In the early 2000s, my dad was engaging in the same futile fact-checking exercise, David, that you did a decade later. He was in the last few years of his life, tethered to  oxygen, but determined to enlighten the conservatives on the message boards that he frequented. For years he had assembled folders of clippings from the Boston Globe, Newsweek, etc. He had scrawled "Gun Control", "Separation of Church and State", "the Bible". You get the idea as you would have resonated with the issues he was passionately defending. He'd do deep dives into the issues, perusing his clippings, offering up statistics and evidence to support his positions. It was all very civil, and all very pointless; his interlocutors weren't operating in good faith. They had no interest in considering another perspective, especially a well-argued one. They were blissfully entrenched in their comforting narrative, and I remember well when dad admitted to me that his Sisyphus-like efforts just weren't worth it.

Until dad was in his forties, he was still the conservative Roman Catholic that he had been raised. I recall him telling me that he was embarrassed that he hadn't questioned much of anything until he was in his fourth decade. The force of reason, and better arguments, and his life experience transformed him into a liberal atheist, and I'm the beneficiary of having had him for so long. Thankfully, his writing extended to letters-to-the-editor, and he was prolific there, and I take great pleasure in being in his presence when I dust them off.

Peter T.