Why All the Secrecy and Fallacy?

I can’t help but notice striking similarities between two controversial moments in American history, and the contention that surrounds them. Those similarities may mean that the official narratives in both cases were correct, but it could also mean that they were not—the two moments of which I’m speaking are the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the 2020 presidential election—let’s take a closer look.

What seems common to both is an apparent lack of publicized factual evidence that would prove the official versions beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, supposedly persuasive, but logically invalid arguments have been used, in addition to falsely describing all skeptics of official versions as mentally-defective “conspiracy theorists.”

One could lend a benefit of doubt to those who, apparently knowingly so, resort to analyses with purposes not of truthful discovery, but of “winning” the dispute surrounding the controversies, and acknowledge the possibility that they are just overzealous in protecting our government and its agencies against the loss of public trust which arguably, would be detrimental to our national coherence, strength, and even survival.

But then, if government officials and the so-called “mainstream” media can deceive the American people for a good cause, such as defending truth that they are just unable to prove, how can we know they would not be doing the same for a bad cause, such as perpetuating falsehoods?

Perhaps the officials and media members find Americans can’t be trusted with the truth, or couldn’t understand or handle it—if so, unlike the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution clearly implies, We the People cannot remain the political authority in America. Such a speculation explains why so many self-appointed defenders of American “democracy” are not only among the most relentless critics of our foundational document, but are also portraying those patriotic Americans who cherish and live by it as ignorant or misinformed “far-right” or “MAGA extremists” (as if there were something inherently wrong with making America great, again) that are more dangerous to our continuity than Adolf Hitler reincarnate.

After all, We the People are not immature and naive little children who need a “wise” and “virtuous” ruling elite to keep us uninformed for our own protection. As a matter of fact, there are no objective and evenly applied criteria for testing the mental fitness or morality for those who are admitted to this ruling class—so how can we be sure that any of these people are even wiser or more virtuous than the average American? Some of them may well be, but statistically, it’s all but impossible to believe they largely are. I am sure one could find plenty of examples that strongly support the notion that a majority of our ruling class are of subpar intelligence and short of impeccable ethicality.

Getting back to the controversies that are subjects of this article, it seems quite obvious that the ruling elite knows it cannot prove that Oswald was the lone assassin, just like it cannot prove that there was no outcome-determinative fraud during the 2020 presidential election. For otherwise the respective proofs would have been presented to the American public. And when I write “proof” I mean a verifiable argument in which the conclusions logically follow from the publicly known facts without resorting to political pressure, demonization and intimidation of critics, censorship, and other forms of discouraging free intellectual inquiry into officially predetermined conclusions.

For instance, watching the published edition on the Zapruder film showing President Kennedy’s assassination one can notice that the second—and, apparently, fatal—shot that hit the president caused backward movement of his head and upper torso, as well as deposition of what reportedly were parts of his head on the back of the limousine. That would suggest that at least one shot might have been fired from a location other than the 6th floor of Texas School Book Depository—where Oswald supposedly was— situated behind, and not in front of the presidential motorcade at the moment the assassination took place. If it actually were the case, then the official thesis that Oswald was acting alone would have been false. Although some theories supporting the official narrative were offered—like the notion that a shot in one’s head could cause the victim head’s movement and the blow-out of head’s soft tissue to move towards the shooter—they were less than convincing and did not prove that said thesis was correct. In particular, a recent article uses (among other things) integral calculus and partial differential equations to derive the desired conclusions from such facts as that the president was shot from a high-powered military rifle, or that his hat size was 7 3/8 in., and reads more like emotionally-loaded, outcome-driven persuasion delivered from behind the shield of amply-used college math and physics than a disinterested scholarly analysis based on relevant facts, logic, and well-structured calculations.

Similarly, there were many videos showing seemingly fraudulent activities while processing and counting the votes during the 2020 presidential election that raised a reasonable doubt in the validity of the election’s result. Also, real-time statistical distributions of numeric data during the vote counting exhibited a considerable number of anomalies that could suggest systemic manipulations of the prescribed counting process. Yet, rather than thoroughly investigating all the election’s “red flags” noticed, recorded, and reported, those advocating the official version claimed, without providing proofs of their claims, that the 2020 presidential election was the safest and most fair and honest in American history and that fraud and cheating—if they did happen—were not “outcome-determinative.”

It appears that 60 years have passed but the more things change the more some of them stay the same—the same defenses of the Warren Commission after the Kennedy assassination became the defenses for the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

If emotionally-loaded fallacious reasoning, threats, and name-calling are the best proofs of the official versions of the events discussed above, then perhaps they are not as correct as the officials and the so-called “mainstream” media insist. According to the common-sense reading of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, We, the People—and not our ruling class— have the constitutional authority to ultimately decide what the truth is. So far we, as opposed to many members of the ruling class, have dutifully fulfilled that responsibility. So, there is no good reason for abdicating our power and delegating to our governments and their agencies our fundamental right to search for truth and the evidence thereof as we see it fit.

Mark Andrew Dwyer’s previously published work at American Thinker can be found here, and other recent columns are posted here, here, and here.