I was having a talk with my 73 year old dad the other night and he still swears up and down that it’s the illegal immigrants crossing the border that are stealing all of our money. I asked him where he got this info from, he said he reads things on the internet. I had my laptop out and said “show me” and then of course he said “I don’t know how to search for it!”. I then told him that he was full of shit, he said the same things about the points that I was bringing up. I told him the difference between my points and his is that 95% of my points I can find a source for, his is always a form of “do your research!”.
He said he never believes online surveys because he’s never been asked to participate in one, so he thinks it’s always a small perfectly chosen group of people in order to sway the results. I read him Pew Research’s surveying methodology and they said that they have all the datasets available. I mentioned that the GOP is almost entirely white people, and he said “How come there were ‘Black People for Trump’ in the last election?”. He wanted to know the results of a particular survey that had to do with politics, but of course wouldn’t look them up himself so I registered for an account, downloaded the datasets and showed it to him. From 2018 until now the GOP has been almost entirely white people, from 88%-92%, it even said that a quarter of them were “males over the age of 65 who identified as Protestant”.
I asked my mom if she had seen that one Presidential debate where Trump was asked by Chris Wallace to say denounce white supremacy and the man literally contorted his brain into a pretzel to fudge out “stand by and stand back.” It was a 100% crystal clear call to “those type of supporters.” When I told my mom this, her rebuttable was “I didn’t watch it” so for her if she didn’t watch it, then it didn’t happen and even if it did happen, she doesn’t have to believe it. It floors me that white supremacist are emboldened these days, but the ignorance, complacency, and lack of empathy and critical thinking from the Right will probably doom us all in a long enough time line.
I was having a talk with my 73 year old dad the other night and he still swears up and down that it’s the illegal immigrants crossing the border that are stealing all of our money. I asked him where he got this info from, he said he reads things on the internet. I had my laptop out and said “show me” and then of course he said “I don’t know how to search for it!”. I then told him that he was full of shit, he said the same things about the points that I was bringing up. I told him the difference between my points and his is that 95% of my points I can find a source for, his is always a form of “do your research!”.
He said he never believes online surveys because he’s never been asked to participate in one, so he thinks it’s always a small perfectly chosen group of people in order to sway the results. I read him Pew Research’s surveying methodology and they said that they have all the datasets available. I mentioned that the GOP is almost entirely white people, and he said “How come there were ‘Black People for Trump’ in the last election?”. He wanted to know the results of a particular survey that had to do with politics, but of course wouldn’t look them up himself so I registered for an account, downloaded the datasets and showed it to him. From 2018 until now the GOP has been almost entirely white people, from 88%-92%, it even said that a quarter of them were “males over the age of 65 who identified as Protestant”.
I asked my mom if she had seen that one Presidential debate where Trump was asked by Chris Wallace to say denounce white supremacy and the man literally contorted his brain into a pretzel to fudge out “stand by and stand back.” It was a 100% crystal clear call to “those type of supporters.” When I told my mom this, her rebuttable was “I didn’t watch it” so for her if she didn’t watch it, then it didn’t happen and even if it did happen, she doesn’t have to believe it. It floors me that white supremacist are emboldened these days, but the ignorance, complacency, and lack of empathy and critical thinking from the Right will probably doom us all in a long enough time line.