THIS IS HOW THEY ROLL: Yeah, you won our video contest, but we’re changing the rules. “This MoveOn/Mayday video contest, lame though it was, was revealing. When liberals say they want to get money out of politics, they aren’t serious. What they mean is, they want to get conservative money out of politics.”

They’d want to get libertarian money out, too, if there were enough to matter. But there’s also this:

Why is that? The answer is simple: liberals command the culture. They control virtually all universities, virtually all public schools, virtually all newspapers, virtually all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, almost the entire apparatus of the news. That control, added to the corruption of crony government, gives liberals access to enormous amounts of money, so that in almost every contested election, the liberal candidate has more money than the conservative candidate.

And yet…liberals have a problem. Their arguments are terrible, and their theories are contradicted at nearly every turn by the facts. Which means that they can’t withstand criticism. They can’t take competition; they need a monopoly. Which, in turn, means that they must prevent voters from hearing conservative ideas and arguments. They can do that in the schools and in the culture, and they don’t have to worry about newspapers or broadcast television. But there is a loophole of sorts: during election seasons, conservatives can buy time on television and on the radio to broadcast messages that liberals are otherwise able to blockade. This is intolerable! Because when people hear conservative ideas, unfiltered by the liberal press, they tend to find them persuasive.

So “money in politics” must be denounced. Most money in politics is liberal, from labor unions, crony billionaires like Tom Steyer, and so on. But that isn’t the money the Democrats mean: they want to silence conservative voices, so their monopoly can be preserved and threats to their rule–democracy, one might say–can be eliminated. The MoveOn/Mayday contest was a microcosm of one of the central political conflicts of our time.

Yeah, pretty much.