You’ve been there. You’re in a conversation with a friend, a family member, or a stranger online. You’re trying to discuss a difficult topic, and you present a set of verifiable facts. But the conversation doesn’t move forward. It spins in circles. You feel like you’re talking to a wall. You leave the conversation feeling exhausted, frustrated, and confused.
This is not an accident. You were not in a debate. You were in a battle against a powerful and predictable defense mechanism. You were arguing with an addict.
The addiction isn’t to a substance. It’s to a dogma, a leader, or an ideology. And when that addiction is threatened by an inconvenient truth, the addict’s brain will deploy a classic, three-step playbook to protect itself. This is not a search for truth; it is a desperate act of self-preservation.
This is a spotter’s guide for that playbook.
Step 1: The Denial
The first and most crucial line of defense is to deny that the problem exists at all. It is a refusal to look at the evidence, a blanket declaration that reality is not real.
- The Tactic: “The event never happened. The evidence is fake. The witnesses are lying. It’s a conspiracy.”
- The Tell: You’ve seen this with stories about a certain laptop. The contents are dismissed as foreign disinformation, a fabrication, a deepfake—even in the face of verifiable data and direct testimony. The addict does not engage with the evidence; they simply declare it to be illegitimate.
- The Purpose: To protect their worldview from a fact so painful and so contradictory that it threatens to shatter their entire sense of reality. It is the act of slamming the door on an uncomfortable truth.
Step 2: The Deflection (Whataboutism)
When denial becomes untenable—when the evidence is too overwhelming to simply ignore—the next step is to change the subject. It is a desperate attempt to create a “fog of war.”
- The Tactic: “You think that’s bad? But what about this other, completely unrelated thing?”
- The Tell: You’ve seen this with conversations about a phone call to Ukraine. The moment the facts of the call become indefensible, the subject is immediately and violently changed: “But what about this other politician’s son and his business dealings?”
- The Purpose: To suggest a moral equivalency where none exists, to muddy the waters so that the original, indefensible act is lost in the noise of a dozen other accusations. It is an attempt to make you, the questioner, feel like a hypocrite for focusing on just one thing.
Step 3: The Counter-Accusation
This is the most aggressive and desperate stage. It is the act of turning the accuser into the accused. It is a pivot from defense to a scorched-earth offense.
- The Tactic: “The only reason you’re bringing this up is because you are the real enemy. You are the one who is evil.”
- The Tell: You’ve seen this with the most bizarre and baseless of theories, the ones about a secret cabal of global elites operating out of the back of a pizza parlor. When confronted with the complete lack of evidence, the response is not to debate the facts. It is to accuse the questioner of being a “groomer,” a “traitor,” or a member of the very conspiracy they are questioning.
- The Purpose: To intimidate the questioner into silence and to rally the tribe against a new, common enemy. It is a desperate, violent attempt to make the conversation so toxic and so dangerous that you will simply give up and walk away.
Conclusion: How to Clean the Mirror
So how do you fight this? You don’t. You cannot win an argument with an addict about the nature of their addiction. To engage with the denial, the deflection, or the counter-accusation is to play their game, on their turf. You will lose every time.
The only winning move is to refuse to play.
The work is not to debunk the specific lie. The work is to gently, respectfully, and repeatedly hold up a mirror to the pattern itself.
The next time you find yourself in one of these conversations, take a breath. Disengage from the details. And ask a simple, Socratic question:
“I’ve noticed that when we talk about this, we seem to go from denial, to changing the subject, to a counter-accusation. It feels like a predictable pattern. Can we try to stay focused on the original question, just for a moment?”
Most will not be able to. But for the one or two who are tired of their own addiction, that quiet, honest question might be the first, necessary crack in the foundation of their own prison. It is the first step in cleaning their own dirty mirror.