This person isn't ill-informed and she’s quite intelligent, but she is willfully and obliviously wrong.

From The enormous value of lies as propaganda by The New Neo.

I used to write a lot about cognitive pollution (ideas and facts retailed as truth which are not actually true.)  I stopped because the problem is ever present.  Its like standing at the shore, railing at the incoming tide.

But the insidious nature of cognitive pollution remains.  It creates a huge impediment to conversation which is the life blood of a republic and of the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal model.  All embedded cognitive pollution is a barrier in the collaborative pursuit of truth and every piece of cognitive pollution forces one of two actions.  

You can either invest time and effort to dislodge or refute the cognitive pollution.  Or you can excise the person from your network because the cost in time, emotion and friendship of addressing a friend's error is simply too high.  If they cannot be reached at a reasonable cost, then easiest simply not to reach them at all.

Neo is referring to the long refuted claim that Trump in his first administration referred to there being good people on both sides of an ANTIFA and White Supremacist protest in Virginia.  The claim was wrong from the start (the protest was about the removal of statues and Trump was referring to good people both for and against the removal) and the claim was demonstrated to be wrong in relatively short order.  Video, transcripts, and recordings in the age of the internet were all there for confirmation that the claim was false, if you wanted to see for yourself rather than rely on second hand inaccurate representations.  However, the legacy mainstream media ran with the claim and if you search online, you will still find more assertions than refutations.  

Even the left's most supportive "fact-checking services, Snopes, eventually conceded that the "both sides" claim was false.  

Neo is relaying an example of the persistence and cost of cognitive pollution.

The other day I was speaking to an old friend who is what I would call a political moderate for the most part. But her hatred for Trump and his supporters – a crowd she lumps together as a large amorphous mass of stupid, selfish, crass, dangerous people (present company excluded?) – means that she hasn’t voted for Republicans in quite a while.

We hadn’t spoken of politics in a long time, and it’s a topic I generally avoid. But during our friendly discussion it came up, and I asked her what is one of the things she dislikes most about Trump. She cited his white supremacism. I asked her on what she based the belief that he’s a white supremacist, and she cited the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” incident.

That’s both fascinating and depressing. This person isn’t ill-informed and she’s quite intelligent, but somehow that original lie, repeated over and over again, has become unassailable truth in her mind. That lie not only got halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to get its boots on, but it burrowed deep into many many minds and then was driven deeper by all the repetition. Correcting it requires a rather lengthy explanatory conversation, supporting documents and videos, and the will on the part of the listener to entertain the idea that such a deeply-entrenched, long-held, and multiply-sourced belief is incorrect. Not only that, but the belief fits in with so many other beliefs about Trump that have been repeated over the years, plus beliefs about Republicans and especially MAGA voters, that the task of getting the revised story across is nearly insurmountable.

Humility is missing among all parties and absolutely one of the most critical lubricants for the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal model to work.  The cultivation of genuine humility is perhaps a first order task for everyone.