For years I assumed that providing facts would persuade most people to use common sense and critical thinking skills.
I'm wrong, of course.
I haven't been able to come up with alternative course, one that breaks down the personality-cult hive mentality.
That is an interesting question. What does it take beyond evidence and reason to change the minds of stubborn in denial? The best I can tell, from Russians who came to the West before Putin's wars, is they changed their minds slowly and indirectly.
For example, a young Russian woman came to the west in pursuit of a degree in Journalism. Thankfully she went to a US university where the ethics of journalism aspired to be as objective as possible, taught her how to weigh evidence, how to check for internal and external consistency of sources, etc.
She graduated a proud and patriotic Russian and started work in America. Both in college and later she started suffering cognitive dissidence. When she defended Russia for its transgressions, people patiently recommended she read particular scholarly articles or books. She said nobody mocked her, they just smiled and pointed out where she might find alternate views.
I took her a few years, but her now western identity as an "objective" and professional Jounalist kept finding new information that exploded the Russia as victim myths she grew up with. She said she went through a few years of confusion before one day it hit her: "I had been lied to all my life". She was stunned that it took her so long to see it.
The key to enlightenment started with teaching how to think; if a person has no reason to embrace truth itself as objectively knowable then they are not able to change their minds.
The second stage is direct, not force, knowledge into their transformed brain. "Seek the truth and ye shall know it" becomes possible.
Takes a long time and some people can't learn - they are, intellectually, more or less flat worms - they react to pain or pleasure, but not much else. They are, for example, most fo the toadies that surround Putin and many that surround Trump.