I live in the Bible Belt so as you can imagine I interact with these types of people on a very regular basis.

I once went on a business trip with one of my [at that time] employees. We got along well although I knew he was very conservative politically and a staunch Trump supporter. I am neither of those things which he knew about me as well. We had a long car ride through the middle of nowhere and we talked for a good chunk of it to pass the time.

Eventually I asked him, “What do you like so much about Donald Trump?” I genuinely wanted to know. He told me. I thought his reasons were bullshit but I did ask and so I had an obligation to at least hear him out. He asked me why I didn’t like Trump. I gave him my reasons. We kind of politely acknowledged one another’s opinion and agreed to disagree. We chatted a little bit more and then he said something that I did not expect. “You know those people who go walking around with guns strapped on them all the time? Those guys are idiots. What kind of moron thinks he’s got to prove something so badly that he goes to the store carrying an AR strapped to his back?”

I was honestly shocked. I didn’t expect him to say that and I agreed with him. We talked a lot longer after that about politics and found that we had plenty of other things we agreed on, and plenty that we didn’t. When we finally got to our destination, I thanked him for answering my questions honestly because I genuinely wanted to understand his perspective. I could tell he appreciated that.

That’s a long way of saying that the only way to deal with extreme conservatives is to go talk to them. Its not always easy but you’ll find that you have more in common with them than you might think. Now, that’s easy for me to say. I’m a straight, white, boot wearing, bearded guy with a southern accent. I pretty much fit right in around here. If you’re a minorty, trans for instance, and you don’t want to go talk to people who think you’re some sort of abomination, I don’t blame you for a second. that’s why those of us who are not as “threatening” need to do a better job of being allies.

There’s a passage in the Bible that says “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” It’s true. A “divide and conquer” strategy is incredibly effective. It’s working very effectively in American politics today. And the only way to bridge the gap is to go find some common ground.

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You can’t go wrong just asking questions.

I’d say it depends on what kind of conservative - bigot, capitalist, or both.

Deprogramming a bigot can be done by getting them to interact with and make friends with minorities. On paper this doesn’t sound hard, but bigots become that way in the first place because they don’t have a healthy and diverse social circle, and you may not be able to just give them one. Hell, depending on how bigoted they are, it may not be responsible or even safe to make anyone else have to deal with interacting with them.

Deprogramming a capitalist has to be done very carefully, but I think for many people there is a lot of common ground that can be reached. I think most people feel the same frustrations that we do, but they’ve been too indoctrinated by the legacy of McCarthyism to recognize that capitalism is the underlying cause of most of what’s wrong with the world today. So you have to be slow and subtle in coaxing them towards this, if you use the words ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, or ‘communism’, they will just shut down and stop listening.

I’ll never forget when my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates back in 2016 and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points. And then she went on to vote for Trump in November. And I get why! The one thing Bernie and Trump have in common is that they tell people “I know you’re mad at the world today, I’m mad too, and I’m going to fix it instead of leaving this status quo where it is.” Even if they’re on opposite sides of what they want to do about it, they agree that the world sucks, and that’s really all that a lot of people need to hear. Start there, and then guide them towards why the world is screwed up and how exactly we fix it.

I think the best argument you can make is to talk about how the rise of automation is going to shape the future. We are moving towards a world where there will be far fewer jobs that need humans than there are humans who need jobs. A world where robots are gonna do all the work for us ought to be a utopia, leaving us free to enjoy life and follow our passions. But capitalism relies on the assertion that everyone must work for a living or else they starve and die - what happens when there aren’t enough jobs to go around? The only way we can solve this is to rethink this premise of capitalism, that everyone must work or die. Automation can only be a utopia in a post-capitalist world, under capitalism it will become a dystopia.

Of course, this only works for people who are not rich enough to support capitalism for entirely self-serving reasons. If you’re talking to someone whose job is likely to be automated away in the future, those are the people you have the best chance of reaching. If you’re talking to someone who is going to own all the robots, hell they probably know and don’t care.

I’d suggest that you start by reading David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. You should also look into street epistemology, and Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists.

First, I think that approaching this with the idea that you’re going to “change them” is probably not the correct approach. Rather, you need to approach it as a conversation where you’re hoping that you can better come to understand each other. Beginning with the idea that you will change them has the a priori assumption that you are morally correct, and that’s not necessarily the case. Is it better to do it in person? Absolutely. You will have a very hard time reaching real understanding online. You’ll need to do is find common ground, ask questions, and really, really listen to them. You need to be able to empathize with them. It’s also worthwhile to ask if they’re open to changing their beliefs, if they find conflicting information. (And ask yourself - are you open to changing your beliefs if facts conflict with what you believe?)

What you need to get at is underlying beliefs and fears, not surface-level stuff. You need to understand that these aren’t issues that can be solved with more factual information, because people will weigh facts through an emotional lens, and will weight things differently than you would to arrive at different conclusions.

On a slight tangent, when you talk about cult de-programming–which is controversial–the important thing to do is to utterly separate a cult victim from their support group, aka their cult, and then give them only one point of view. When you talk about deprogramming conservatives, you’re asking people to commit social suicide; it’s likely that all their close friends and associates (or all of their parasocial relationships) are with people that hold similar conservative beliefs. Without surrounding them with people that are more liberal, and are willing to accept them, you’re not going to be able to have a long-lasting effect.

Befriend them. Show them instead of telling them.

You absolutely want to do it in-person, but understand this is going to be a long deprogramming process. You’ll need to demonstrate how each lie they have been fed is untrue, and correct it with factual information. Once you get far enough down the right-wing rabbit hole, these people start living in a completely separate reality. Not only will you need to deconstruct that reality and bring them back to our own, you’ll need to do so in a supportive and caring way, because most people don’t respond well to their worldview crumbling. You’ll need to convince them that you care for them more than anything else, or they’ll retreat further into the fake reality that’s been constructed for them.

You can absolutely win them over but the problem is they go right back. Like someone getting out of rehab and going to right to their dealer they will turn on newsmax or get on Facebook and reprogram themselves.

Force them to interact with queers and minorities. Treating them the same as they treat us.

I don’t think you can. I very gently tried to dissuade a church friend from weaponized disinformation websites by explaining what that was, and he unfriended me and stopped coming to our church and told the pastor we were too liberal. Well we always were so it was just a matter of time before that sunk in, so I don’t imagine anything would have stopped that, but I felt bad. I just didn’t want him getting sucked in to Tucker Carlson because he is a sweet guy and deserves better, but he also seems to have gotten religion because of a psychotic episode so I’m not sure any of this is a good idea for him.

Keep punching them?

I don’t think it’s possible, I tried with some people who I thought were close friends but when they found out I was trans they disowned and bullied me.

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it’s funny that the other question about “how would you deprogram an extreme liberal” got so many down votes rather than this one