[mistermann]

> Honesty and a willingness to accept that you're just as biased as anyone else can get you pretty far.

I am very confident that there is a phenomena whereby someone can do this, but that in doing so their mind is in a certain "mode" of some kind (abstract, for starters), but when the mind is in a different mode (discussion or arguing about object level ideas, culture war topics tend to work best), the knowledge that they formerly had becomes inaccessible, often even if reminded of it.

My armchair theory is that this plays a part in it (but there are surely other things going on):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory