gunga galunga: Fox News viewers tune into Fox News because they want their beliefs validated that liberals and Democrats are Satan Incarnate and the Republicans are the Avengers who will save the world. Sean Hannity knows how to make them a pizza they will love and will keep coming back for more.

This. It's easy to write them off as drooling morons who can't tie their own shoes, but it's not the case. My mother is an educated woman, well read and well traveled. When she told me she was going to vote for Trump in 2016, and I saw the Q sticker on her car, I nearly fell over.

In the intervening years I have tried to understand how this has happened, and best I can tell it's a combination of a few things. 1.) This started happening when she retired, and it gave her a community to be part of (albeit an incredibly dumb one). 2.) Constant propaganda. Literally every hour she is awake she has on YouTube, or Fox news, or some other media source confirming the false reality she lives in. But to gunga's point above, it isn't just "consuming" news. It's reinforcing an identity and belief that they want to believe.

3.) The final thing is that at some point these people have to make a choice. The lies and falsities are simply too obvious. They need to choose to admit they were duped, or, they need to double down and just interpret the entire world as being against them and take it all as, essentially, an article of faith. Virtually all the people I know who started down the Trump rabbit hole do the latter. It's simply too damaging to their ego to admit they were suckered. It's much more fun to play the victim.

This is why it's pointless to argue with them. They aren't using rational thought, they aren't making decisions based on available information or even their own lying eyes. It's not just a sense of community (which is a large part of it), but also an entire identity. For Trump or Q or whomever to be wrong is not just a mistake, it's foundational to their perception of themselves. I'd also add that for him to be wrong, that would mean the awful things he did as president would make them awful people as well, which is a (true) but tough pill to swallow.

Anyways, I still have a positive relationship with my mother (the only MAGAT I've kept in my life) but there is a very explicit understanding that we don't talk politics. Every now and then she transgresses this, usually after some "explosive" new "evidence" of whatever has been published on Fox or wherever. It's 100% always misleading, incorrect, or evil (usually all 3), so my response is to loudly and immediately rebuke whatever nonsense she spouts. It's especially helpful if it is in public, because if she's not surrounded by other MAGATs she generally clams up quickly, as they can't stand to have their beliefs questioned in the open light.