I will be aiming to update this blog once a week and hope to explain what inspired me to start it on my next post, as I wish to focus on the topic at hand with today's entry.
Since our election, I've taken great joy in disputing Donald Trump supporters, enablers, or apologists on a little social networking site called Facebook. Most of these discussions end in them seeing the error of their ways and thanking me for enlightening....
No, that's not it at all - usually we blow hot air at each other until a time of day arrives that one of is too busy to continue wasting time on the internet and the discussion is left unresolved - agreeing to disagree as it were.
I'm over it. It's wasting my breath, it's wasting my time, and it gives me little more than the smug satisfaction of knowing that I'm right.
Moving forward, I'll be taking a new approach to these discussions - instead of calling him "unhinged", I will henceforth regard the President-Elect as a role model for intelligent and effective communication and debate and will reference his words and behaviors when engaging in a battle of wits with his supporters.
Some examples of this include (based on recent events):
When the general question goes out as to why people are protesting a legal election, I'll just point out that we're doing what we were advised by our President Elect following the 2012 election, when he (incorrectly) believed that Romney had one the popular vote. I often back up my argument with this screenshot of his Twitter feed:
It currently seems up for debate whether hate crime is going up in the wake of the presidential election. If confronted with someone arguing it's not, rather than citing statistics, just let the person know that you're seeing it all over facebook and certainly don't have time to fact check every piece of information that you see online. If confronted with this as an unreasonable way to conduct yourself, just point out that you're following the example set by soon to be the leader of our great nation.
There are more examples of this that can be used in these discussions than I can recall at this time (such as ad hominem attacks against the person you're debating using demeaning nicknames), but it's important to remember that we hold President-Elect Trump in high regard in these discussions as we're using his behavior as an example for how we should conduct ourselves. I'll be marking these discussions with the hashtag #wwtd and encourage you to use it as well, or of course come up with something of your own that similarly gets the point across.
If you have friends, family, and associates telling you to "give him a chance" or "get over it" and you're sick of appealing with rational arguments explaining why you're genuinely afraid for your nations future, I encourage you to instead engage them using irrational arguments - if they disapprove of this methodology, you can just issue a reminder that "It was good enough to win your vote in the last presidential election, it should certainly be good enough for our friendly conversation here."
