Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
Because it’s a cult.
Fascism and religion run on the same hardware. The paramount values are obedience to a higher power, and the core belief in the scriptures/propaganda.
This is why centrist politics never work. Why make a step towards them when they will never make a step towards you?
Anyone who believes in the fairy tale of religion is going to be more susceptible to other lies.
But that doesn’t explain why some people are way more susceptible to being stuck in a cult than others.
Personally I think it’s genetic. It’s some kind of brain feature that leads to people having beliefs that are extremely hard to change. I say this is a feature, not a defect, because you only have to go back a few hundred years to find a society where not having the right belief system can quickly lead to ostracization and death.
It’s a survival tool that has suddenly found itself in the modern informational environment and it can’t cope. See it in action and it’s incredibly tragic.