The Kremlin has been extremely busy with psyops deployment over the past year. See https://www.state.gov/disarming-disinformation/disinformatio... for a full report.

| It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.

There are three specific components to this.

* It's important to understand, that brains are fundamentally survival machines, and agnostic to truth. If it gives delta-advantage, brains itself lie, hallucinate, and make up falsehoods to justify, and rationalize whatever that advantage is.

* Living in a society introduces linear dependencies on other people's beliefs. Knowing, or behaving-as-if-knowing a "truth" when that "truth" is being negatively selected for, leads to a disadvantage, leads to no one actively speaking up for it, leads to only ever hearing the "pro" side. This is doubly so, when the party line has boots attached to it.

* If you look at that list of lies above, you notice how extreme length they went. There is a bug in the brain, whereby when being told a big enough lie, internally the brain goes "surely this couldn't all be lies, right?", adjusts a little bit on the basis of "propaganda", then assumes the rest as "truth". This has been term'd "big lie": the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie