You can’t fight the Republican party’s ‘big lie’ with facts alone | Peter Pomerantsev

Agreeing to Donald Trump's claims about the rigged' 2020 election ensures your fealty by making you complicit

Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.

She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.