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There are lots of things to look forward to during the winter holidays. If you’re a Sacramento State student, maybe chief among them is Thanksgiving break; a chance to leave campus, forget homework for a few days and come back recharged for finals.

Just kidding! Because it’s actually a time to have awkward and uncomfortable conversations with your misinformed families!

Maybe it is presumptive to hypothesize that your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents or even younger relatives, like siblings or cousins, are like those of the The State Hornet editors; sharing racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic memes on Facebook and Twitter and forwarding emails of photoshopped pictures with subject lines that read, “It’s time to boycott the NFL.”

So in the run up to the celebration of a holiday that celebrates the false notion that European settlers in America were anything but horrible to Native Americans in the 1600s, we thought it would be handy to go through a list of topics that do not make for polite conversation but simply should not be ignored anymore.

You know someone’s going to bring it up, so you might as well be prepared. Here’s some facts you can fall back on:

• The senate tax plan as proposed currently will most significantly lower taxes for the wealthiest citizens in America and actually raise taxes for the poorest citizens, who greatly outnumber wealthy citizens in population. This theory, known as “trickle down economics,” has been implemented numerous times in this country’s history, and upon implementation, has helped cause the two worst financial collapses in the history of the country.
• Based on the frequency of past occurrences, if gun control laws should never be written in the wake of a mass shooting, they could never be written.
• President Donald Trump has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by as many as 16 women.
• Trump said multiple times on his campaign that he would enforce a “Muslim ban,” and though his administration denies that it is related, the majority of the countries included in his repeatedly attempted travel bans are majority Muslim.
• No sitting president in the history of the U.S. has ever brought a country to the brink of nuclear war via Twitter. That one stands for itself.
• Last season, Colin Kaepernick ranked 17th in the NFL with a quarterback rating of 90.7, which would be good for 17th again this season as of today, as would his career rating of 88.9. Sixteen qualified quarterbacks with ratings below his have played for an NFL team this season, and many more are signed as backups. It is abundantly clear that Kaepernick is being kept out of the league for non-football reasons.
• A viral photo purporting to show members of the Seattle Seahawks waving a burning American flag in their locker room is doctored.
• Sexual orientations or gender identities are not chosen arbitrarily and are not signifiers of mental disorders.
• Unwanted sexual comments or acts are sexual harassment. Doing anything of a sexual nature to or in front of someone without their consent is sexual assault, including masturbating, as comedian Louis C.K. has admitted to doing.

The State Hornet hopes that your Thanksgiving is warm, relaxing and enriching. But if family members make that impossible, make sure to correct them on any of the hoaxes or fake news they may have fallen for between last year’s turkey and next week’s.