If you acknowledge their call in any manner, it just tells them they have a live phone number. They then sell your phone number to another scammer as well as continuing to call you. NEVER respond in any way to these calls, just ignore them or block them but do not respond or you will never get rid of them.
"launches into a rhetorical "rant" of their own, because their views of how it is are more important" is a false assertion. My rant is a no-better-or-no-worse response to An angry grandma's rant and how you came to conclude "more important" is beyond comprehension. If An angry grandma can have a nothing-to-do-with-this-number rant on 800notes, surely others can as well, or are these sorts of rants exclusively reserved for the right-wing? Has the right-wing more privileges than other groups?
These people were calling my home phon and now they are calling my cell phone. I have never stayed on the phone,I always hang up , but they keep calling.