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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.

    We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.

    There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.

    The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.

    In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.

    So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.

    https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.