Anyone who wants seriously to look at this problem needs to grapple with the following: preferring one's beliefs to counterevidence is not just a property of "crazy/stupid people", but of humans in general, including oneself and everyone on one's own side. This is a difficult fact to face, and to the extent one can face it, I think it changes everything. Even if one makes the smallest beginning at doing so, it already starts to change everything.
For this we have to stop pointing the finger at the others—their ridiculous beliefs, their preposterous disregard of evidence—and face that we ourselves are the same way. It's not that the other side does it more; it is simply that it is easier—much easier—to see it in them. If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness. (I don't mean you personally, of course, I mean all of us.) And let's be honest: we all feel that we don't do it as much. I feel that myself even as I write this.
A timeless essay on this is Orwell's "Looking Back at the Spanish War" (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel..., discussed last year at [1]). The depth of consciousness that Orwell reached in that essay is profound, but its profundity is obscured by how simply he states it, and no doubt also by the fact that we all think we already know it and are the exception to what he describes.
Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
[1] Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 - Nov 2020 (128 comments)