Bill O'Reilly Knows Why We Have An Electoral College: To Keep Whites In Power, Ta-Da!

Never mind what Alexander Hamilton may have said (or perhaps sung) about the need for smart men (definitely men) to keep demagogues from fooling people into voting for them; Bill O'Reilly has got the purpose of the Electoral College all figured out: It's about making sure the coloreds don't take power away from the white folks. It's really quite obvious, you see: Complaining about the Electoral College is just a plot to destroy white power, because most Americans live in cities, which have a lot of brown people in them, and if we went with the popular vote, then the 20% of the population that lives in rural areas -- and which is mostly white -- wouldn't have nearly as much electoral power as they do now. And what the hell kind of democracy is it when 20% of the population can't have an outsized influence on elections?

You start weighting all the votes equally, and you're going to end up with some crazy scheme where a vote in Wyoming would count as much as a vote from California, which would be simply madness, because currently, an electoral vote in Wyoming represents 85,000 voters, but in California, it takes 258,000 to get one elector. Billo quite simply isn't going to stand for such madness, explaining that the dangerous idea of one person, one vote is actually "all about race":

The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with. Therefore, white working class voters must be marginalized. And what better way to do that than center the voting power in the cities? Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America today is based on race. It permeates almost every issue. That white men have set up a system of oppression. That system must be destroyed. Bernie Sanders peddled that to some extent. Hillary Clinton did. And the liberal media tries to sell that all day long. So-called white privilege bad. Diversity good.

But what about the right of all the white people in small states to count for more than those filthy minority people in cities and large states? More to the point, what about the right of the Republican party to maintain disproportionate power, even if fewer people actually vote for them? Billo explains the nefarious Democratic plot to disempower the white male minority:

If you look at the voting patterns, it's clear that the Democrats are heavily reliant on the minority vote. Also on the woman vote. White men have largely abandoned the Democrats[.]

How true this is! Look, here is a chart that shows exactly what O'Reilly is getting at:

 
 Chart by Philip Bump, The Washington Post

And just because more people in large states might be likely to vote for Democrats, is that any reason to let them? Where will the madness end? With a Congress that has, say, roughly equal numbers of men and women in it, like the population? Next you'll be saying that systematically suppressing the black vote is somehow "unfair," even though the Supreme Court decided there's no more racism.

O'Reilly ends up with a powerful plea on the behalf of "the white establishment," which demographically is already declining, but which he hopes can be preserved through some sort of affirmative action system, like keeping the Electoral College:

Summing up, left wants power taken away from the white establishment. They want a profound change in the way America is run. Taking voting power away from the white precincts is the quickest way to do that.

As rants about race go, it was a pretty good one. We'll have to remember to give Billo credit for not invoking the threat to our wives and daughters from marauding blacks, not even once. Don't you go calling O'Reilly's argument for protecting white minority power racist, even if it sounds like it could have come from Pretoria in 1983. At least he's being honest about his desire to preserve white political power, and not pretending some states don't exist . Besides, you certainly wouldn't want the majority of voters to decide elections, now would you?

[ Fox News / WaPo / Vox ]