I’d say it depends on what kind of conservative - bigot, capitalist, or both.

Deprogramming a bigot can be done by getting them to interact with and make friends with minorities. On paper this doesn’t sound hard, but bigots become that way in the first place because they don’t have a healthy and diverse social circle, and you may not be able to just give them one. Hell, depending on how bigoted they are, it may not be responsible or even safe to make anyone else have to deal with interacting with them.

Deprogramming a capitalist has to be done very carefully, but I think for many people there is a lot of common ground that can be reached. I think most people feel the same frustrations that we do, but they’ve been too indoctrinated by the legacy of McCarthyism to recognize that capitalism is the underlying cause of most of what’s wrong with the world today. So you have to be slow and subtle in coaxing them towards this, if you use the words ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, or ‘communism’, they will just shut down and stop listening.

I’ll never forget when my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates back in 2016 and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points. And then she went on to vote for Trump in November. And I get why! The one thing Bernie and Trump have in common is that they tell people “I know you’re mad at the world today, I’m mad too, and I’m going to fix it instead of leaving this status quo where it is.” Even if they’re on opposite sides of what they want to do about it, they agree that the world sucks, and that’s really all that a lot of people need to hear. Start there, and then guide them towards why the world is screwed up and how exactly we fix it.

I think the best argument you can make is to talk about how the rise of automation is going to shape the future. We are moving towards a world where there will be far fewer jobs that need humans than there are humans who need jobs. A world where robots are gonna do all the work for us ought to be a utopia, leaving us free to enjoy life and follow our passions. But capitalism relies on the assertion that everyone must work for a living or else they starve and die - what happens when there aren’t enough jobs to go around? The only way we can solve this is to rethink this premise of capitalism, that everyone must work or die. Automation can only be a utopia in a post-capitalist world, under capitalism it will become a dystopia.

Of course, this only works for people who are not rich enough to support capitalism for entirely self-serving reasons. If you’re talking to someone whose job is likely to be automated away in the future, those are the people you have the best chance of reaching. If you’re talking to someone who is going to own all the robots, hell they probably know and don’t care.

Because of the heavy brainwashing they’ve experienced, their brains will need to first be removed and dried out before they can be reset.

After re-assembly, try a car battery to restart them by using secure clamp-style connections on both ass cheeks. A conservative’s back fat is marbled all the way up through their neck rolls and into their fascinating little brains, so they should start right up. Hope that helps.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/07/18/yanss-080-deep-canvassing/

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/08/05/yanss-107-how-debate-leads-to-progress-and-social-change-no-matter-who-wins/

The whole You Are Not So Smart podcast is about how people think and how you can get people to really examine their beliefs and bringing them closer to rationality.

There are ways to do it, but it’s also easy to push the wrong direction, and you can’t think about it as making someone think a certain way, but helping them examine why they believe what they do.

This is my go-to resource for living with conservatives.

https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-deal-with-a-narcissist

I’m not joking.

Molly/ Ecstasy

Here is a story of a white supremacist switching views after taking it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-white-nationalist-took-mdma-for-a-drug-study-and-renounced-his-racist-views/

Here is an article on how mdma can change PTSD by opening up the brain by rewriting. This is obviously for depression and PTSD, but recognize why it works for these other things. It opens up the brain to becoming reactive to different stimuli after having kept the same pathways for so long.

I think of course, community is the best long term answer. Education is hard for adults but having lived narratives around you showing you a better way is FAR more effective than just some facts thrown at them.

These people need to be taken out of their echo chamber and if possible, given a new vision

Make them cluck like a chicken

Removed by mod

100% in person. You’ve got a much harder battle online. As someone else said, exposure is a big piece. Also just challenging some of their beliefs in a Socratic way

Removed by mod

You’re talking about a fascist, not an “extreme conservative.” And you cannot persuade them “toward center” because there is no such thing as a political “center.” Never has been.

Throwing a spanner in their brain washing is actually a lot easier than people think… but only if you understand their socio-economic conditions. There’s a lot of contradictions bubbling under the surface of right-wing ideology - the trick is to exploit those.

Just the premise of this question is beyond parody. Americans, you are so screwed.

To people asking this question seriously: has it occurred to you that your conservative fellow citizens are asking exactly the same silly question about how to deal with you?

They have a vote. You’re going to get precisely nowhere if you try to “deprogram” them. You’re just going to have to talk to them, and that begins with listening.

This is a story about how someone from the Westboro Baptist Church left because of the way that people engaged with her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV2Zk88beY

What’s worth noting from this story, people that were hostile in their interactions with her only served to entrench her further in her ideals.

What caused her to change her mind were the people that had “friendly arguments” and made an effort to learn where she was coming from.

She listed out 4 key points when engaging in difficult conversations. I extracted/paraphrased some of what she said below:

1. Don’t assume bad intent (assume good or neutral intent instead) - Assuming ill motive almost instantly cuts you off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do. We forget that they’re a human being with a lifetime of experience that shaped their mind and we get stuck on that first wave of anger and the conversation has a very hard time ever moving beyond it.

2. Ask Questions - Asking questions helps us map the disconnect. We can’t present effective arguments if we don’t understand where the other side is coming from.

3. Stay calm - She thought that “[her] rightness justified [her] rudeness”. When things get too hostile during a conversation, tell a joke, recommend a book, change the subject, or excuse yourself from the conversation. The discussion isn’t over, but pause it for a time to let tensions dissapate.

4. Make the argument - One side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is, or should be, obvious and self-evident. That we shouldn’t have to defend our positions because they’re so clearly right and good. If it were that simple, we would all see things the same way.

You can’t expect others to spontaneously change their minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it.

You absolutely want to do it in-person, but understand this is going to be a long deprogramming process. You’ll need to demonstrate how each lie they have been fed is untrue, and correct it with factual information. Once you get far enough down the right-wing rabbit hole, these people start living in a completely separate reality. Not only will you need to deconstruct that reality and bring them back to our own, you’ll need to do so in a supportive and caring way, because most people don’t respond well to their worldview crumbling. You’ll need to convince them that you care for them more than anything else, or they’ll retreat further into the fake reality that’s been constructed for them.

Removed by mod

Honestly I don’t try to change my older relatives’ minds on things. After a certain point your views about life/politics get fixed and then that becomes part of your identity.