"Slavery was good for slaves because it taught them new skills"

“State government should decide women’s bodily rights and medical needs."

“Christian Nationalism was enshrined in the Constitution."

"Trump has not broken any laws or engaged in insurrection."

Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.

In short, the discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with corrected information, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort. Fiction becomes fact, and reality becomes crazy talk. Crazy talk becomes a cult of dangerous pariahs seeking vindication and benefit for their bogus truth through force and violence, trading sedition for Revolution.