As I've made several moves up the management chain in leadership an eye opening thing for me is how disingenuous and PURPOSELY stupid people can be at the VO and above level. As in they will use every bit of ADVANCED calculus, statistics, and brain power to find "data" to support a winning narrative, while completely shutting their brains to the most basic common sense that doesn't support the narrative.

So take that corporate mentality, and apply to politics. Along with the fact that a good chunk of their based isn't even "shutting their brains off", they literally will believe any talking point they are told at face value.

The example I can think of that might be applicable to all of us is spellcheck. When I was young I was GOOD at spelling. I could memorize the spelling of all kinds of basic words. At this point though I rely so heavily on spellcheck, that part of my brain has been completely turned off. I was working on something in PowerPoint last week, and I was misspelling a pretty basic word. But spellcheck wasn't catching it so I didn't even think twice about it. Shared the PPT with a colleague who called me out, and I was like "NOOOOO - look at my PPT, no red squiggly lines." But on theirs they saw the lines. I had clicked "Ignore All" at some point in the doc so it wasn't catching the misspelling. I rely so heavily on spellcheck that even though my brain should know that it's misspelled, I was seeing confirmation bias in real time.

For a good segment of the GOP base, it's just like that. Deep inside they know something is wrong, but if they can find one thing on Fox News to support the argument, one talking point, no matter how disingenuous or cherry picked, they will completely ignore basic facts.