Am I incorrect to approach this from an angle of assuming most libs are intelligent enough to believe this bullshit because of information asymmetry (from watching Maddow go nuts over Trump, Russia, etc.), and an ideological model of the world which compels them to both a) discount the credibility of left-wing sources and media while uncritically absorbing western state media talking points and b) MSM and to resolve apparent contradictions with reformist (FDR- or Warren-esque) politics?

Most college-educated libs (except maybe some of the STEMlords) have at least some of the tools available to unlearn all the bullshit. They understand that systemic racism, sexism, homophobia exist, even if they think the “X faces in high places” tokenist approach is a major step forward. They at least understand that oligopoly and rent-seeking are a problem, even if they think capitalism is reformable. They understand that the 2003 Iraq invasion was at least initially a horrible idea, even if they fail to grasp the extent to which the US empire wraps its tentacles across the globe. They know climate change is a deadly-serious problem that calls for radical solutions, even if they don’t know what those solutions would look like.

Their biggest problem is overcoming the hurdle of re-evaluating 20th-century socialism, which their history and economics education taught them was a complete failure (rather than only mostly a failure) and guaranteed to yield mostly poverty, death, and suffering - they don’t understand that this was a result of capitalists laying siege to socialist states for literal decades, they’re so gaslit by the Cold War agitprop and red-baiting that they fail to recognize the race to the bottom and threat of capital flight as a global hostage situation and think that markets are the natural (or even optimal!) state of an industrial world, something impossible to challenge without everything turning to shit.

These people might even prefer the Pareto improvements (or at least Kaldor-Hicks improvements) socialism promises for the working class - if only it actually worked! But they’ve seen satellite photos of the Korean peninsula, or at least heard about studies comparing the economic development between East and West Germany, failing to notice that West Germany and South Korea were imperial Potemkin villages developed precisely to mislead western liberals into believing the implications of these “apples-to-apples” comparisons. They’re insufficiently media-literate to recognize the bad-faith human rights concern trolling from western MSM against Cuba, Venezuela, PRC, etc. for what it is, while still correctly opposing the western human rights violations they know about (e.g. the torture in Guantanamo, the post-9/11 mass surveillance, and the shit happening in ICE/CBP camps). This is a group of people who’ve been convinced that they have no choice but to throw someone vulnerable under the bus every election in the name of harm reduction - it’s a mindset open to arguments for regime change on a humanitarian basis (the US did go to war with Hitler, after all), and resignation to Malthusian policies that disproportionately screw over the poor and POC.

This collective gaslighting is the barrier we have to shatter with our own agitprop. We have to call out the MSM’s scapegoating and divide-and-conquer bullshit whenever we see it. We have to convince these people that a better world is even possible, let alone worth fighting for! We have the antidotes for most of these brainworms now, I know we can reach some of these people.