So.

In January 2021, a group of wingnuts (and some rioters, too) tried to prevent the almost-entirely-ceremonial confirmation of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, and, hence, the next President of the United States. By regurgitating the endless stream of lies from their party's leader, Donald Trump, these Congressional wingnuts had primed their followers to believe that their candidate had actually won the election. They were assisted by their followers' utter lack of knowledge about the Constitution and complete ignorance of how this whole "vote-counting thing" (i.e., "an election" ) works. Also egging them on was a cadre of professional ignoramuses masquerading as experts, who not only repeated Trump's lies, but gave him new ones to repeat and pretend were his own. They also brought along a mythical sea monster, which remains mythical to this day, since it was never "unleashed".

Long story short, the law-&-order-supporting insurrectionists managed to cause the death of a police officer, and managed to get four of their own number killed (or "martyred", as Trump would have it), as well as doing thousands of dollars in damage to the Capitol and taking a shit on the Constitution- I'm sorry, taking a shit on House Leader Pelosi's desk.

In the aftermath, once the rioters were finally expelled and order restored, a large number of these Congressional Republicans completely forgot the panicked phone calls they had been making to the White House a few hours earlier, begging for Trump to do anything to quell his followers, and promptly glued their lips back onto his ass.

Their leadership, amazingly, managed to find the testicular fortitude to actually criticize Trump and say out loud (at least, out loud in private) that he bore responsibility for the insurrection by his all-out contesting of an election which he lost, by a lot, and his constant stream of lies that the election had been "stolen". But within days, their gonads had once again retracted up inside their abdominal cavities, with a sucking sound heard on Fox affiliates nationwide, and they went back to their Trump-approved lies that he was the victim of a conspiracy involving pretty much everybody in the world which, nevertheless, went undetected by every investigating body ever, including Trump's own Attorney General. (Well, obviously they were all in on it! For reasons!!)

As it stands, roughly 70% of Republican voters still believe that the election was invalid. They also express doubts about any future election, except, presumably, for those their side wins.

From all this, and over many years of study and reflection, I've concluded-

Republican voters want to be lied to. They, like any of us, find information which confirms their own worldview comforting; but, unlike rational people, they would rather hear a comforting lie than accept a truth that they dislike. If 70% of Democrats had insisted that the 2016 election was rigged in favor of Trump, Republican would have rightly mocked them. But when their own candidate loses, suddenly reality becomes subjective. Politics, for Republicans, is a religion- and no amount of facts can shake their faith.

I'm not sure what to do with this conclusion, since I don't know how to present truth as a lie in a way that Republicans would accept. They are clearly invested in living in their own fictional world. I don't know how to bring them back.