Totally off-topic here, but your comment ("for some unknown reason") got me wondering about the psychology of lying or self-deception. When the tendency of accepting, spreading and tenaciously defending misinformation is as
common as it seems to be, I suspect that it's too easy and potentially dangerous to simply dismiss 'them' as liars and a-holes. I've known some folk who've been chronic fibbers, habitually telling falsehoods despite being regularly called out on them, often about the silliest, most pointless or most obviously untrue things. Good people though, so presumably there was just something wrong with their brain. But when you think about it, it's actually pretty strange and impressive that we have this idea of 'truth' at all: We build up a picture of reality inside our brains, and
we say that it is 'true' when our picture of reality matches the real reality based on... what we personally see, or what other people agree is the real reality, or...?
We say that someone is wrong when their words don't match the 'truth' of our picture of reality, and we say that they are
lying when their words don't match our picture
and we presume that they have the same picture inside their brains but have chosen to speak otherwise.
But there's a lot of stuff that goes into making that picture of reality inside our brains, stuff that isn't always simple, isn't always rational, isn't even always conscious; filters for what kinds of information/sources we'll accept and how (or if) we'll either integrate new information or discard-and-replace old information. During the Trump presidency many of us have learned a new word -
gaslighting: Trump is known for his lying even more than most other politicians, often about the stupidest or most obvious things. But whether it's just his own innate pathology or a high-IQ calculated strategy, the effect of these lies is not (as we might expect) causing his supporters to reject him. Rather, due to general partisan tendencies and the sunk costs of having voted for him, it seems the easiest path for most his supporters was to try to rationalize them and pass them off as inconsequential again and again, and again and again.... Helped along by Trump's parallel rhetoric against the media and "fake news," it gets to the point that people (particularly but not limited to his supporters) simply can't be bothered trying to sort fact from fiction on a case by case basis and so their heuristic, their mental shortcuts for generating their internal picture of reality becomes much more heavily dominated simply by questions such as "Do I like this information?" or "Does this reinforce what I already believed?" Those questions are a significant bias for everyone's mental picture of reality, to greater or lesser extents, but in the context of constant back-and-forth partisan accusations and particularly when
any kind of shared picture of reality is rejected by constant lies about even the most obvious or trivial things, perhaps sheer attrition exhausts or reduces the fidelity with which we use our other more rational and discerning filters. There's nothing particularly new about all that of course (for comparison see Hitler's theory of the
big lie), but at least in terms of recent US presidents, Trump has apparently broken new ground in the
breadth of a host of little lies.
Long and short, even in the seemingly most obvious of cases I'm not sure that it's always fair to assume that someone 'lying' about politics (or for that matter religion) is a bad person or even being deliberately deceptive at all. Quite possibly it's just that the way in which they construct the picture of reality in their brains has been messed with, their mental filters thrown out of whack; which could imply that it wasn't top notch to begin with, perhaps due to poor education or the like, but blaming them for that would be kind of like considering it a moral shortcoming to get your calculus wrong!
But also rather importantly, let's remember that none of us has a perfect way of creating our picture of reality, and we're all vulnerable to similar failings; perhaps
especially when we see so much disinformation coming from the other political 'side' that we might consciously or subconsciously decide on a shortcut of simply rejecting their information out of hand... from which it's a very small step to simply rejecting anything we don't like.
