Watching Trump supporters confidently repeat his lie that he won by a landslide and the election was stolen makes me wonder how do you ever change the mind of someone so thoroughly brain washed? Is this brain washing? Is it more just gullibility, stupidity, or delusion? Or what? Is there any hope for these people to ever change their minds? There is plenty of evidence that Trump is lying, but nothing seems to sway them.
That and ignorance.
It is my perception that large numbers of Trump supporters simply do not understand how the US political system works.
With a gullibility which defies reason, those people thought a privileged rich white bloke was going to look after their interests. Although Trump has been shown to be a pathological liar, his core supporters continue to believe anything he says.
I haven’t seen any empirical evidence which demonstrates such people have been brain washed into believing whatever Trump says-------.
Having said that, it’s my understanding that Trump’s hard core followers tend to be fundamentalist christians. To put things into perspective; if they will believe that superstitious drivel they will believe just about anything.
I’d be fascinated to see a poll showing what percentage of Trump supporters also believe in alien abductions and that aliens built the pyramids at least.
Trump supporters were not brain washed, he touched on and fed into their fears. There is no doubt, he played into the white christian block, and they are unwilling to accept a changing world where whites are no longer the “ruling class” and christianity may also decline.
IMO it is basically impossible to counter a person’s entire life following a certain position, then attempting to change those views instilled by family, community, and culture. You would have to remove that person from those influences and spend years attempting to make them see the world through a different perspective.
I was brainwashed.
Seriously.
If you had met me 25 odd years ago… lol
I had the comfort of black/white; right/wrong - absolutely sure of my beliefs. I had an enemy and the love of Jehovah. I was saved.
Had I been asked to sacrifice myself - I would have (and almost did - thanks to a great surgeon I didn’t die). I was arrogant but thought I was humble. I served well. And I was right
Nowadays… lol 
I’m the person I would have HATED at the door and in life. I would have judged me worthy of gods wrath to die at Armageddon.
Facts don’t sink in. Not all at once. Over time and reality hitting hard.
When there has been too much sacrifice, too much hypocrisy, to many judges in your life… over time, you learn to grow up and think for yourself.
To really make your own decisions.
For some-
They don’t escape. They die. They never are themselves. They don’t want to shake it.
The cult of Trump. The cult of personality. The guy who they related to. To his money? No. To his morals? No. To what??? His dream. He related and made them feel heard at the beginning. He held a hope that they could do the same as him. He used and abused them - mocked the “others” and made them feel oh so special.
The excitement of “living a movie” through the conspiracy world was their hook, line and sinker.
People believe what they want to believe. For most, if they come across information that they have always suspected of being true, then it is. Its the Slytherin Dark Side of the Internet. You are likely to come across any amazing claim online these days. Most people don’t even think to scrutinise anything they find, particularly if it feeds into their personal world view.
Today I revisited a pro-Trump you tube channel, I have been frequenting since before the election, wondering how the troops were dealing with the bitter news Trumps admission of defeat. Not a bit of it. The fight is still advancing valiantly and many are still certain another four years is still possible before the 20th. And the latest drumbeat is that the Italians have uncovered a dastardly plot involving vote flipping algorithms sent to Georgia, Pennsylvania etc via Germany from an Italian source and a notorious Italian hacker who personally and perfidiously delivered the election to Biden…a twenty minute check of names and places and histories reveal another wild mash of misinformation and general bullshit.
But the comments, some obviously added by the site owner under sock puppets, and the most, comprising hundreds of other apparently bona fide posts seething with outraged passion and inflamed indignity promise support and enduring support for the sociopathic narcissist in the WH and they all hang on his last words that “It is only the beginning”.
I can smell the New Dark Ages on the horizon, or are we standing on it now, where truth and fact are wilfully mixed for no fair purpose.
We desperately need to educate our children and grandchildren with the discipline and critical thinking skills to tell the difference.
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Difficult question to answer. Like most sane people I see Trump whining about losing, and claiming he’s been cheated out of a landslide victory, and my first reaction is to roll my eyes in disbelief.
Then I thought, well I kept an open mind about the accusation of election tampering in 2016. So I thought it seems just typical of the man, and he was claiming election fraud before the results had started being counted. By the end I was just exhausted by the same unevidenced claims being made over and over as if evidence had become unnecessary, or the vague assertion that there was irrefutable evidence. If this was the case why could only Trump and his supporters see it, I asked myself.
Why weren’t the people who scrutinise ballot counting agreeing, why weren’t judges from different states upholding his legal objections?
So in the end you’re faced with a massive conspiracy that made no rational sense, or Trump lost and is lying.
I know, I know, its a no brainer, but then there aren’t many Trump supporters in this forum are there. I guess it’s easier to believe you’ve been cheated, than accept you’ve lost. I’m still pretty convinced that the 2016 election involved outside tampering, but whether it changed the result is another thing, and let’s not forget Clinton won the popular vote, it was a closer run thing.
I discussed it with a colleague, and was taken aback when he said “welllll, if there was cheating we’d never know, would we?”
I smiled politely and moved away. I see too many claims of that sort on here, and they always have alarm bells ringing.
Bottom line no politician should want the democratic process undermined, only autocrats would seek to do this, and Trump has confirmed again and again what I’ve suspected of him all along, that he will do anything to grab and hang onto power.
You can do no more than ask that sufficient objective evidence be demonstrated for claims. Once someone is prepared to wave that request away, there’s not much you can do sadly.
Information is the bane of ignorance. The problem is… you can lead the ignorant to the well of information, but you can’t make them drink.
…after my personal experience with indoctrination and the slow escape until I broke free - the struggle to get my brain working…
One of my most valued goals.
Teaching HOW to think. NOT what. Btw I have jumped into about every conspiracy theory rabbit hole 
. Partially out of curiosity (whaaa??? How they get there???) partly because the boys and the Internet.
We had a blast in the flat earth one. Not a poke fun, laugh at stupid - BUT a serious “what if” how do we know?..
OR… think
That fucking “we’d never know” (Sheldon) implying “of course we’re right - just can’t prove it”.
Uh, known conspiracies become “known” via investigative journalism (or whistleblowers) and solid evidence.
Gossip.
These tRUMPturds are just fucking fantasy gossip mongers…
Last but not least final thought to conspiraturds compared to real conspiracies.
My last line of “mental Defense” when emerging from the great mud-flood, young earth creationist, aliens running the planet, inserted “history”, and tRUMP the saviour…
“So what?” “What if it’s all true?” “How does it effect me today?” IT FUCKING DOESN’T
Seriously 
do these stupid shits think they could seriously “run” a country? They fucking can’t even run their stooopid shitty lives.
Edited to add:
Beliefs motivate actions.
I left “belief” behind decades ago.
“Confidence in” has been my mind-set and fuck faith! I do not put a smidgen of “confidence” in anything without evidence (unless it’s so mundane, who gives a shit?)
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I think you’re right-ish. It seems to be possible to remove and reintegrate people from a sect into general society to a point. Seems to be a matter of degree.
I became a catholic by uncritically accepting everything I was told before the age of reason. That inflicted catholicism on me at an almost cellular level.
I parted company with the church in 1968 because I could no longer believe some of their more outrageous claims. EG the trinity, virgin birth, forgiveness of sins and of course the infallibility of the pope.
I’ve been an agnostic atheist for about 30 years. I call myself a cultural catholic. That’s because some catholic emotional responses, such as guilt over absurd things, remain. When push comes to shove, I’m usually able to engage my cerebral cortex and act from a rational position rather than one of faith. Took some time to get there.
When it comes to extreme sects and cults, I think it may be a matter of degree.
Much harder if not impossible to fully recover from membership in a sect or cult which began at birth. Possibly easier if membership began as an adult, although I can’t prove that .
What I’ve learned it that I can’t control how I feel about anything with simple willpower. BUT I can control my behaviour. [Unless I’ve taken that first or several drinks, and the addiction has kicked in. At that point free will no longer operates]
There’s a saying in AA “Fake it until you make it” have needed to do that a lot over the years. Today far less than before.
It is my understanding that behavioural science teaches that some behaviours and feelings can be changed. That they can be changed the same way they were inculcated, with conditioned reflexes. I’m not a trained psychologist, so my understanding may be wrong.
From experience, I can affirm that cognitive therapy helped me change some self destructive beliefs and behaviours.
Could be to much lead in the water. Way too much sugar consumtion. I have an old physiology book from 1860, and in it, they talk about the effects of sugar on the mind and how it causes confusion…
Talk about burning books! How many old books are left… antique collectors go our and buy up everything,… wonder how many if them are religious…
How many atheist Hospitals are there?? We’re being dumbed down and foundational information is being lost and replaced with new views and specialties which only further divide…
Even among atheists… there are women A’s, black A’s, trans A’s, gay A’s, the list goes on…
Divisions keep frivolous debates going on for centuries!
This is a very very very slow game and direction man kind has been playing since long before Christ!
Did you know there is a sec of Jewish people that integrated into the Chinese culture in like 400bc and some how kept the Torah complete and alive in their minds … the Egyptians were giants, and there were many exodus’ from their total control… I have this theory, that the Jews were actually their own people that they deemed (born under the sign of and evil God or fuck who knows… ) but I do understand that the Jewish slaves of Egypt, many were indoor servants others probably carpenters and Smith’s of different sorts, and the black slaves worked in the fields… they used slaves to build their pyramids… … I think they did far worse… they studied the human physiological system… studied the planets and time, which is what everything is really all about…
To know everything we need to expand our minds in a simple way, study the movement of people through our times.
mythology 
Can a hospital believe in a deity?
I don’t believe in any christ.
From memory one imagines? The human mind is capable of memorizing entire books almost verbatim.
At any point do you intend to evidence these relentless claims you keep making? Or make a cogent point?
Can you demonstrate any objective evidence for it?
Extensive and methodical archeological excavations conducted over decades of research, have shown no trace of Jews living in Egypt in any significant numbers during the era portrayed in the biblical myth of Exodus.
A rather racist and particularly stupid claim, how many white skinned people do you imagine lived in Egypt at that time?
A once popular myth that has been roundly debunked in recent years.
I see no evidence of studying in those claims sorry, just mangled ancient myths, with some bizarre fantasies of your own.
Sprry, but did you have a point here? Only you sound like a lot of theists who come here, realing off unevidence claims based on archaic myths.
You’re way behind in your thinking on this. Most current Egyptologist believe they were built by free citizens during the farmers off seasons. They’ve found the workers housing at Giza. They were housed, fed, and given medical care beyond what would likely be given slaves. The most telling thing found to show they weren’t slaves is that they were given dignified burials near the pyramids themselves.
Why they might not have all been happy campers there is some evidence they took pride in their work. They were divided into teams that appeared to compete with each other in their efforts. These groups would basically sign their work with graffiti in out of the way spots. It’s still an effective way to get the most work from people, to give them an identity with a team and set them in competition.
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At least aliens 
didn’t enter the explanation.
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Can you give a concrete example of this lost foundational information?
Ok… religion started as a way to hide the learning of astrology or the movements of our planets and cycles of or moon and time itself. People have always known and witnessed our ice melting away… it was once covering much much more of the land…
The Egyptians were genius… and had ambitions they couldn’t reach because they didn’t have the technology to achieve everything they knew was achievable… make sense?
Our minds can run on a very very high frequency… omg…
Problem with atheism is you loose touch with imagination and how important it is in solving problems, this new age NEEDS proof, hard nosed proof or you won’t listen at all…
So yes, the truth is stranger than fiction, so the irony would be that much if the fiction wrote could actually be true… if looked at from the right perspective…
The bible itself is a blue print for it’s believers to act out in the name of God… like the apocalypse it could be that Christians can and do use it as a way to send messages to those that break certain laws within Christianity… on top of being a ledger holding secrets into the time we may have left on earth as a whole…
Everything that’s ever been written is a clue to our reality, of which we’ve made so many diferent realities to follow…
This isn’t a game. It’s real life. To believe in nothing but a singular idea and “disregard” everything else as simply being “myth” or “folk lore”, imagine the thought and energy it took to to put together such words solely for the sake of a singular idea? Even in the bible they mention the Sun, Stars, and Moon multiple times. The Egyptians worshipped the Sun, then didnt, then did, then didnt, then did, then stayed with polytheism… every great thinker to have ever lived, has studied the planets, thought about time, and made simple observations among us… then certain thinkers decided to use what they found out, against the people…and worried themselves not, cept for money and power and land, and religion and family (not in that order…)
Thing is is that THIS form of communication is, in vain… everything is so mixed up at this point, if you kmew the truth you’d literally lose your bodily functions!
Peace
Also, seems everywhere I research it seems I run into “monkbot” refreshing and changing info across the web?!?!
No more burning books, when all you have to do us change an entry at the speed of sound! Thing about science is that in a large way, you can’t trust it. Specially when IT is controlled by the controllers…
Religion tricked us into science. It was always their idea and ambition, and furthered it along by way of atheism turning directly to science! The #irony is thick!
Really?? Of course this would be the “new” way of thinking, because or history is being changed right before our eyes! I have also read of a guy that’s saying that the timeline for the Egyptians is way off by hundreds or thousands of years… and the when they were unearthed long after being sacked by the Romans and the Greeks, the Brits and Germans came in and we’re in control of digging everything up and classifying everything…
Idk? Since when can we trust the Brits or any one that controls information?
I question you actually believing this “new” simple theory of FARMERS in their “off season” building pyramids… really??
I’ve seen this happening for years… This reconstruction of facts, that were staged from the beginning,… wow
Really? Nice claim. Tell me how not believing or with-holding belief until there is demonstrable evidence of “god” a shutting down of imagination?
How does one relate to the other?
I can imagine a god. So? Doesn’t make it real. I can imagine myself flying like Superman, doesn’t make me able to do it in the physical reality of this earth we live on.