Practical Politics
It is a very strange phenomenon, this continuous attempt at re-writing history. It is illogical and dangerous. Telling the same lie over and over will not make the lie the truth. If it did not happen, it did not happen. History moves forward, not backward. Shouting from the rooftops and in every social media scenario possible that you won an election that you clearly lost will not make that lie the truth. Trump lost the last presidential election and will undoubtedly lose even more as a result of his continuing to lie about it.
The numbers, as usual, are definitive. In the highest total of voters in American history (159,633,396), Trump won 46.8 percent, or 74,222,958. And Joe Biden won 51.3 percent, or 81,283,098. After constant lying and over 200 legal cases ruling against Mr. Trump, he still persists. But closing one’s eyes to a truth one does not want to face, does not eliminate that truth. It only prolongs one’s acidic non-healing.
If the Justice Department brings to fruition the stolen documents case against Mr. Trump, as expected soon, it will not matter if Mr. Trump repeatedly takes the position that the classified documents he removed from the White House and kept in his private estate belong to him. In spite of his claims to the contrary, the documents could not be declassified simply by his wishing for that result, or waving a magic wand so to speak, nor did the documents ever belong to him.
They were and are the property of the U.S. government, and at trial that fact will be easily demonstrated, along with the accusation that Mr. Trump, in fact, stole the documents and refused to give them all back when it was demanded of him. Again, wishing, hoping, and pronouncing a different result simply because one can, will not change oil into water or vice versa. Believing in one’s own ability to ‘have one’s own facts’ is fine, except when it’s not. A courtroom is very possibly the last place to test that theory when the evidence is firmly against you.
Having a body of elected legislators try to abuse parliamentary procedure by ousting two legally elected members of the Tennessee state House of Representatives, is another example of trying to replace historical facts with wishful thinking. This is 2023, not 1923, and the laws of the KKK will not so easily prevail in legislative circles anymore. That history has changed. Both legislators are being sent back into the state house from which they’ve just been illegally removed, using the easiest routes—being sent back by the local bodies that originally elected them—but they were going to reclaim their elective seats anyway, because they were illegally removed in the first place, and a court ruling stating that fact was not far off.
White males in modern American society who still believe they can simply bellow out orders and expect Black folk to merely line up and follow their instructions have not been paying attention. This is not their fathers’ and grandfathers’ history. As the saying goes, ‘Times have, indeed, changed.”
And they are not changing back to those days ever again.
In logic, students are readily taught how to recognize the non sequitur fallacy that the Trumpites love to use. That is, Since Fox News commentator Alex Jones, Donald Trump and many other social media sources have been adamant that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, then surely Dominion Voting Systems, which was responsible for the vast number of voting machines used in the election, will be found guilty of robbing Mr. Trump of his real presidential victory for 2020. Mr. Trump is the real POTUS; Joe Biden is an imposter !!! In other words, a demonstrably false premise cannot lead one to a non-fallacious logical conclusion.
Up is up, and down is down. Period.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
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