On Wednesday morning, the powers that be on Facebook’s Oversight Board decided that 45th President of the United States Donald Trump’s suspension from the platform would be upheld. They called for a review of the indefinite suspension in six months’ time and pseudo-scolded Facebook for using an enforcement mechanism that wasn’t one of their normally used punishments.
As the apparently all-powerful Oversight Board wrote in Wednesday’s decision, “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension” because “Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account.”
The page where the Oversight Board posts its decisions features a hand wielding a gavel, but that’s as close as what the New Yorker called “Facebook’s Supreme Court” gets to being a real court. It’s not. Its decisions are not really binding as they don’t have any enforcement mechanisms outside of Instagram and Facebook. It’s a kangaroo court set up at the direction of the only person it can overrule, Mark Zuckerberg, to give some sort of impression to his network’s users that their rights were being protected.
And while having this Oversight Board allows Zuck to claim some shiny veneer of impartiality and means to protect users from being targeted by intellectual opponents or censorious individuals, the Oversight Board is just as easily biased as if Facebook made rulings on its own. Users still have no real recourse because of Section 230 protections that allow the social network to feign platform status in theory as if all speech is allowed while acting like a publisher in practice.
Of course, this is not the first time the know-better liberal elite have substituted the Constitution and its principles for a more convenient and less accountable forum for their needs.
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Not that long ago, until Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education released its Final Rule on Title IX, a different kind of kangaroo court was the norm on campuses across the country with disastrous effects for both victims and the accused.
Casting aside notions of due process, presumption of innocence, transparency, and accountability, a dear colleague letter on Title IX circulated during President Obama’s tenure took a flawed system and made it worse without input from the American people or force of law in its outcomes.
Instead, the accused had next to zero rights in the kangaroo courts and even less recourse for wrongful or later-disproved convictions handed down by college and university Title IX offices. And rather than helping accusers by securing justice, the kangaroo courts often led victims to be revictimized when Title IX decisions were challenged in actual courts.
Both Facebook’s Oversight Board and the Obama-era Title IX kangaroo courts show what the Left does when they need to guarantee an outcome: they rig the game by creating alternate venues to inflict their will.
It’s the same motivation behind the radical proposals to add DC as the 51st state, to remove the filibuster, and to pack the Supreme Court.
Democrats can’t achieve their radical legislative proposals with the Senate’s current duly-elected representatives of the American people, so they’re demanding Washington, D.C., be granted statehood, giving them two new reliably leftist sheep to go along with the party line.
When openly debated in the U.S. Senate—supposedly the greatest deliberative body in the world—the Democrats’ agenda doesn’t pass muster in the bright lights of the Senate floor. So again, Democrats are pushing to abolish the filibuster to remove the apparently insurmountable challenge posed by intellectual diversity and ideological opposition that is supposed to ensure bills are refined before becoming laws.
And the Supreme Court, which has generally managed to protect the Constitution against attempted breaches by the other two branches of the federal government for hundreds of years, has been deemed a relic of institutional racism by Democrats. They are forced to pack (read: rig) the highest court in the land because their unconstitutional wish list might be struck down by a majority of the duly nominated and confirmed jurists.
The pattern leftist Democrats continually have shown is that when they can’t win on the merits of their arguments or through established processes, they blow up the system. Rather than sit at a table, they flip it over. Because of this standard operating procedure, conservatives cannot be complacent in our victories because even a win through normal means is not a certainty.
If conservatives gain a platform through social media, they’ll kick us off. If we create our own social network, tech giants will ban the app and pull the plug on its host servers. If we gain Senate seats, they’ll add two more of their own. If we confirm originalist judges, they’ll throw more of their own on the Supreme Court. And if we use debate to show the flaws in their policies, they’ll kill off the filibuster.
The Left never rests, and if conservatives hope to have any role in the future direction of our country, neither can we.
