As I explained in another reply, I am not advocating for keeping up to date with the news so much as I refuse to absolve smart people from accepting responsibility for confident media literacy, and it's hard to be media literate without at least parsing what's being reported so that you can reason about it, even amongst people who are in your bubble. I am suggesting that if you think you can avoid this step and still be able to hold your own in a discourse, you are willfully proving the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Our goal should not be to enter a conversation intended to change the racist uncle's opinion. That is, indeed and sadly, a fool's errand. But it's also the wrong tactic.

I would argue that the #1 goal of such a family dinner should be to listen compassionately, being the progressive that defies all of the stereotypes about elitist, know-it-all coastal intellectuals, and choose your battles really, really carefully. At the very least, the other people observing are judging every subtle nuance of what's going down, and even though uncle racist will still likely be a terrible person after dessert, the other six people at the table will find themselves much more confident that you quietly made him look like an asshole.

The left is far too hung up on the shallow win of a "fully pwned" outcome, where the racist uncle is sobbing and begging for forgiveness and promising to lead a better life. Not only is this a stupid goal, it's insulting to the fact that your racist uncle probably has some ideas that are not fully wrong. The notion that the left is right and the right is dumb is roughly 95% of the problem.

I am typically not quick to delegate my points to video, but I was really impressed by this Big Think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfWv0EnHQw