Despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than seven million votes, Donald Trump tells a Republican summit near Orlando that he would have won every state if not for widespread voter fraud.
Instead I think about his voters and wonder if there is any falsehood he could utter that would cause them to change their minds about him.
Exactly: the point of this kind of blatantly outrageous lie isn’t actually to try to convince anybody of anything; it’s to act as a fascist purity test. The goal is to force everyone either to sink deeper into the cult of personality by knowingly accepting and thus sharing in the lie, which introduces even more cognitive dissonance and makes it that much harder for them to break free in the future, or to out themselves as an enemy so that they can be purged.
Exactly: the point of this kind of blatantly outrageous lie isn’t actually to try to convince anybody of anything; it’s to act as a fascist purity test. The goal is to force everyone either to sink deeper into the cult of personality by knowingly accepting and thus sharing in the lie, which introduces even more cognitive dissonance and makes it that much harder for them to break free in the future, or to out themselves as an enemy so that they can be purged.