It's always tempting to debate bigots about their bigotry, but honestly the best thing you can do is often to directly help those affected by said bigotry.

Bigotry doesn't exist to be debated. People who are bigots do not care about debate - they care about humiliating their opponents. You cannot outsmart somebody who doesn't give a flying fuck about their position being incorrect. You will be playing a completely different game by trying to debate somebody out of their bigotry.

The best thing you can do is to show up for the marginalized. Check in on them, talk to them, and engage with them as people. Ask them if they would like help and then respect their answer to the best of your capabilities. Oftentimes, that will be sufficient enough and will go a long way.

Grantaire’s Modernized Rant

This is a rewrite of one of Grantaire’s drunken speeches from Les Misérables, in Chapter IV of Book Four–Les Amis de L’ABC, which has been modernized not only into current speech but also do to with current issues. I put quite a bit of effort into it, so enjoy!

~~<><><>~~

Grantaire, extremely drunk, had started ranting at the top of his lungs from the corner of the pub which he had taken over with his volume, shouting: "I'm bored!! I need alcohol, life fucking SUCKS!! It's all so POINTLESS and cheap and short and definitely hates me!! People always talk about wanting happiness, but I mean, how selfish and vain is that!? Hell, it was once said that "all is vanity", and I agree, even if that might not even be a real quote! If you have nothing else, at least you can think about how great you are! People use it to make everything seem so much more important than it is. A kitchen is a 'laboratory', a boxer is a 'pugilist', a doctor is an 'apothecary', even bugs have super extra Latin names!! It can be some good and some bad, I guess. The good is stupid, the verbal and mental equivalent of a participation award. 'You're alive, congratulations!!' The bad becomes too much and people can't stand to be around you. I'm annoyed with one and exhausted with the other. People don't take anything seriously anymore, entitlement leads to making a mockery and a joke of everything! Rich people complain about paying high taxes, happy people write songs about depression and loss and heartache; anything can be 'memed', no matter how serious! Go, then, and enjoy your quote-unquote 'edgy' humor! No one has any respect or integrity anymore. People in relationships cheat on each other, fights over stupid politics ruin friendships, it is our own fault that people die by their own hand! It's too bad I'm stupid, or I'd quote all kinds of ancient wisdom and facts and evidence to prove my point, but I don't know anything. I've always been too much of a smart-ass; when I was put in the most prestigious schools and classes, all I did was fuck around. What's the point of putting so much importance into those things, anyway? Being part of them doesn't make one person any better than another. So even if I'm stupid but privileged, I am fundamentally the same as an intelligent but unfortunate person. It's so fucked, everyone wants to be perfect and have all the best qualities. Every one of those good qualities can be made into bad ones by perspective! Frugality is underneath just greediness, generosity is just attention-seeking in disguise; bravery is an excuse to brag and the pious are also the bigoted. So which are we SUPPOSED to say and understand? Do we applaud the victor or the loser, the Allies or the Nazi's? You'd prefer the victor, right? Great, then I suppose we'll all applaud the corrupt officer who was VICTORIOUS over the unarmed teenager, as well! There's your positivity, but also insanity. That officer did what he did because of human prejudice, just as the Protestant burned the Pagan at the stake because of his prejudice against that which was different. History repeats itself, especially the grimmest generalities. The battle at Palmito Ranch mirrors the battle at Yorktown, the internment of Japanese-Americans inspires the imprisonment of immigrants. I don't see the cause for celebration of victory. You're arrogant for winning and weak for losing. Can nothing be one thing without also exhibiting traits of the other? I'm so done with the human race in general. You expect me to 'help people in need'; what people, then? Should I feed the hungry? What about the homeless, then? Which is more deserving of my help? It's a debate which could go on forever, senseless from the beginning! Our politicians are the reincarnations of the tyrannical emperors of the past, taken straight from our history textbooks. What does one have to do, anyway, to be considered important enough to make it into one of those books? I brush my teeth every day, but I can guarantee you that I'll never learn about the inventor of the toothbrush in my history class. No, instead I'll learn about some of the most horrible men who've ever lived and have done nothing to affect my life. And why? To avoid the repetition of history? Regardless of man's actions, such an outcome seems inevitable in every sense. Not to buy into stereotypes, but the liberal young hopefuls who put so much stock into these dated ideas will find themselves just as stuck. I mention stereotypes with the utmost authority, of course! They make up everything we think about our society on a daily basis! Your clothing, your speech, your actions, and your whereabouts decide for you what kind of person you must be to a thousand strangers a day, easily. Even those who claim to be non-judgemental, their opinions are affected by such stereotypes even if they deny it. Such assumptions are what our society functions on. And it can be beneficial in some situations, of course! A first-impression can warn one of a dangerous person, one to be cautious of, absolutely! It can give one a whole host of necessary information for dealing with a person in a social situation, yes, but can also cause one to miss out on a potentially vital opportunity which now will never be known. And the only thing which MOST PEOPLE will care about is, oh no, FOMO!! Yet this behavior and thinking will never change, no matter a person's intent to block it. It is human nature. You who claim not to judge books by their covers, might you be the uninformed while you claim your superiority to the cautious? And now that you consider that, SURPRISE, what I have just suggested is yet ANOTHER assumption! Even one made about yourself is one which makes you question what you know about your opinions, further proving my point. So what really is different between you and he who judges others by first visual or interactive impression all the same? Dammit, people, I'm telling you!! NOTHING IS DIFFERENT!! The whole human race has an eternal, genetic superiority complex and proves it every day! The other races of the earth are considered lesser races simply because we have taken over what is theirs and made it our own. I do not claim to be immune to such judgment and arrogance! I can acknowledge my faults, that I rely heavily on appearances when I need to! So why not crucify me now!? Where is my judge, jury, executioner!? Oh, so it is you, Louison. Hey, didn't see you there." So Grantaire, far drunker now (if that's possible), caught the girl as she passed just trying to bus the tables, and turned his ridiculous and never-ending rant on her. Bossuet leaned over and tried to clamp a hand over Grantaire's mouth to shut him up, but this started Grantaire off on an even worse rant: "Ugh, GET OFF ME! You're not gonna shut me up or calm me down, not while I'm speaking the truth to the masses, to anyone who will be smart enough to listen! I'm fine, you don't need to do that. I'm just sad. What do you want me to say? Humans are horrible, they just completely suck. Butterflies are great, but humans are failures. God fucked up with this one. You want to see something really screwed up, there's nothing more so than your average joe on the street. Like me. I'm depressed and a hypochondriac and I'm pissed for no reason and I'm sleepy and I'm bored and I'm exhausted and I'm STUPID! FUCK IT ALL!" "Then shut up, please!!" Bossuet tried again to silence him, as he'd been in the middle of trying to have a conversation about work with his friend, in the background as Grantaire threw his tantrum.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-conway-trump-is-a-racist-president/2019/07/15/b13c0bd4-a740-11e9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html?utm_term=.88382c05ebf6#click=https://t.co/O5wAbMjbwy

Thank you @gtconway3d

"No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

"But Sunday left no doubt."

George Conway: Trump is a racist president

By George T. Conway III | Published July 15 at 7:15 PM | Washington Post | Posted July 16, 2019 |

George T. Conway III is a lawyer in New York.

To this day, I can remember almost the precise spot where it happened: a supermarket parking lot in eastern Massachusetts. It was the mid-1970s; I was not yet a teenager, or barely one. I don’t remember exactly what precipitated the woman’s ire. But I will never forget what she said to my mother, who had come to this country from the Philippines decades before. In these words or something close, the woman said, “Go back to your country.”

I remember the incident well, but it never bothered me all that much. Nor did racial slurs, which, thankfully, were rare. None of it was troublesome, to my mind, because most Americans weren’t like that. The woman in the parking lot was just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration. America promised equality. Its constitution said so. My schoolbooks said so. The country wasn’t perfect, to be sure. But its ideals were. And every day brought us closer to those ideals.

To a young boy, it seemed like long ago that a descendant of slaves had  prophesied, five days before I was born, that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We would be there soon enough, if we weren’t there already. I couldn’t understand why colleges required applicants to check boxes for race or ethnicity. I’m also part Irish and Scottish. What box should I check? Should I check one at all? Will that help me or hurt me? Never mind, not to worry, those boxes would someday soon be gone.

How naive a child could be. The woman in the parking lot — there were many more like her, it turned out. They never went away. Today they attend rallies, and they post ugliness on Facebook or Twitter. As for the victims of historic racial oppression, no matter how much affirmative action (or reverse discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) the nation offered, they, too, had resentments that never went away — in part because of people like the parking-lot woman. Those resentments often led to more, not fewer, charges of racism as the years passed — charges of institutional racism and “white privilege.”

Which, in turn, bred another kind of resentment: Why, asked many an unaffluent white parent, who may never have uttered a racial slur or whose ancestors may never have held anyone in bondage, does my child have to check a box to her detriment, or be accused of “white privilege,” when the only privilege she has received came from the sweat of my brow? Why are people like me being called racist, when all I’ve done was mind my own business?

And how naive an adult could be. The birther imaginings about Barack Obama? Just a silly conspiracy theory, latched onto by an attention seeker who has a peculiar penchant for them. The “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel incident? Asinine, inappropriate, a terrible attack on the judiciary by an egocentric man who imagined that the judge didn’t like him. The white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville? The president’s comments were absolutely idiotic, but he couldn’t possibly have been referring to those self-described Nazis as “good people”; in his sloppy, inarticulate way, he was referring to both sides of the debate over Civil War statues, and venting his anger about being criticized.

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core. It doesn’t matter what these representatives are for or against — and there’s plenty to criticize them for — it’s beyond the bounds of human decency. For anyone, not least a president.

What’s just as bad, though, is the virtual silence from Republican leaders and officeholders. They’re silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.

But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.