good question. I pretty actively try to avoid discussing politics, because... well, it's rarely fruitful. Talking/debating pretty much never convinces anyone of

good question. I pretty actively try to avoid discussing politics, because... well, it's rarely fruitful. Talking/debating pretty much never convinces anyone of anything. If you want to change someone's mind on something, step 1 tends to be "deeply understand why they think a certain thing", and not only is this totally at odds with casual work conversation, it's not actually appropriate in the vast majority of work relationships. Anyway - gentle redirects out of political topics usually work for me. If they say something like "I just watched a documentary about {bad group} doing {bad thing}, and that's why Trump is an idiot", I'd try something like "oh, where did you see that? Was it on Netflix, or cable TV?" If they say Netflix, then "oh, cool. I just saw a video on how Netflix caches content and uses this thing called a 'chaos monkey' to preempt catastrophic outages. It's really clever... the way they use it is..." Just pick a non-political element out of the conversation, and drive into that. Usually works.