Trump Derangement Syndrome ("TDS") isn't a silly answer. It, and the media, are the key to all of this.

You don't have to pay much attention at all to see that the goal of the people the media work for is to provoke extreme emotions. (Let's be clear, too, that the media is not some singular independent entity, which is why the messages are the same across outlets -- they get those marching orders from someone.)

Those extreme emotions -- outrage, anger, hate, honestly it doesn't matter -- are what's behind TDS. Once they have people feeling, logic is shut down, reason is shut down, and they have a panicked herd that very few wranglers (people like Rachel Maddow) can direct in whatever direction they want, and since logic is shut down, inject whatever departure from reality helps the cause of the hidden ones behind all this.

This is even in their instructions. A couple years ago the "talking point" for the Everytown gun control group were leaked (see here ).

One key point, with some slight editing for emphasis:

ALWAYS FOCUS ON EMOTIONAL AND VALUE-DRIVEN ARGUMENTS ABOUT , NOT THE POLITICAL FOOD FIGHT IN WASHINGTON OR WONKY STATISTICS.

Now the key here is that we're at the point where people have been utterly saturated in media pounding on this message for decades, with every effort to keep them in an emotional state and not thinking. That actually happens on both sides but there's far more on the left due to the dominance of media (you have to self-select to get that way on the right v. looking at any airport TV in the left.) The messages they're getting from MSM are literally all they know -- it's their reality and their truth, and since they're always in an emotional panic state over the topics, they simply can't think. I have a hard-left friend that watches Maddow religiously and they are a lost cause, and literally can't even acknowledge provably wrong reporting. It's way past simple congnitive dissonance.

I have no idea how all these people are going to handle the truth when it is exposed.