I might need it with some family.

johnnyRocket, thanks so much for posting this.

I never thought much about it, I guess I'm not personally susceptible to it. But brainwashing is a real phenomenon, and put the social pressure aspect on top of it, I can (almost) understand where a Trump voter is coming from.

From the article:
"Cult members are typically accustomed to only receiving information that has been vetted and approved by a field of like-minded believers."

Rec'd.

and he is still as brain washed as ever. When presented with outside facts he simply will not read nor listen to us. He says it is all lies. It's crazy and nothing I do has any effect. He just gobbles up the lies and believes them all no matter how ridiculous they are. He even believed Pizzagate for heavens sake. And he is not a stupid person at all. When he retired he just gave up reason.

His family has been friends with my family since before I was even born. The conversation was frustrating to say the least. He seems to get his news and information solely from right-wing sources and social media, so as you can probably guess, he's misinformed about pretty much everything.

He doesn't think there's a Trump-Russia issue. I'm not completely sure if he was even aware that there's an actual FBI investigation into it. He thinks if there is one though, then Trump should just put an end to the investigation, since he's the President and should be able to do whatever he wants. I'm sure he wouldn't feel that way if it were Hillary. Speaking of Hillary, pretty much anything I tried to tell him about Trump, instead of soaking in the information or trying to verify it, he would just throw back all of the fake scandals/fake news involving Hillary and Obama that he could think of. None of what he was saying about them was true, but that never got in his way.

Anytime I would cite a source for my information he would shut it down as fake news. Even if I said it came straight from the FBI or intelligence community, he would just say that they're out to get Trump and they can't be trusted. Absolutely NOTHING I said was getting through to him and this conversation went on for probably an hour. We covered a whole range of issues, and I couldn't make headway on any of them.

I felt completely disheartened at the end of it because I know that there are millions of other Trump supporters across the country who are EXACTLY like him. They don't know how to distinguish between fake news and real news. They are filled with sooooo much false information from their right-wing news sources and paid Russian trolls on social media, that they honestly seem to know next to nothing about what is actually going on in our country and around the world. And almost everything they think they do know is based entirely off of false information.

I'm constantly wondering how to get through to these Trump supporters. I'll try some tactics from the article and see how it goes.