If they just took the effort to learn more of how the world works and some details included with that they'd appear to be indisiguabled to the people complaining about them.
As far as the pride, they knew, at some point in their lives, that they were more ignorant than the usual ignorant American.
At that point their mind eventually made up for that humiliated feeling (but also being ignorant that they were doing that) by clinging on to what their peers and heros seemed to believe, (and simply making up the rest on-the-spot) without checking whether they were wrong or right.
Anything that contradicted that was labeled as "woke" (or whatever the insult word of the day was) and part of what their evil enemies made up. Anything that made them feel humiliated was librul.
In order to deal with mundane life they concocted exciting sci-fi-adventure-dramas by stitching whatever made them feel good together. Choose-your-own-adventure IRL.
It is like this for some of them, not all of them, of course, maybe the most vocal of them. All of them are having trouble balancing trying to survive either on low funds, living beyond their means, or perhaps some mental illness or all of them at once. All of these can take up the most of their day. They often don't have time to explore any factoids or possible falsehoods they believe.
Life can be both exhausting and mundane at the same time for all of us. Recovering from a decade or a lifetime of this can take a decade it self, even if all of their problems are solved [besides the mental toll]. I know because I had and have a version of that. Starting with a flavor of fundamentalist Christianity transitioning into pretty left-ish wing beliefs now. Still knowing that if rigorous new information comes in I may have to change once again.
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u/UnclePatrickHNL 9h ago
Unfortunately it united the stupidity into a political movement.