I need (political) help: looking for anecdotes

In My Humble Opinion
1

Someone I love identifies as a “conservative”.

It would be perfectly fine if she was just about low taxes and border security, Second Amendment and stuff like that. I could rationally discuss these things with no problem. But she has views like… every democratic candidate is a dangerous extremist, if they get in power they’ll outlaw Christianity, and start going house to house for guns. I’m only exaggerating a bit.

She’ll cite examples of people saying or doing crazy things in support of a “leftist” agenda. It doesn’t even have to be a democrat: could be someone in movies, someone from the journalism world, even any random person. Basically she expects every anti-racist activist, every advocate for LGBTQ equality, and every labor-sympathetic person to answer for all of Hollywood, all of news media, basically all of everything everywhere.

Sometimes she won’t even provide a source, just “A Democrat Politician just said he wants to ban Christianity,” and insist that actually happened. Then if I say “There’s no way that happened,” and she looks it up to show me, the quote is something like “I think we should respect the Supreme Court’s decision regarding same-sex marriage.” Oh okay, checkmate I guess? WTH?!?

And her favorite thing to say is “I don’t hate them, they hate me.” As if nobody on the right has ever said anything hateful. If I bring up one of those things from “her” side, it takes a LOT for her to admit that it’s hateful or racist. If she concedes it is, it’s an example of a “bad apple”.

So, I want to play a match-game with her. For every vague anecdote of left-wing tyranny she brings up, I want a link to a story of a right-winger saying something even worse, more clearly and with even less room for interpretation. I want to be able to cite from straight news sources reporting direct quotes, verifiable events, and indisputable facts. I know there’s enough out there to do this, and I think it might give her something to think about. As irrational as she may sound, she has two eyes and a brain, and she can use them when she wants to. And she does listen to me, and I believe she’ll make an honest effort to consider what I have to say.

I know I just signed up, but can you guys help me? I’m not asking you to do my homework, maybe just point me in the right direction. You can tell me a search term to google, or a website with some information you think might help me, and I’ll follow up. I’m not sure I can get through to her, but I have to try.

2

[quote=“DCCab, post:1, topic:911923, full:true”]
Sometimes she won’t even provide a source, just “A Democrat Politician just said he wants to ban Christianity,” and insist that actually happened. Then if I say “There’s no way that happened,” and she looks it up to show me, the quote is something like “I think we should respect the Supreme Court’s decision regarding same-sex marriage.” Oh okay, checkmate I guess? WTH?!?[/quote]

Fascinating. Do you think she really tried to find the exact quote that seemed to match her opinion or merely something remotely in the ball park? Maybe some far right winger is blogging it, taking enormous liberties with the facts, but when asked to produce the original facts they’re nowhere to be found. If she can’t recognize that trick, hmm.

I was expecting more cookbook fallacies like ad hominem, ad baculum, etc. with some straw man and broad brush etc. Throwing in a startling claim that doesn’t pass the sniff test and can’t be backed up with much—I’m not hopeful that she’s going to have an epiphany. I mean, facts are sometimes debatable but c’mon.

In the above case, I would round up the names of some prominent Democrats who are Christians and ask her if she really thought they would just allow it to be banned. And it’s in the constitution—it could be changed but only with enormous effort and time. But if it could be banned what would that look like? Gun toting folks would show up anyway. Besides, people could still worship in their homes and how would others know? You could also look up the media bias/fact check rating for the websites and see what snopes has to say.

Still, some people are inclined to believe what they will. COVID is just a vast conspiracy to make Trump lose, you know? Dems are so desperate to win that they’ll infect millions worldwide just to stick it to the man :headsmack:

3

Any credible responsible news sources you could cite would just be Fake News anyway, n’est-ce pas?

You could consider browsing through our Stupid Republican Idea of the Day thread and its new sequel NEW Stupid Republican Idea of the Day over in the BBQ Pit. Many of the posts contain cites to their sources. Here at the Dope we like to see posts with cites to their sources!

BTW, @lobotomyboy63, those [quote] and [/quote]
tags only work when they are on a line by themselves.

4

Thanks, Senegoid, I tried deleting much of the quote so I could respond to that smaller portion of it.

5

I’m going to guess she spends a lot of time in Facebook groups and on Twitter. the unfortunate thing those platforms do is use their almighty “ALGORITHM” to feed people content that matches what they’ve been looking at. it’s specifically designed to keep them in a bubble where the only information they find is that which reinforces the information they got earlier. It’s very hard to pull someone out of that bubble, never mind trying to counteract that.

And outside forces (foreign disinformation trolls and bots) have used that to their advantage to make those bubbles seem bigger than they are.

6

Just subscribe to Trump’s Twitter feed and pull out the most outlandish stuff he says. When she accuses you of making it up, show her the Tweet.

That won’t change her mind, of course. It’s solely to make you feel better.