So, in truth, I think that process leads just to a dead end. It may end the conversation rapidly, if that was the goal, but I have talked to lots of conspiracy theorists, lots of people that are buying into some seriously nutty shit and over time I have come to my own approach.
1. Listen carefully to what they are saying.
2. Be sympathetic to their ideas.
3. Delicately poison the well.
David below talks about the goldmine. They have traveled into that mine and they are finding the shiny stuff they are supposed to find. It seems really exciting to them and that they FOUND this themselves and so they have bought into whatever the bullshit is so completely now it is hard for them to let it go.
However, we know the method used to get them there, so why not use the same method to bring them back. If their brain, the well, was poisoned with the rotten disinformation in this backhanded way, we know it works on them...so why not use the same method to try to bring them back.
Many years ago I worked for a stage hypnotist. Stunning stuff at times but I learned hypnosis and that you can, with a great deal of ease, plant a seed in a person's mind. They will water that seed and help it grow on their own. You have to do very little.
Before that, in a political science class in high school I studied sloganeering. Coming up with phrases that people just can't get out of their heads. It became so much fun for me, that some friends and I would just come up with stuff to plant in people's minds. Then I read this little book, I forget who wrote it, that was essentially a manual on how to manipulate people with words. That you could sit down with someone in a bar or at a party and by the time they got up to leave, you could have left one or more ideas in their mind that they would not be able to stop recalling and or thinking about.
None of this is secret stuff, in fact if you look at the second thing David posted below from the NYT about the things Carlson did on his show, he is using these methods. In a much larger way because he had the platform to blast it out there night after night on repeat...which is pretty potent stuff.
So, what I try to do when I talk to someone that is saying freaky stuff to me, is not to fight with them, not really to try to prove them wrong, just to plant something else in there...in the goldmine...for them to find at their leisure. Something that hopefully, as it grows, works as an antidote to the poison...or a poison to the poison. Letting them come to it, as if they found it, the same way they came to the nutty idea.
Granted, patience is a must in doing this. However, these scenes from movies are a sort of example...
