Rising crime in the UK

[Sheldon]

Would you really trust unevidenced third-party hearsay over that? Why?

When all you have to sell is fear, you will always believe the most frightful things, whether or not they're true. It helps that those frightful things happen to support his bigotry in a roundabout way.

I have seen even decent, reasonably well educated people fall into this trap, letting base fears drive their reasoning, perhaps we can reach him, and demonstrate that this is a very poor way to reason, that the more objective arguments and evidence are, the more reliable they become, and that the more we have, the more reliable it is that what they support is true.