You're right but it's worth remembering that that doesn't strictly matter when you're talking to people.

It's not artificial to them and if you instantly treat it as though it is, you're going to slam the door on any sort of exchange before it starts and you're going to entrench them further.

You can communicate with people without treating objectively untrue things as real for the sake of the exchange.

That's a valid point in that you can't bridge fundamental differences in worldview with just being nice to someone.

That said, you can make people more amenable to discussions if you approach from a place of understanding.

but if someone says, "candidate X is bad because she rapes kids in a pizza parlour basement before drinking their blood", where do you even start unravelling that stupidity?

Well, first by not calling it "stupidity."

It's clearly not a true statement but this person believes that it is and if you're automatically treating a core part of their worldview as just stupid and wrong, then yeah they're not going to listen to you.

It doesn't help to address these more tangential beliefs. Things that seem irrational are often rational from the perspective of the person that holds them and if you follow the logic tunnels they use to get there, you can often make a lot of progress.

So your Pizzagate guy, you can't engage him on Pizzagate. You just can't. You're playing on his field, he gets to make the rules, all it's going to do is frustrate you. But you can dig down and learn that he got these ideas from some YouTube channel that he spends all his time watching because he doesn't have much else to do with his time.

He's socially isolated, maybe due in part to his beliefs, and that provides you with an "in" to be able to start talking to him instead of his beliefs. Maybe you agree to hang out more but you set a firm boundary with him "We don't talk about Pizzagate stuff."

It's not a guarantee but part of how you de-radicalize people in general is offering them a support system outside of their radical beliefs. People don't radicalize because they're bored on a Tuesday. They radicalize because those radical beliefs offer some kind of refuge from a situation they're having trouble dealing with or accepting.

You can offer a measure of humanity to someone in these extreme headspaces and it can be a route to them working past that worldview.

First of all, conservatives are NOT “really good at getting it once you put them in [others’] shoes”. In fact, in my experience, the vast majority of them - and I come from a rural, socially and religiously ultraconservative environment, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to their attitudes, prejudices and thought processes - can barely comprehend the purpose, and often even the very concept, of imagining another person’s perspective, much less that of someone currently suffering injustice and active oppression at their hands.

On a broad level, yes, I agree with you. Modern American conservatism is pretty allergic to ideas of empathy but if you get people down on an individual level you often find that people are able to get there and that makes sense, most people are not monsters. Most people have a degree of empathy and, if you can reach that, you can talk to them.

Secondly: ¿Que? When have conservatives ever possessed such a thing?? Face it, the vast majority of American “conservatives” aren’t really happy unless they’re actively curb-stomping someone they consider an inferior being!

Again, on a broader ideological level yes. It's worth remembering that a huge amount of the gas behind modern American conservatism is built on blunted aggrievement politics. It's wildly disempowering to the individual so most conservatives intake this feeling of "I am isolated and powerless." Hurting other people is a way of feeling empowered by taking power from others. It's pretty base but it works.

If you can operate with conservatives from that mindset it becomes easier to untangle the why of a lot of their approaches.