More evidence of Republican voter fraud and defensive propaganda tactics

Mark Meadows, fraudulent voter and elite 

Republican Party neo-fascist traitor

His valiant defense: No comment

The AP writes: 

Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, has been removed from North Carolina’s list of registered voters after documents showed he lived in Virginia and voted in that state’s 2021 election, officials said Wednesday.

Questions arose about Meadows last month, when North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration, which listed a home he never owned — and may never have visited — as his legal residence.

A representative for Meadows, a former congressman from the area, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Public records indicated Meadows had been registered to vote in Virginia and North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a 2020 presidential election ballot in the state.

Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election, as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, and in the months after Trump’s loss, to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner. In his 2021 memoir, he repeated the baseless claims that the election was stolen.

Judges, election officials in both parties and Trump’s own attorney general has concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The Republican 'keep your mouth shut' propaganda tactic

It is worth noting that Meadows, like nearly all Republican elites, when faced with evidence of their own or their tribe's or cult's bad behavior, almost always respond with no comment. Failure to respond to inconvenient facts or truths or evidence of bad behavior by a partisan or his/her tribe or cult is a powerful and routine propaganda tactic. Essentially all Republican politicians, propagandists and elites are expert at keeping their mouths shut in the face of bad behavior or crimes and broken laws by themselves and/or their side. The same behaviors are ruthlessly called out and self-righteous, but hypocritical, screams of LOCK 'EM UP!! abound when the other side does it.

The keep your mouth shut tactic is surprisingly effective. There are solid biological cognitive and social behavioral reasons for the effectiveness of staying silent in the face of bad news and crimes. Those reasons are:

• The tactic of silence is 100% effective at preventing easily fact checked lies and saying stupid things that make no sense and/or are easily rebutted. Put another way, silence is an excellent breeding ground for some reasonable doubt. That is all that is needed for plausible deniability.

• The tactic of silence is very effective at leaving minds willing to give the benefit of a doubt able to do so. When so motivated, e.g., by ideology or tribe or cult loyalty, he human mind  rapidly and unconsciously rationalizes and minimizes or completely explains away home team/cult bad behavior. Bad things, even awful ones, get rationalized into insignificance or non-existence. That reduces or eliminates the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when confronted with bad news.  

• The human minds evolved to operate in a default mindset of trust, which fades if the mind gets betrayed or cheated too often or too badly. By keeping one's mouth shut in the face of bad behavior or betrayal, some, maybe most, people who are still in the mental trust mode will default to trust, and that unconsciously kicks in a normal, automatic motivation to rationalize home team and/or home player bad behavior into insignificance or non-existence. Keeping one's mouth shut makes the pro-bad behavior mental trick easier to occur.    

• Although it has become weaponized and partisan for many or most Americans, society still believes in innocence until guilt is proven. These days, innocence appears to be mostly or completely taken for granted for Republican bad behavior by most of the Republican rank and file. That also applies to Democrats, but probably at a significantly lower intensity level. By keeping one's mouth shut, one says nothing that can affirmatively damage the bad actor's position in view of his/her bad behavior. 

Unfortunately, one does need to pay attention to political propaganda tactics these days. The Republican Party has sunk into a moral rot that accepts lies and deceit in service to the party and its agenda. The GOP uses propaganda tactics routinely and ruthlessly. There are no moral qualms left in nearly all of that party's elites any more. And sometimes, the Democratic elites are not so great about their honesty. But despite flaws and bad things with both, there is not badness equivalence between the two sides.

Plausible deniability usually means keeping one's mouth shut 

about one's own lies, sleaze and crimes