We spoke about typical family shit for 30 minutes, and then he asked me if I'm following the Trump indictments and what I think about it.
I forget my exact phrasing, but I basically told him I think it's a travesty that makes a mockery of our justice system.
He was taken aback and said he thinks it's a great thing and has been a long time coming. He truly believes that Trump tried to take over the government by ignoring the 2020 election results.
I asked what Trump did specifically. He said, "Trump filed a bunch of court cases and lost every single one."
I said that's sort of true but most cases weren't even heard so the evidence couldn't even be presented, but regardless there's nothing illegal about challenging election results through the courts. I then pointed out that Trump left office right on schedule. I also pointed out all the election results that Democrats have claimed (and still are claiming) were fraudulent.
So again I asked, what specifically did Trump do that constitutes trying to take over the government? And why is it a crime for Trump to question election results but not Hillary or that fatass from Georgia?
Crickets on that, so he shifted gears to the classified document case.
I told him that case is a complete joke. Trump didn't do anything that every past president hasn't also done with their documents. I pointed out that Biden had thousands of classified documents in his fucking garage, and he didn't even have the power to declassify, so why aren't your calling for Biden to be prosecuted??
He said that's different. I asked how. He couldn't even muster a pathetic reason and told me he doesn't think it's productive to continued the conversation because we aren't going to agree.
I said you're the one who brought it up and I'm fucking sick of people claiming all these wild things about Trump without being able to back it up and then saying they don't want to talk about it.
I ranted for a good long while lol, stopping every so often to ask him for specifics on this or that (all related to his original claims) and each time he just remained silent, so then I'd start ranting again. I reminded him that Hillary Clinton was caught red-handed using a private email server and she sent and receive classified documents, and that she destroyed evidence and laughed about it.
I said, "You're telling me if Trump were caught using a private server and classified material was involved, you wouldn't want him prosecuted??"
He said "I'm not sure." I said give me a fucking break, you know damn well you'd cheer on his prosecution if that happened. The media would claim he endangered every American and you'd be there nodding along.
At some point, he referenced Russia helping Trump in the 2016 election via Facebook. I asked him to explain what they did. He couldn't. I said why are you going around making claims about something you can't even describe?? Crickets.
I asked if he knew the Steele dossier originated from the Clinton campaign. Crickets.
It went on like this for another 30 minutes or so. He couldn't provide specifics about anything. I kept pressing him. He kept saying this isn't productive. I said yeah no shit because all you can do is regurgitate claims you've heard from biased sources.
I could have handled it better in some ways but I don't regret what I said. I'm so fucking tired of otherwise smart people being completely clueless about important issues that THEY bring up and claim to be knowledgeable about.
That's about it. Not all that interesting but it's slow around here so I thought I'd share.
Anyone else get into it with family members about politics lately?
You can't change their mind, but can you make them to empathize with yours?
"You know, the most important thing to me is free speech, so which party should I vote for? The one that censored the President and made social media censor people?"
"It's important to me that we don't destroy history even when it's not things we'd do these days, and it seems to me liberals are committed to destroying statues and rewriting books"
And so on. They'll pretend to themselves that "orange man bad" is more important than any of those things, or censorship is okay as long as they do it, but they can't convince themselves that you don't care about those things when you say you do.
Over time they may say to themselves that, you know what, they also value free speech, self-defense, equal opportunity, equal enforcement of laws, trustworthy elections, and such as.