Most of your explanations amount to spreading the trees out far enough and saying, "see, there's no forest here". You agree that all of the underlying mechanis

Most of your explanations amount to spreading the trees out far enough and saying, "see, there's no forest here". You agree that all of the underlying mechanisms perform their component tasks, but disagree that there are cumulative, persistent effects of prolonged exposure to combinations of them. My point is that there are large swaths of conservatives that have been radicalized by the last 25 years of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And now they are being told that mainstream media is lying about everything. It's so complete in many people, that they don't hear themselves when they lay out their political motivations. The number of people whose primary goal in achieving any particular political end is to anger their political opponents is staggering. Its like a catch all if someone can't be convinced of the traditional conservative stance on an issue, they can fallback to "well, at least liberals will lose their minds". This radicalization is primarily the cumulative effect of conservative media, and its villification of the left. Cults can't exist without a confident authority figure dominating the flow of information to the adherents. These things don't just happen out of vacuums, without a leader in on the scam. Just because reading Dianetics is not 100% effective in converting to scientology, that does not mean that the book isn't an effective tool of persuasion, that combined with the other effects like ingroup psychology, can get people to join a cult that will bankrupt them without a second thought. With regards to advertising, I mean the use of sex, patriotism, or other emotionally charged concepts to trigger positive associations with the subject being marketed. I don't claim that all people are impervious to all instances, I mean that enough people are susceptible to it, and it has persisted over a long enough period of time, that it has produced a significant amount of people with seriously warped views of how government works, how the 20th century played out, and what the powers that be are planning to execute imminently. I think there are literally people out there being primed to support whatever totalitarian aspirations Trump may have, and that they are being convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Do you really think that hundreds of thousands of people are being facetious when they refer to Donald Trump as "God Emperor"? With regards to basic training, the effectiveness can be attributed directly to the process I describe. Convince people that they are in danger for long enough, reinforce this with threats and screaming. After the people are sufficiently scared, give them a path to escape the danger. Apply the imaginary danger proportionally to the level people stray from your prescribed path. You posit that since the danger is controlled and not as real as the grunts are lead to believe, the effect is somehow negated. It works in the military because you are isolated from any contrarian information by the military themselves. There's no source of information to tell the trainees that its a controlled, safe environment. It works in political echo chambers because the people have isolated themselves willingly. There's no _trusted_ source of information to temper the vitriol from the echo chamber. Your model of people and how they take in and react to information ascribes a lot more agency and rational decision making than what I posit. Your argument is that since everyone technically has the tools available to them to become educated enough to not fall prey to devious persuasion, devious persuasion is automatically defanged, because all people avail themselves of all education. Tobacco smoking, specifically nicotine addiction, is not a different mechanism at all. In fact it is a highly illuminating example that shows how insidious constant bombardment with persuasion can be. Nicotene has only the slightest physical withdrawal symptoms. The cravings smokers exhibit are a product of the brainwashing. People don't wake up in the middle of the night from cigarette cravings. They've convinced themselves that smoking a cigarette removes stress, instead of ensuring its perpetuation. When they crave the cigarette, they fantasize about how much they will enjoy it, but when they actually smoke it, addicts are surprised 20 times a day to find out they don't enjoy it at all. But this surprise doesn't free them from their mental prison. They are of the opinion that cigarettes modulate some completely unrelated stress in their life. Think of talking to a smoker, and just telling them how dumb they are, by repeating obvious facts that we all agree upon. How does that work out for you? They immediately put up defense mechanisms and dig in. But in their private moments, they know that everything you said was true. I posit that many Trump supporters are in the same predicament. They are faced with the prospect that their entire world view is wrong, that they aren't the woke genius's they've assured themselves to be, they are just Bernie Madoff investors, tools of Vladimir Putin, the choice to double down on supporting Donald Trump is no choice at all. Trump supporters are addicted to him like Nicotene, and they will irrationally defend the Nicotene even as they cough and wheeze, because after all, whats more emasculating and cuckold-like than admitting you've been catfished by a charlatan to the very people that have been screaming this fact at you for over a year?