A bevy of Hollywood celebrities and others famous for being well-known, actors who get paid handsomely for pretending on film they are somebody they’re not while reciting words written for them by others, now seek to impose their will on the American electorate.

As Daniel Halper writes in the New York Post, these celebrities made a video expressing their desire to pull the red carpet from underneath the feet of those who marched to the polls in flyover country to elect Donald J. Trump the 45th President of the United States:

A slew of other has-been and B- or C-list celebs have piled on, calling for 37 “conscientious Republican electors” to swing the Dec. 19 Electoral College vote away from Trump. The Republican is expected to win 306 votes -- more than the 270 necessary to win -- based on the results from last month’s general election.

“Republican members of the Electoral College, this message is for you,” begins a preachy Martin Sheen. “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 and down with the requisite qualifications.'”

“I’m not asking you to vote for Hillary Clinton,” some in the video say -- just don’t vote for Trump.

Martin Sheen, who played a left-wing cartoon president in “The West Wing”, forgets that the reason the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College was to protect the little states from being dominated by the big states. That is, they wanted states like Wyoming and Arkansas not to be subject to the whims of heavily-populated states like New York and California. Gee, guess where these poster children for Botox and facelifts reside?

They claim they aren’t asking electors to vote for Hillary Clinton, just, er, never Trump. Do these narcissists realize that if nobody, if they get their wish, will get the required 270 electoral votes, the election will be thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives where Donald Trump will be elected a second time?

We live in a republic and not a democracy, a fact ignored by those who note Hillary Clinton won a popular vote. But subtract New York and California, and then count the popular vote. The Founding Fathers may not have envisioned the rise of the cultural elites, but the demagogues whom they wanted to deny control of the White House to and whose influence they sought to mute reside precisely in the patron states of fictional reality. Thankfully, the Founding Fathers created a system where the bitter clingers and those the elites call “deplorable” determines who will lead them.

The irony here is that those who claim every attempt to guarantee voting integrity -- such as requiring a voter ID or proof of citizenship to vote is an attempt to intimidate and disenfranchise voters -- are attempting to disenfranchise voters.  By asking the electors Trump's supporters voted for to slect someone else they disenfranchise those voters. Why have an election at all if you’re going to have electors “vote their conscience”? The danger we face is from the demagogues of the Hollywood elites.

Those who would distort the intent of the Electoral College to overturn the results of an election, a palace coup worth of Venezuela, ignore another “undemocratic” system -- the United States Senate. If the Electoral College is undemocratic, then so is the United States Senate. The Founding Fathers set up both the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate so that no state and its people would be ignored and that the will of the small states would not be subsumed by the populous large states.

Is legislation passed by the Senate also illegitimate because it was passed by senators representing a minority of the population? Wyoming's two senators can cancel out California's senators, who represent 69 times more people. Is that “fair”?

Our system has flaws, but so does every other system. Just how many “republics” have the French had, for example? But it is a system that has resulted in the world’s oldest and most stable democracy, perhaps because the Founding Fathers felt that too much democracy was not a good thing and deliberately devised a system that would not succumb to the passions of the moment and the whims of a transient majority.

Again, we are a republic, not a democracy, and it is worth noting that the U.S. Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, not put to a popular vote, with each state, large and small, having one vote regardless of population. Was that fair and democratic?

In football, wins go to the team that scored the most points, not to the team that gains the most yardage. You don’t change the rules of the game. The Electoral College made the world’s oldest, most stable democracy possible, not subject to the passions of the moment. Yes, it was designed to keep demagogues from controlling the presidency. This time it stopped the demagogues of the left and Hollywood.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.