The Syllogism of a Political Coup

            IM:  Gentlemen, as I watch the Mueller investigation play out, I just can’t help but to think how sinister it seems.  Lavrentiy Beria comes to mind.

AM:  I hear you, IM.  I am trying to understand what is going on with the so-called deep state conspiracy theory.  There is a constant 24/7 push to delegitimize President Trump.  We have the Mueller investigation, a new Woodward book, and now an anonymous op-ed article by an alleged highly placed senior administration official working for President Trump.  Is there a logical thread that connects all this activity?

            Old Gadfly:  If one takes the time to clearly examine facts within a well-defined context, then, yes there is a thread that actually violates logic.

            IM:  What the heck does that mean?

            Old Gadfly:  First, we need to refresh our minds as to what a syllogism is when understanding argumentation.  Here is a definition of syllogism from philosophyterms.com:

A syllogism is a systematic representation of a single logical inference.  It has three parts:  a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.

 

·         The major premise contains a term from the predicate of the conclusion.

·         The minor premise contains a term from the subject of the conclusion.

·         The conclusion combines the major and minor premise with a ‘therefore’ symbol (∴).

 

When all the premises are true and the syllogism is correctly constructed, a syllogism is an ironclad logical argument.

Let’s now apply this system to the Mueller investigation.  Keep in mind that an investigation such as this is based on a predicate, that is, a law was broken.  The predicate in this case is that President Trump colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.  So, lets map this out as a syllogism.

Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian collusion by President Trump and other members of the Trump presidential campaign.  So, what is the predicate for the major premise?  Based on DNC hacking evidence, there was collusion with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.  The subject of the conclusion is the minor premise:  Trump or members of the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia.  This is the way to map it:

Major premise:  Based on DNC hacking evidence, there was collusion with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

Minor premise:  Trump or members of the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia.

Conclusion:  Trump or members of the Trump presidential campaign, based on DNC hacking evidence, colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

But what is wrong about this syllogism?

AM:  At least two facts make the syllogism suspect.  First, collusion is not a crime.  Second, the DNC hacking evidence is far from certain.

IM:  The intelligence community, led by James Clapper and John Brennan, have publicly claimed the intelligence community has evidence.

Old Gadfly:  Of all the friends I have quizzed when asking them what exactly the evidence was, they did not know.  They simply took the word of Clapper and Brennan. So, exactly what was the evidence?

 

IM:  That Russia hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and shared this information with Wikileaks to influence the election in Trump’s favor.

Old Gadfly:  Yes, that is what they have claimed in the public narrative.  This so-called evidence conditions the major premise in the syllogism:  Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.  However, how does the intelligence community know Russia hacked into the servers?  Didn’t the FBI offer to examine the servers for forensic evidence?

AM:  Yes, they did, and the DNC refused any access to the servers by the FBI.  Instead, the DNC hired a private firm called CrowdStrike to do the investigation.  This action then further protected the DNC in its claims Wikileaks received DNC material from Russian hackers.  Wikileaks’ Julian Assange denies Russia was involved, that he received the material from another source.  Some (called conspiracy theorists by the left) believe Seth Rich, a young DNC staff member, may have been involved in assisting Wikileaks.  But now he is dead, in an apparent assassination, and his laptop has disappeared.  This incident made a minor entry into the public narrative and has completely disappeared.

Old Gadfly:  Obviously, the so-called evidence is dubious and makes this version of the Trump collusion syllogism weak.  We cannot say the major premise in the syllogism is true.  Therefore, we cannot say the conclusion is true.  Could the syllogism be reconstructed to build a stronger argument to weaken Trump’s legitimacy as president?

IM:  How about the dossier that led to four FISA court warrants for surveillance?

Old Gadfly:   The syllogism would then be reconstructed with the same conclusion slightly modified, such as Trump or other members of the presidential campaign colluded with Russia, based on dossier evidence, to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

AM:  Again, let’s examine the doubtful nature of the dossier.  The dossier was developed under contract for millions of dollars with GPS Fusion by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.  The effort involved collaboration with a British spy and Russian contacts.  Nothing in the dossier has been validated, but it was the basis for justifying four FISA surveillance warrants of members of the Trump presidential campaign.  This was a fraudulent attempt to find incriminating information.  Fraud, on the other hand, is a crime.  Given these circumstances a far different syllogism can be constructed:

Major premise:  There was manufactured evidence involving foreign collusion to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

Minor premise:  The DNC and the Clinton campaign were involved in manufacturing evidence.

Conclusion:  The DNC and Clinton campaign manufactured evidence involving foreign collusion to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

Old Gadfly:    This syllogism seems far more plausible.  Unfortunately, the earlier syllogism still drives the Mueller investigation, chalking upon worthless victories by destroying numerous lives in the process.  The Mueller effort, combined with other efforts such as the Woodward book (Note:  Woodward works for The Washington Post, which is now owned by progressive billionaire Jeff Bezos) and the recent anonymous op-ed letter actually represent an Orwellian dynamic predicted by Walter Cronkite in 1983.  Perhaps somewhat chastened by his mischaracterization of the Tet Offensive in 1968 while working for CBS, Cronkite provided the following Preface to a 1983 edition of Orwell’s 1984 (the following are excerpts from the Preface):

Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power.  How is that?  Because they were so useful, and because the features of the world he drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar.

They are familiar today, they were familiar when the book was first published in 1949.  We’ve met Big Brother in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini.  We hear Newspeak in every use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism.  And every time a political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience that mental process Orwell called doublethink.  From the show trials of the pre-war Soviet Union to the dungeon courts of post-revolutionary Iran, 1984’s vision of justice as foregone conclusion is familiar to us all.  As soon as we were introduced to such things, we realized we had always known them.

. . . If not prophecy, what was 1984?  It was, as many have noticed, a warning:  a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imagination of earlier ages.

. . . 1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass.  That warning vibrates powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computers that can tap into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television program we are watching and how many people there are in the room.  We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioral emotions like aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.

And we hear echoes of that warning chord in the constant demand for greater security and comfort, for less risk in our societies.  We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost.[1]

This preface was written 35 years ago.  Its prescience should frighten us.  Think about what he is saying:

 

·        “use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism.”   When Comey laid out the case for all the laws broken by candidate Clinton, he euphemized the harsh reality with the claim there was no intent to break the law, as if the actions do not imply intent.

 

·         “And every time a political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience that mental process Orwell called doublethink.”  The notion that Trump demands the absurd has been manufactured by a leftist cabal in the public narrative, to which Trump is compelled to counter in his tweets.  The outrage about separating children at the border is based on law established prior to Trump’s administration.  Trump is accused of operating above the law, but what laws has he broken?  Mueller is still investigating whomever he wants based on fraudulent grounds.  When single Federal judges stopped Trump’s travel ban, he honored the injunctions until overruled by a superior court.  Instead of unconstitutionally legislating on immigration as his predecessor did, Trump wants Congress to solve this issue.  Many on the left want us to think Trump is the fascist president Sinclair Lewis painted in his novel, It Can’t Happen Here.  Fascism is a socialistic manifestation.  Trump is promoting the importance of our Constitutional Republic based on classical liberalism and Judeo-Christian values.  His opponents are pushing for secular humanistic socialism.

  

·     “From the show trials of the pre-war Soviet Union to the dungeon courts of post-revolutionary Iran, 1984’s vision of justice as foregone conclusion is familiar to us all.”  Raiding the President’s personal attorney’s offices and then prosecuting him for charges unrelated to the scope of the investigation makes for great press.  Even those who have not faced indictment suffer greatly from legal expenses when faced by Mueller and his politically-motivated henchmen.  Of course, these tactics are not new.  Joseph Stalin’s chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus, Lavrentiy Beria, claimed: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”  Ironically, the so-called Trump Tower meeting focused on the Magnitsky Act.  The press had no interest in the subject—only the alleged Russia collusion to get dirt on candidate Clinton.  Read Red Notice by Bill Bowden about how his attorney Sergei Magnitsky had his law offices raided, with all documents and computers confiscated, then jailed on fabricated tax evasion charges, tortured, then murdered by Russian authorities.  We know more about these circumstances than those surrounding Seth Rich’s assassination.

·        “a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imagination of earlier ages.”  Friends, this speaks to the deep state.  Unelected elites who pen anonymous op-eds published by news sources that openly defy a duly elected President.  The evidence hides behind veils of euphemisms.  Who would believe investigative material from such individuals as U.S. Representative Louis Gohmert, who can only publish his work through another digital source?

AM:  I served my country for several decades.  I stood for something.  I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  There is no doubt that in 2018, the greatest threat to America is domestic.  It is a deep state of political elite that want to fundamentally transform America.  This faction is anti-America.  Its patriotism is to a future utopia that is the basis of progressivism.  Nikita Khrushchev predicted this political manifestation in 1957 at the National Press Club:

. . . I can prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism.  And please do not be afraid of that.  Your grandchildren will not understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of a socialist society.[2] 

    

Old Gadfly:    Americans better wake up regarding the syllogism of a political coup underway and its fraudulent deception of the American people, and have the courage to preserve our Constitutional Republic.  We can do this peacefully in the midterm elections.  As citizens of a just society, we should also demand accountability for those conspiring to destroy a duly elected President.       

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[1] George Orwell, 1984, with a special preface by Walter Cronkite, (New York, NY:  Signet Classics, 1983 [originally published in 1949]), p. 2.

[2] Cited in J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit:  What the Communist Bosses Are Doing Now to Bring America to Its Knees, (New York, NY:  Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1958), p. 3.