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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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He really has absolutely no standing in his ad hominems against people who think the election was rigged if he’s unwilling to challenge his own bias in getting informed.
He comes across as a flaming hypocrite.
Yeah, there’s a Big Lie right there.
It is, but, as with most of these discussions, it also has a basis in truth. Why did both GOP candidates lose the GA run-off? Was it because Loeffler should never have been the candidate? Was it because trump told people that the election was rigged and why bother voting? Was it because people were watching the inept GOP leadership say that there was no fraud and nothing to be concerned about in the election as more and more evidence showed up that called that into question? Was it a combination of all of those?
As I told my kids recently, remember that half the world is below average intelligence and thus may make very stupid decisions.
So that they can send the totals to county election HQ. They tabulate the votes in the precinct, then the modem dials a number for the county HQ, connects to a machine there, and uploads the results. I don’t think it’s technically connected to the Internet at all, it’s more of a peer-to-peer direct network connection.
That’s my understanding, at any rate.
“Stupid” doesn’t correlate with low intelligence, I’m pretty sure.
That may be how some of the machines work. I don’t know. But see the post on Chesterton, Dominion, and the Michigan state Senate report.
Footnote 20-somethingThe footnote on page 22 of that report explains things.I believe if you consult the report you’ll find that many of the voting machines have internal modems for connecting to the internet through cell networks in order to report unofficial results quickly. News agencies even access the devices to get those early results.
Hence the horrifying plausibility of hacked voting machines in the absence of rules and processes to ensure that the modems are switched off until the count is finished and the official results printed in multiple copies.
I have never heard of such processes. Have you? If they existed, would they not have been explained ad nauseam in every fact-check since November 2020? Would the federal government and the RNC be officially recommending that machines with such modems be banned in each of the fifty states?
These machines are mystery boxes. As much of a mystery as a dark night in Philly or in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas where no cameras or opposition observers are present and a one-party local government announces their party’s victory after ballot boxes are opened at 3 AM.
I’m all for trust. But we need trustworthiness, and we don’t have it.
This raises the question I have for Joseph and others who seem so confident that the 2020 election (among others) was “free and fair.” Do you really have faith in the integrity of our elections? What would it take to convince you otherwise?
The very fact that we’re not allowed to ask questions without being labeled “deniers” or “ultra-MAGA fascists” makes me trust the system even less than I did the day after election night 2020. Something smells about the whole thing. When Democrats deny election results (the “Resistance,” “not my president”), we tend to ignore them. If we do it, the Deep State mobilizes against us. That’s no way to convince me the system is trustworthy.
The lies are validated by the public reversals. Not all of them actually get reversed but enough to know that the perpetrators are habitual liars. You could fill a book with Biden’s lies.
I agree with what you say here, but I have aside point. Asking “What would it take to change your mind?” requires someone to think the virtually impossible. What would it take to change one’s mind on liking fishing? A fatal boating accident? Grossly polluted streams and lakes? Or on marrying his fiancée? Photographic proof of infidelity? Or on wanting to drive cars on public roads? Again, a fatal accident?
I think it would take a major catastrophe. But in political elections, by the time it becomes clearly catastrophic to the most trusting among us, it will have come too late.
Yes, and we’re accused of obsessively focusing on the 2020 election, when, really, I’m even more concerned going forward.
I rather think it is already too late, and Democrats are demonstrating it with the heavy-handed use of government agencies to suppress (or persecute) their political opponents. We’ll know more after the midterms, but I’m not hopeful. Globalists are a case study in: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yes, I’ve been thinking this too. The Democrats are acting crazy because they don’t care what the electorate thinks, because the elections are already decided.
And I think, or fear, that I also was too trusting of elections until it was too late.
I would need to see some evidence that vote counts were altered in the 2020 election, with specific details about who altered them and how.
Just note that when Democrats devised a plan to seat alternate electors in 2016 who would vote for Hillary, Republicans did not send the FBI to raid their homes.
But the Democrats have no such scruples.
Altering vote counts is but one method of stealing a vote. Tens of thousands of fake ballots dropped in drop-boxes is another.
https://electionfraud20.org
I think Joseph needs the names of those who did it.
Yes, and a very narrow one at that. Polls have already shown that withholding information from Hunter’s laptop(s) altered the election in favor of the Biden crime family. People are truly ignorant of how corrupt Joe Biden is thanks to the Democrat media apparatchiks. But, if they had known, a significant, election altering number would have voted differently.
Will video evidence work?
But, you didn’t answer the first question. Do you have faith in the integrity of our elections? Is there anything else as important you entrust to those already in power?
I can honestly say I don’t trust our government as far as I can throw it. There are too many with too much power invested in keeping power and concentrating it further.
Evidence about who might not be available, and evidence about how might be incomprehensible to all but a rare breed of super-specified computer specialists.
And the evidence might still be good enough.
Or it might not. But that assessment can wait for us to see the evidence.
But before looking at evidence for electronic election theft–not the only kind of evidence for a bad election, as noted in # 164–we have to first learn where we stand.
That’s what Chesterton teaches us. We stand in a windowless room with the lights off. We have no evidence that none of the machines were hacked. There are neither rules nor process to make the system trustworthy. Our elites and officials tend to be untrustworthy people, but what of it? They don’t know anything either. The only ones with any glimmer of clarity are the ignored bureaucrats at the Election Assistance Commission, and some people in Michigan who added a footnote on page 22 of a Senate Oversight Committee report. Trusting the electronic vote count means assuming that no razor-thin Biden margin in a swing state could have been affected by a single person, whether through fraud or incompetence, leaving a modem switched on. Just as if it were the morning after a one-party machine in Philly announces that ballot boxes opened at 3 AM handed an election to the Democrats with no Republicans or cameras present, Ockham’s Razor tells us nothing.
The odds of an electronically stolen election are about 50/50, and not because we can calculate them to that number but because we just know basically nothing.
Nothing’s perfect, but we have a two-party system of government that has proven remarkably durable. Trump won in 2016. Biden won in 2020, but faced a divided Senate. Heck, Senators of his own party blocked key portions of his agenda.
In the midst of all that, something I never thought I’d live to see actually happened: Roe was repealed!
“Those already in power” includes both Democrats and Republicans. We have peaceful changes of power every 4-12 years. Both parties have a vested interest in preventing the other party from rigging elections.
A few favorites:
Let’s see.
If you were doing a small election type thing, pieces of paper in a hat style;
There are 5 people involved. In the course of counting the votes, you find votes that were made on paper not available to anyone involved, and there are say 9 votes rather than 5.
Do you insist on knowing where the other paper came from, and who put it there, or specifically WHY?
Otherwise, everything is just hunky-dory, even though you lost by 6 votes to 3 when only 5 people were supposed to vote?
Maybe he’ll add that. But then the question is: Did the tampering really effect the vote? I myself am wondering what it would take to present absolute, incontrovertible proof. And I think that with all the secrecy and the timeline having run out for preserving evidence, that it will never be absolutely provable beyond what we already have.
I suppose if Biden were to beat Trump in the next election and 100 million registered voters subsequently turned out in the streets of every state capital at the same hour and chanted, “I voted for Trump!” that might do it. But one would still have to take it on faith that there really were 100 million people, that they were all registered, and that they all voted, and that they all are not lying but indeed voted for Trump.
I’m highly skeptical that even this would be effective.
You are reversing the burden of proof here.
We started out discussing “the Big Lie.” Trump has claimed repeatedly that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The slogan of his supporters was “stop the steal.”
If you accuse someone of theft, you need evidence to convict them. Saying “well there’s no evidence you didn’t steal from me” won’t cut it.
Honestly, this sounds like the last lines in Some Like It Hot.
– Jerry: We can’t get married at all.
– Osgood Fielding III: Why not?
– Jerry: Well, in the first place, I’m not a natural blonde.
– Osgood Fielding III: Doesn’t matter.
– Jerry: I smoke! I smoke all the time!
– Osgood Fielding III: I don’t care.
– Jerry: Well, I have a terrible past. For three years now, I’ve been living with a saxophone player.
– Osgood Fielding III: I forgive you.
– Jerry: I can never have children!
– Osgood Fielding III: We can adopt some.
– Jerry: But you don’t understand, Osgood! I’m a man!
– Osgood Fielding III: Well, nobody’s perfect!
Things like elections often rely on chain of custody etc. When chain of custody is violated, it is not necessary to specifically prove that someone(s) actually did contaminate the evidence. That chain of custody was not properly maintained, is all it takes.
Stop, alleged thief!!!
Whatever happened in Wisconsin regarding the charge that Zuckerberg contributed 400 million dollars illegally to help election officials in Democrat dominated jurisdictions?
Republicans don’t occupy the bureaucracy the way Democrats do, because Republicans already have a religion that gives them meaning in life. It’s a false equivalency you’re making.
Also, our system is “remarkably durable” until it isn’t. “’How did you go bankrupt?’ Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”