this message is for you,” Sheen said, pointing at the camera.
“As you know, our founding fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is to ‘an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,'” Sheen added.
Next, actress Debra Messing, with a look of dramatic severity, reiterated the important phrase: “an eminent degree.”
Thus, only 25 seconds into a two-and-a-half-minute video, the celebrities revealed their nefarious purpose. Republican electors, they said, should deny Trump the presidency because, in their judgment, he lacked “requisite qualifications” to “an eminent degree.”
At this point, we need not even look into the celebrities’ definition of “eminent.” It could have meant anything. It certainly meant something different to them than to Trump’s 63 million voters.
Above all, it meant trying to change the 2016 election results.
Seven years later, the video reminds us of leftist hypocrisy in two areas.
First, there is the phony solemnity in their shameless appeal to an Electoral College they have trashed for years. In leftists’ minds, the Constitution exists only when it suits their purposes. Otherwise, they ignore it and denounce it as a tool of racist patriarchs.
Second, there is the attempt to overturn a presidential election. Before 2020, leftists wore this as a badge of honor. Since then, however, anyone who challenges an election’s results risks being censored or worse.
Although the 2016 video exposes leftist hypocrisy, in some ways that hypocrisy no longer matters.
People who engage in good-faith debates care about the consistency of their arguments. They respect their opponents and regard them as equals. If shown an inconsistency in their thought or action, they will acknowledge and try to amend it.
Modern leftists, however, have no interest in debate. They mean to defeat opponents by silencing them, or, if necessary, by throwing them in prison. They justify everything by appeals to political necessity.
To such people, hypocrisy has no meaning. Those who control every government agency, every major institution and the entire establishment media have no reason to fear accusations of hypocrisy or even to acknowledge their opponents’ legitimacy.
In fact, the 2016 video itself amounts to a kind of relic from a time when leftists still tried to persuade. Today, in the censorship era, they need not bother.
On a personal note, the most gratifying thing about re-watching this video is that I did not know the names of the celebrities who followed Sheen and Messing. May they forever languish in relative obscurity.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
