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What Precisely Was the Big Lie?
C. S. Lewis’s character Professor Kirk was right to ask why they don’t teach logic in schools these days. Our absurd political circumstances have rarely, if ever in human history, needed logic more. Let’s do what we can to shed some logic on the talk about Trump’s talk of the 2020 election, shall we?
An enthymeme is an argument with an unstated step, usually an unstated premise.
Aristotle explains that enthymemes can be useful rhetorically. You don’t always have to spell out every step, talk like a robot, and lose your audience. Sometimes it’s ok to just say, “The defendant was seen at the pier on the night of the crime, and therefore did not commit the murder,” without explicitly telling people who already know the local geography that the pier is a long way from the crime scene.
But enthymemes have a darker side, like when you say “Alex is Polish, so he’s stupid” (Richard Purtill‘s example of a bad enthymeme).
Obama gave us a fine example of a bad enthymeme in 2008. He used to diss John McCain by saying that McCain agreed with George W. Bush 90% of the time. (Or maybe it was 95%. Or maybe he varied his estimates. Hard to remember exactly. Let’s just stick with 90%, shall we?)
Obama’s argument against McCain depended on a premise that Obama did not say out loud–the premise that says just how often Bush was actually wrong. If the premise was that Bush is wrong 100% of the time, then the premises of the argument do a good job beating up McCain, but one of the premises is plainly false: No one is wrong 100% of the time.
But if the premise is only that Bush is wrong 65% of the time, then Obama’s argument only establishes that McCain is wrong 58.5% of the time. If the premise were that Bush is wrong 55% of the time, then the argument would establish that McCain was only wrong 49.5% of the time–in other words, that he is usually right!
So Obama had to keep it quiet just how often Bush was wrong. Whatever the premise was, if we said it out loud, we’d start thinking for ourselves instead of doing what Obama wanted, which was to scurry along from a hastily drawn conclusion that McCain is wrong a lot into an enthusiastic vote for Obama. If Obama had let his other premise out into the open, then it would have been easy to see two things:
1. There’s no general agreement on how often Bush was wrong, and therefore little clarity on how powerful Obama’s argument against McCain actually is.
2. The most powerful versions of the argument would rely on an obviously false premise.
Now, back to Trump. A lot of people are using enthymemes against Trump these days. Trump tells the Big Lie, we are told, and therefore he is a big liar, a big problem, a threat to the Constitution, and so on.
What I don’t understand is: What exactly is it that Trump said that was a lie? There is an unstated premise here.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said the 2020 election was rigged? If so, then the Hemingway book shows that the premise is false–it actually was rigged.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that there was a lot of fraud? But in that case, the currently available evidence indicates that the premise is false–there was some fraud, and there was probably a lot of it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that illegal actions flipped swing states? That’s probably a false premise too–illegal actions probably did flip swing states. Maybe the ones considered in Teigen vs. Wisconsin Elections Commission, for example, and almost certainly the million-plus Biden advantage in mail-in votes cast in violation of the state Constitution of Pennsylvania.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen electronically? If so, then we need to talk. We need to talk about how, without even talking about 2020 specifically, electronic fraud actually looks pretty plausible because we have vote-counting machines with internal modems and no processes in place to ensure that the modems are switched off during the vote-count. And after talking about that, we’d have to figure out what sort of evidence there is either for or against some of the machines having been hacked in 2020.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the Senate should not have certified the Electoral College vote? If so, then the premise is wrong because Trump honestly believed it. But at least I can agree that he was mistaken about that.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the election was stolen when Dominion applied an algorithm and the voters “broke the algorithm” before some jerks brought in some fake ballots or whatever? Lots of details in there–likely at least partially mistaken, although still not a lie as such because he honestly believed it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that we knew all that stuff at the time? Yeah, maybe that was a lie. I sure didn’t know it at the time; I was barely figuring out some of the early bits and pieces. I still don’t know exactly what happened in 2020.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen? I’ve heard it said that this is exactly the premise, but this is why we have to have big vocabulary words instead of nice things. Vocabulary words like “enthymeme.” An election could be “stolen” in any of the ways mentioned above. If that was the lie, then we still don’t know what the premise is.
What is the premise of the argument against Trump? What exactly was the Big Lie?
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Separate issue, but my point was that Biden failed at not appearing “crazy.”
Did you know that I spent many weeks saying he did and annoying the true believers on Ricochet? That was before major chunks of evidence emerged, of course.
Straw man fallacy.
My intent is not to add length to a thread that is already been added to by repetitiveness that has little direction other than to challenge. But I believe it is important to express a real and genuine appreciation for the exacting work done by the author in putting together an array of information and real evidence in an orderly matter which a reasonable person can review and reach a conclusion on their own.
I said at the time, here and other places, that the matter in which the election was run was an arrogant, “in-our-face” operation but that it would take both time and a great deal of real work to draw a true and complete picture. This author has done more in less time than I really expected. But it is worthy work and to be greatly appreciated.
My position is still that the changes made at the state level in so many states without the legislatures are clear violations of the Constitution. That should be unarguable. The language is clear, regardless of any national panic. That itself makes the elections in those states illegal before any discussions already made here. To deny that might be considered confirmation bias, by reasonable people.
Once again, thanks to the author for such honest, reasoned and exacting work.
Not nearly orderly enough.
Not yet.
But thank you!
The major problem that some might have the information and evidence so patiently collected and presented is that an honest evaluation could make the notion of the “Big Lie” harder to shallow, it being the last or at least latest Trump “crime” after all the rest have lost their legs.
A billion accusations, zero convictions.
;) perhaps, but far ahead of me and my small abilities!
I think it’s also worth noting that the “Election Credulists” (those who believe elections are honest without real evidence of it) accept a lot of misbehavior which – especially for the lawyers among them – they would never accept in any other situation. Much of the election laws and procedures involving chain-of-custody etc, are in place to hopefully assure election integrity. And if they are not followed, as with chain-of-custody etc, nobody needs to PROVE that malfeasance actually happened. It is enough that the rules were not followed, blatantly in many cases.
And the Steal Deniers simply shrug and say, so what? I call this the implicit, “they stole it fair and square!” argument.
Ballot harvesting is legal in California, but in states with electricity it’s a crime.
He may have appeared crazy to you, and perhaps even to everyone else you know (hence the Nixon reference), but millions of Americans looked at the same race and concluded Trump was the crazy one.
Any link is there perchance?
https://www.azag.gov/press-release/guillermina-fuentes-enters-guilty-plea-yuma-county-ballot-harvesting-case
A real crime. But I’m not sure how closely we can connect this to 2KM.
It’s his style though. He’s the Don Rickles of Ricochet but without the good-will or the laughs.
If anything he bent over backwards to not show any chicanery. Intellectually admirable.
She pled guilty back in June, but has been back in court recently.
By the way, the newshounds at the Arizona Republic want you to know
What we know about San Luis, Arizona, election fraud case exploited by conspiracists
Conspiracy theorist? Moi?
No way! Bill Barr is certain that was not an issue!
Problem was, they weren’t looking at the actual people and what they said and did, they were looking at how the media lied about both of them.
Yuma County is also very small compared to Pima and Maricopa Counties. Makes you wonder how many people like her were operating state-wide.
Shawn, if you examine the voting stats from the 2016 Pres Election, you’d see there were ~66 million votes for Hillary, and ~63 million vote for Donald.
Add those 2 numbers up and you get 129 million voters who cast a ballot for President in that election.
Are you really really comfortable with the idea that 155 million people voted for either Biden or Trump in 2020?
Where did an extra 26 million voters come from? Remember this huge upsurge in the voting public came about in just 4 years.
Explain if you can.
It’s no great mystery: voter turnout was higher than in recent elections.
It still has plenty of room to go up, more people did not vote than voted for either candidate.
Not even the same election:
Trump won the primary.
Or did he? Now that this evidence of fraud has come to light, can we be certain that Trump really beat Bill Weld?
Ah, because of all the protections that were in place for the general election that weren’t for the primary,
Cheating is too easy. Evidence will be hard to come by.
That’s the plan. But the exact nature of the connection I can’t address, based on our brief exchange.
Great job on this post, Aug.
It must be frustrating for a philosophy professor to try to get people to understand reason and logic when they have been taught to operate purely on hatred for Emmaunel Goldstein.
You also brought out the “internet atheists” who think that after 2000 years, they have come up with a sure-fire argument that’s never been heard before! LOL!
I regret that I have but one like to give to this post. I think that you have done more to show that there are legitimate questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election than any other person I have seen, though I haven’t read Mollie Hemmingway’s book). Some may ignore your work, but that is whistling past the graveyard. I think that we will know a lot more about the integrity of the elections in a couple of months. One reason that we are seeing the plethora of articles about how the Dems are “surging” and that the “red wave” isn’t going to happen is that it explains away the rigging that may occur. Its also to encourage Democratic turnout and depress Republican turnout, but, if the Dems hold onto the House and Senate, it won’t be because the red wave didn’t happen, it will be because they rigged the election. Its happening right now with the polls that we have a hard time believing. In 2020 in Wisconsin the polls had Biden ahead by 17 points…and we all know that turned out. In short the polls are either broken or skewed on purpose, maybe both.
I want to second your view regarding @saintaugustine‘s research, analyses, and overall contribution to understanding at least some of what happened in the 2020 election process.
I would like to add my thanks to Ricochet and my fellow members for the education I have received while here. I grew up amid the major threat of Communism being part of American life. It was always a threat until recent years when it has actually manifested its influence in daily life. I’ve been trying to understand that. I going to post an essay explaining more.
That’s great. Don’t do it.
I think it’s important. So I will do it.
You sure sidestepped that question that should be easy for anyone to answer irrespective of any other events. Why should there be on-line capability for vote tabulation?