beachdeath:

How do you persuade people to listen to reason or acknowledge the facts, when they have openly declared that they don’t care about reason or facts?

The answer is simple: You can’t. These are autonomous adults who have decided that loyalty to Trump and hatred of liberals matters more than the truth. There are no cool psychological tricks one can use that are likely to convince them to readjust their values system.

That answer, of course, is unsatisfying, because it’s not like liberals can simply drop all engagement and discourse with conservatives. Doing that would be tantamount to giving up on this country and letting the liars drag us directly down the path to authoritarianism, and quite possibly outright fascism. So what do we do, rhetorically speaking, to fight back?

The first thing liberals and journalists should do is find ways to speak the truth without inviting conservatives to troll them with “debate” about it — debate that will inevitably just be the pitting of lies against truths, leaving those who still believe in reason frustrated and giving conservatives endless opportunities to gloat about their triggering talents.

There are a variety of tools that accomplish this, but the primary one is to avoid speaking to liars and instead speak about them. For instance, cable news would do well to stop inviting Kellyanne Conway or other administration liars to appear on camera and tell more lies. That time would be better used straightforwardly debunking their numerous falsehoods and deliberate misstatements.

Brevity is key here. Whenever you’re explaining, you’re losing. For instance, it was a waste of time going frame by frame through that Jim Acosta video to prove he did nothing wrong, since everyone who claimed to believe he had done something terrible was lying in order to troll the left. Journalists would have done better to  present the fact that Acosta did nothing wrong as self-evident truth, which it was, and move on to addressing the real story, which is how Trump uses lies to advance his agenda.

When it comes to more direct encounters with trolling right-wingers — on social media or, say, at the Thanksgiving dinner table — the maxim to live by is that you can’t reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into. Evidence, facts and rational argument are all pretty useless when you’re dealing with a person who rejects the value of all those things.

It’s a good idea to remember what the troll is trying to get out of this situation. For most conservatives who play this game, they “win” either by baiting a liberal into a pointless and unwinnable debate or by making the liberal flustered and angry. So don’t reward them by giving them either.

Instead, try to raise the social costs of lying for the purpose of trolling – as high as possible. For randos on social media, shame is admittedly unlikely. Blocking them and depriving them of the interaction they crave is the only real method. But on those occasions when you’re engaged with a coworker, friend or family member, that’s a time that social shaming — which liberals are often reluctant to use, but which can be really effective — is helpful.

Don’t debate facts. Focus instead on impacts. Instead of getting into an argument about whether climate change is real, point out that lying in order to leave the world a worse place for one’s children is gross behavior. Don’t debate whether #MeToo has gone “too far” or whether Christine Blasey Ford is lying. Instead, shame the person saying these things by bluntly stating your support for victims and opposition to sexual abuse. I find that making it personal can often be really helpful. If a conservative in my life praises Trump for trolling the press with his “enemy of the people” language, I might ask that person if they really think that I am a force for evil and that I should be censored, or perhaps imprisoned.

Be calm and dispassionate, however, and state things matter-of-factly. Any sign of emotion will be taken as evidence of “triggering” and is likely encourage to encourage still more trolling behavior. But I’ve personally had a lot of luck with calm but adamant shaming, perhaps because it makes behavior the focal point, rather than some pointless debate over what the facts are.

– Amanda Marcotte, Conservatives have gone fully fact-free: So how the heck do we even talk to them?