Jeremiah Goulka is an ex-Republican. He writes about American politics and culture with a emphasis on security, race, and the Republican Party. His story of how he came to leave the GOP is an interesting and (sadly) rare instance of someone realizing that what they accept as reality is a fiction.
“My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it). It explains why study after study shows — examples here, here, and here — that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.”
The whole thing is worth a read.