A Badge of Honor
I’d sort of been feeling left out. Then came the email last night, with the subject line, “your content has been removed from You Tube”.
It read, “Hi KXEL 1540, We wanted to let you know our team reviewed your content, and we think it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. We know you may not have realized this was a violation of our policies, so we’re not applying a strike to your channel.”
And it said it was removing the video version of this segment…from December 10, 2020. Frankly, I have no idea what I said and haven’t looked back, but it was probably about the electoral college meeting that day. (UPDATE: See the text of the original segment below)
You Tube says it realizes this may be disappointing news, but “it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all”, and tells us we can appeal.
Probably not worth it, thought, because it states the policy: “Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
Interesting on so many fronts…I’m glad that my terribly subversive video was removed to keep society safe…two and a half months after it was posted. I was actually tempted to simply read that segment again today and see how long it would take for them to notice.
In one respect, it’s nice to know I’m now one of the cool kids, a radical who got his content banned from big media. But it’s hardly a laughing matter, because of the long-term ramifications of silencing speech in this country.
Original Segment
A Little Bit Fraudulent
Others have pointed this out, but it bears repeating. With regard to the 2020 presidential election, we’ve gone from supporters of the outcome saying, “there’s no fraud” to “there’s no widespread fraud” to “there’s not enough fraud to change the outcome”.
That concept of “there’s no widespread fraud” reminds me of the old saying, “you can’t be a little pregnant”. Pregnant is pregnant. And fraud is fraud.
From a legal standpoint, cases may be rendered moot if a decision will not alter the status of the parties; it’s a waste of a court’s time, in other words, to rule on something that has no impact. That’s the concept behind “there’s not enough fraud to change the outcome”.
That alone, the level of fraud, is in question. But beyond that, we’re talking about the most sacred part of our representative democracy…election of those representatives. If we don’t have confidence in that, the foundation for the whole thing is broken.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to do…but we really need to separate the issue of President Trump from all this. There are clear voting irregularities that Trump haters are willing to ignore because they got the outcome they wanted. Some are based on bad rules, such as not requiring signature matches on absentee ballots. Some are based on flawed premises, such as vote by mail. Regardless, citizens need to demand that they be reviewed and confidence in the system restored.
Seems like we do things pretty well here in Iowa, but there’s always room for improvement, especially as our ever-more-fractured electorate provides closer and closer elections. But Iowa is not the problem. And citizens of states that do have problems need to do more than simply point to their “I Voted” stickers and say they’ve done all they could.
