In another firum, we were discussing why people reject facts in favor of personal belief in politics. My response was that facts do not move people, because there are too many facts for people to understand. In the end, people find and accept facts that agree with their existing world view, and ignore those that do not. In this case, the fact was that no industry is self-policing, and yet conservatives reject government, at least in part, because they view government regulations as more negative than positive. Note well that this applies to progressives as well, we just have to swap out the details we are talking about.
In my very humble opinion, understanding why the folks who do not believe us reject our arguments is a critical task for all of us. They do not get that no industry is self policing for very specific reasons related to how human brains work. It was mentioned that they failed to have a grasp of history. But no human has an actual grasp of history. There is too much information to absorb. So, we pick facts to support a narrative that agrees with the world view we have. For any given situation, you can usually find more than enough anecdotes to support your world view. I call the plural of anecdote, anecdata, because it is not really data, it is a small sample that we select to support the narrative we already believe.
Getting past that, and on to the truth, first requires understanding what is going on. Facts alone will never convince anyone of anything.
Here is a nice TED talk to think about. It talks about marketing, but it applies to politics as well:
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