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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

>and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all

This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of, and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.

I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic because there were two or three cases in the U.S., but I had a family member insisting it was "just the beginning" and was going to get worse. A year later he said there's "probably a lot of stuff happening that's not reported yet". Two years later he forgot he ever said it.

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> It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.

Tribal alignment. If the tribe had moved on from Trump and he had lost the election, your relatives would still be grounded in these conversations and reality.

Trump is still the leader of their party and cultural movement, They have zero incentive to acknowledge the truth if it conflicts with these loyalties. If anything, such an action would be dangerous and risk their standing within their tribe, So the loyalty test then becomes denying what's clear and obvious to prove you are still a loyal member.

They have lost all ability to remember the past.

Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that.

Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke.

My father is a general contractor and viscerally experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very face.

My father has never been outwardly sexist and always demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to participate in normal society. He still was convinced by right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the cockpit.

The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for him again, and it happened the exact same way.

Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change their memory of reality to fit their ideology?

I do think there would be some utility to isolating and elevating this particular issue. It seems to be pretty uniform as a phenomenon. Conspiracy theorists can't remember the past.

I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.

One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.

So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.

I have relatives who’ve been concerned enough about the “[democratic candidate] will take your guns!” thing that they’ve made and displayed signs about it. For multiple election cycles.

That these same candidates, when elected, haven’t even attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned Congress, doesn’t seem to register at all. They hear their lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe it whole-heartedly. It’s so weird. You’d think at some point they’d start to wonder why it never happened.

They would do it if they had the political capital, and further they will tell you as much.

Why would I not believe candidates who have spent their political life advocating the banning of the most popular rifle in America? When someone shows you what they are, believe them.

If Democrats want people to stop reacting that way, they need to commit to leaving law-abiding gun owners alone, not say "well it'll be fine, believe us" yet continue to campaign for bans and pass idiotic restrictions that do little to control crime.

> political capital

Could you explain this a bit more?

It would take a combination of accumulated goodwill, unity, a significant legislative majority to overcome the filibuster, and a perceived mandate from the people (particularly in certain swing states) to survive the blowback that would follow pushing gun control on the level of another AR-15 ban through — plus a lack of other competing legislative priorities (e.g. health care reform) that could suffer as a result of the gun control push.

This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.

No, you've won, you get to keep the guns and the school shootings and now the political shootings.

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