By Melissa Wilson
We’ve all been there before: we’re reading through the comments section of a thought-provoking-groundbreaking New York Times article when we come across an uneducated, right-wing zealot who thinks he’s better than all of us spouting some misinformed opinion. Thankfully, I’ve spent countless hours in the trenches of Facebook comments putting these Trumpeters in their place and I’m ready to share my careful techniques with the world.
The first thing you have to do is call him out on grammar mistakes. Who cares if he’s making a good point. If he used “its” instead of “it’s,” he’s probably wrong about everything. Don’t even think about getting into the meat of the argument yet until you shame him on grammar first.
Its incredibly important that you write out long paragraphs with facts and reasoning that he probably won’t read with nuance or clarity:
Did you know that 95% of Trump supporters found their information on unarmed black teens from a Breitbart article about global warming? I’ve personally stopped communicating with several relatives because they didn’t know that Betsy DeVos personally cut the funding to an art school in Minnesota because they owned the URL that shared the name of her new yacht. In 2018, 1 out of every 4 men over the age of 32 and under the age of 89 were seen to have increased acts of aggression on every other Tuesday in the summer months--coincidence?*
*All stats pulled from the reddit front page (www.reddit.com)
Don’t worry if he’s only responding to these with two short sentences because facts will always triumph in the end, even with someone who has a confederate flag overlaying a bible verse as his profile picture.
Then, you need to “haha” react at all of his comments. Anyone would have the balls to laugh in this guy’s face if they met him in real-life, but that doesn’t matter anyway since you have the internet to protect you from real-life consequences.
If after a few days of arguing the guy is still not admitting that he’s wrong, just comment a meme from Occupy Democrats and metaphorically drop the microphone.
Congratulations, you just did your part in helping to save America.