>To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?

It all comes down to a belief in "trolling". Once you assume that your chosen individual might act stupid on purpose, you lose the ability to discern between actual stupidity and fake stupidity. GameStop enthusiasts see that interview and assume Cohen is mocking the interviewers as a show of intentional disrespect. They think he's not actually clueless, just trolling.

Unfortunately, this sort of belief is self-reinforcing. Once you get over the hurdle of believing in trolling the first time, the next instance seems completely plausible. Every time it happens, you become more convinced that the person engages in a pattern of trolling — after all, you've seen it so many times! You don't realize that the source of your belief is not accumulated independent evidence, but a chain that rests on a single link.

This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.