I won’t claim to know objectively, although I roughly agree with a lot of the theories people are offering in other comments. One thing to add: The lack of critical thinking ability, I think, is crucial in letting this stuff develop. I think a lot of what’s going on there is just conversations between people who just all make decisions based on emotion (how well what’s being said “resonates” with them, how confidently it’s presented, how it lets them be part of an “in-group” which then gives them a feeling of belonging, etc) instead of because they have the tools to be able to evaluate the arguments and have decided they believe in them. That’s why it is entirely unconvincing to put arguments in front of them. They simply don’t care to evaluate them and they don’t have the tools if they did want to. It’s just not how they operate.

I saw an extremely revelatory post on lemmy.ml on some kind of math principle with an objectively accurate answer (with a pretty straightforward proof of that answer included), and the comments were full of people presenting the wrong answer and arguing why, using exactly the same super-confident presentation and style of “resonant but empty” argumentation that they use when they talk about politics.

And I thought, oh. Makes sense. They just like sounding like they know what they’re talking about, and everyone else is the stupids. That’s how they interact. It’s not really new, there have always been political theories that don’t make a ton of sense with wide communities of people who fall in love with them anyway. It’s just on the internet now, and so it’s easier for them to find each other and self-select themselves into little communities where critical analysis on the topic is actively attacked if it ever rears its head.