A Liberal Dose, June 23, 2022 "Trump Knew His Election Fraud Claims Were Untrue"

 

A Liberal Dose

June 23, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Trump Knew His Election Fraud Claims Were Untrue”

 

Another week, another two hearings from the House select committee to investigate the January 6^th insurrection. As I said before, it is a litany of shame and corruption -and, unlike the conspiracy theories being thrown at the wall by many conservatives (mostly to distract you from these hearings), it is verified by documents and eyewitnesses under oath -dozens and dozens of them, most of them from Trump’s own administration. I am going to lay out the KNOWN AND VERIFIED FACTS so far.

First, not only did Trump declare there was fraud in the election, he started declaring it months before the election was held, implying that the only way we would know the election was fair was if he won, because the only way he could lose was if it was rigged. This pre-planted the idea in his followers’ minds that if he lost the election it must have been fraudulent.

Attorney General William Barr explained to Trump that there had been no evidence of fraud. Barr said the president did not seem to be interested in actual facts, only in conspiracy theories that confirmed his charge of fraud. Barr said that the theories were so bizarre and devoid of evidence Trump would have to be “detached from reality” to believe them, including the “2,000 mules” theory. Barr and others explained to the president that it had been well known for decades that Democrats tended to use mail-in and absentee ballots more, while Republicans tended to mostly vote in person -and that this was especially true in the 2020 election as Trump had essentially told his followers not to use mail-in ballots (to his detriment, as he probably missed out on a lot of votes because of that). Therefore, his advisers warned him days before the election, it was a common thing for the Republican candidate to start off with a huge lead that would shrink as the (mostly Democratic) mail-in votes started coming in. When that actually happened, Trump claimed it was evidence of fraud (he also called for all vote-counting to stop while he was ahead). Barr explained that it was NOT nefarious for there to be video of boxes of votes coming into a polling place at 3 or 4 a.m. the morning after the election, because in some large cities all the votes had to be taken to one location to be counted, so you had to wait until all the votes came in to the other locations and then move them to a main site. Trump’s advisers explained, in fact, why each of the conspiracy theories he was spreading (including the ones about Dominion voting machines being rigged) were false.

All this was presented in order to establish that Trump knew -or should have known, because he had been repeatedly told by his staff -that his claims of fraud were untrue.

It was also revealed that Trump’s official advisers -his legal team, Barr, and so on -were referred to as “Team Normal” by West Wing staffers, while his informal advisers (such as Rudy Giuliani) were called “Team Crazy.” It was also revealed that Giuliani was noticeably intoxicated when he was meeting with Trump on election night.

One member of Team Crazy that got a lot of attention at the hearings was a law professor named John Eastman, who came forward with a Plan B, if you will. Eastman claimed that VP Michael Pence, as president of the senate, had the authority to throw out the electoral votes in swing states where Trump claimed there was fraud, and declare Trump winner of the election. Barring that, Pence could throw out the electors in those states, and allow different (Republican) electors instead. None of those claims are constitutional, and Pence refused. Eastman admitted the plan would not hold up in court, and would result in riots.

But that, investigators will contend, was the goal.

Stay tuned.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, June 16, 2022 "Someone Tried to Steal the Election, All Right"

 

A Liberal Dose

June 16, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Someone Tried to Steal the Election, All Right”

 

One week ago (June 9), the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021 had its first live televised hearing. More than twenty million Americans tuned in (more than to the NBA finals), and that doesn’t count the ones who dvr’d it or have watched it on youtube or other websites. The three networks and all major TV news outlets broadcast it live.

Well, almost all.

Fox did not show it. Lest one think they didn’t believe their audience would be interested, note that they did not have any commercials during the Tucker Carlson show, on during the first hour of the hearing (not even from the pillow guy). In other words, Fox News willingly gave up millions of dollars to make sure their watchers did not wander off during commercials and accidentally see something true. Side note: many studies have shown that people who get their news only from Fox are less informed about what is really happening than people who watch no news at all.

I hope all of you watched it, or found a way to go back and watch it later. There was (and will continue to be) testimony from countless witnesses, including quite a few from the Trump administration. Much of it is on film, and in many cases in official documents, plus many people will be testifying live. In other words, it is not a conspiracy theory or “fake news.”

It is as real as the blight on our national reputation it documents.

Here is what we know as FACT:

Donald Trump insisted he won the election, despite the fact most of his people told him he had lost. He continued to deny the outcome, spreading inaccurate information and outrageous theories as his “proof.” His efforts to overturn election results were thrown out by over sixty judges (many of them appointed by Trump himself). His Attorney General, William Barr, was only one of several advisers who told Trump that the claims had no merit and lacked any evidence that voter fraud significant enough to “steal” the election had occurred. Barr called the claims “complete nonsense,” as well as a coarser term that starts with the word “bull.” Ivanka Trump testified that she believed Barr. Barr testified that he resigned because Trump was trying to make him pursue baseless voter fraud claims in an attempt to overturn a constitutional election.

Trump next claimed that the vice president has the authority to throw out electors from any given state by claiming voter fraud, and instead swear in alternate Republican electors from that state. Pence does not have that authority, and there is no legal basis for substituting electors to nullify the will of the people in a given state. Vice President Pence verified he did not have the constitutional authority to do this, yet Trump continued to pressure him to do so. A federal judge has said Trump broke at least two federal laws just in his efforts to corruptly coerce Pence into overturning the election. Meanwhile, Trump pressured governments of states where Biden won to withdraw their fairly chosen electors and/or to back up his unsubstantiated voter claims. He may face charges in Georgia for trying to browbeat that state’s Republican government to “find  him just enough votes to win.” I say face charges, because that is voter fraud.

Trump and some of his inner circle, including Rudy Giuliani, began speaking on the possibility of declaring martial law and having the military seize voting machines and supervise a new election. America condemns this when other countries do it, and rightly so. It is against the principles of democracy. Russia is one of those other countries, by the way.

Man, I’ve barely covered the first point.

I am going to continue, over the next weeks, to summarize every main point of these hearings. It is a litany of shame, dishonor, corruption, and treason.

And it is well-documented.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, June 9, 2022 "Why Is It So Hard to Pass Gun Laws?"

 

A Liberal Dose

June 9, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Why Is It So Hard to Pass Gun Laws?”

 

 

“Another school shooting. It has become like clockwork.”

 

That’s the first line I wrote for this column, almost three weeks ago… but every time I was ready to send it in to the editor, there was another shooting, and I delayed this topic in order to talk about the new one, too. And there have been so many new ones, so close upon one another, I finally realized that if I wait until I am caught up with the number of mass shootings, I’ll never actually get this piece written. And, apparently, we came very close to one at the Cookeville Wal-mart last week.

 

Clockwork.

 

It is easy to become desensitized to it. Shootings at the grocery store, at a church, at a military base, at a club, at a concert. But I will never be desensitized to the shooting of little children. Hence the tone of this article.

 

I am a gun owner. I like guns. I have trained with guns (though it’s been a while). As a U.S. citizen I have the right to have handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles in my home, to protect my property from varmints and my home from aggressive invaders. While the wording of the Second Amendment is frustratingly vague, the Supreme Court has interpreted it to be a protection of what I just described. That has not always been the case- some “wild west” towns banned firearms in the city limits.

 

But “the right to bear arms” has never meant “all arms that exist.” It has, can and should be regulated. I mean, hand grenades and rocket launchers are arms. Some people might think it would look cool to walk around with live grenades or rocket launchers, but you can’t, because it’s a public health risk. The same principles apply to military-style semi-automatic weapons- their only practical use is KILLING LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE QUICKLY. It is the same reason AUTOMATIC weapons were banned decades ago (and remain banned): gangsters in the 1930s were killing each other, and bystanders, by the carload. But even Al Capone didn’t target little children (unless they got in the way).

 

This is just common sense, and most Americans agree with me. But gun manufacturers don’t agree with me, because they want to sell lots of guns, to make lots of profit. Know who else will not publicly agree with me? The Republican politicians the gun industry owns. Politicians are afraid they will lose power, or their jobs, and the gun industry is afraid of losing money. And to heck with our children.

 

Someone else who doesn’t agree with me: a minority of citizens whom those gun-industry-owned politicians have stirred into a paranoid frenzy by saying that the mean liberals are coming to take ALL your guns, and that your home is in danger of being invaded by caravans of immigrants. Side note: gun sales always go way up when such paranoia gets a fresh stir.

 

I’ve had friends reason that the second amendment exists so citizens can overthrow tyranny, therefore private citizens need to have the same weapons the army does, in order to fight against them. Some of those folks supported the January 6^th insurrection, because they didn’t like how the vote went. Counting all the votes is not tyranny; creating laws designed to prevent people you don’t like from voting, because you wouldn’t like the outcome, THAT’S tyranny. My point is, some people think the Second Amendment trumps all the OTHER amendments, or want to ignore them completely. Heck, they even ignore the last part of the Second, where it talks about a “well regulated” militia. Politicians want to keep the votes of their base, and therefore bend over backwards for the gun industry, who keep the base agitated and donate to those politicians.

 

But know where you can’t legally carry a gun? Government buildings. Especially capitol buildings, where the politicians are.

 

Wake up.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE    

A Liberal Dose, June 2, 2022 "Fake Conspiracies Can Lead to Very Real Dangers"

 

A Liberal Dose

June 2, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Fake Conspiracies Can Lead to Very Real Dangers”

 

For the past few weeks my columns here have focused on local issues, and I have not addressed the major national concerns that have arisen. While it should come as no surprise to anyone that local and national issues are very much connected, I’m going to shift my focus a little. Allow me to catch you up, if you haven’t been paying attention.

After years (decades, really) of conservatives working hard to gain control of local and state governments and ensuring an ever-more-rightward tilt of the Supreme Court, we are seeing the results. Meanwhile most progressives, as usual, have not noticed the ship was sinking until their hats starting floating off their heads and wishful thinking did not put them back on.

After 50 years, Roe vs. Wade is in serious danger of being overturned -despite the fact that 70% of Americans do not want that to happen. Most Americans do want some regulating of abortion, but fewer than one-third want it banned outright. Red states around the country have proposed -or already passed -laws that would, in the event the Court overturned precedent, forbid abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or overwhelming danger of death to the mother. Some propose forcing women who have miscarriages to prove they did not cause them, on pain of prison, or to carry the lifeless fetus to term. Our very own state legislature recently considered a bill that would allow the family of a rapist to sue his victim if she aborted the fetus his crime put into her. Now some states are coming forth with plans to ban any form of birth control.

Meanwhile, just in the last few weeks there have been more mass killings, with several targeting ethnic minorities -on top of an ever-rising number of smaller hate crimes. This is being indirectly stirred up by conservative politicians and media personalities who are parroting “replacement theory” -one of several ideas and slogans popping up on the far right lately that originated with American pro-Nazi groups in the 1930s. This theory states that there is a Jewish plot to bring in immigrants and bolster native people of color so as to overtake white people as the majority and take over the country. The logical conclusion of that line of thinking, in the minds of impressionable or unstable individuals, is that it is patriotic to do everything possible to stop that from happening, which is exactly what the mass shooter in Buffalo claimed he was trying to do.

All over the country, there are politicians saying and/or voting for crazy things. And regular people, too; there are folks right here in White County who believe that Tom Hanks is part of a secret baby-eating cult, that Bill Gates invented Covid in order to put microchips in your brain, and that the “My Pillow” guy is privy to secret information verifying their conspiracy theories. I think his pillows must have something more potent than feathers in them.

I am not saying that everyone who disagrees with me goes to such extremes, they do not. But the number of people who do is growing, and the consequences are becoming very, very real. Unlike the conspiracy fantasies of the far right, this stuff is actually happening and can be empirically documented.

Those folks are being hoodooed. Tricked. Bamboozled. Their fears are being stoked into a frenzy until it becomes potentially violent -and why? To get their vote, yes… but also to keep them from noticing what is really going on. Who benefits from this? Follow the money. The corporate bigshots who own the politicians would do anything to keep their taxes low and their businesses unregulated. So what if it divides the American people to the point of bloodshed? It has worked before. Check your history… while you are still allowed to.

Come on, neighbors. Let’s put down our pitchforks and take off our blinders, together.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

  You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE