How to Confront Extremism in Someone You Know

It is easy to condemn extremism when the extremist is somebody on television.

It is considerably harder when he is your brother.

Or the man you have worked beside for fifteen years. The guy from the hunting club. Your oldest friend. Your father. Your son. The neighbor who helped you replace a water heater. Somebody you know to be more complicated than the ugliest thing he said last Tuesday.

That complication matters.

It does not make the ugliness acceptable.

When someone you know starts talking about whole groups of people as enemies, repeating increasingly dehumanizing claims, excusing cruelty, embracing conspiracies that cannot be questioned, or treating political violence as something to look forward to, you have a decision to make.

You can stay quiet because confronting him will be uncomfortable.

You can explode, call him every name available, announce that he is dead to you, and enjoy thirty seconds of moral satisfaction.

Or you can try something harder.

You can confront what is happening without pretending you control what happens next.

That is the practical side of Tenet 9: Reject Extremism.

First, Know What You Are Confronting

Do not call every political opinion you hate extremism.

A man can oppose immigration policy without hating immigrants. He can support stricter immigration policy without being a white nationalist. He can support much more permissive immigration without wanting the country destroyed.

He can oppose abortion or support abortion rights without automatically being a religious fanatic or a murderer.

He can believe taxes are too high, corporations are too powerful, policing is too weak, policing is abusive, gun laws are too restrictive, gun laws are too loose, government is too large, government is failing to protect people, or nearly any other political proposition without crossing into extremism.

Strong disagreement is still disagreement.

The line gets more serious when the argument stops being about conduct, laws, institutions, or policy and starts becoming a story about categories of human beings who are supposedly corrupt by nature, contaminating the country, secretly controlling everything, replacing the rightful population, deserving collective punishment, or no longer entitled to ordinary human dignity.

Watch even more carefully when hatred becomes coupled with the idea that ordinary moral rules no longer apply.

That is not just a man having a bad political take.

Something deeper may be happening.

Do Not Start by Trying to Win

If your first objective is to defeat him in debate, you will probably get the argument you came for.

You may not accomplish much else.

A public humiliation is especially tempting. Somebody says something vile at dinner, at work, in a group chat, or on social media, and you want to demolish him in front of everybody.

Sometimes public correction is necessary, particularly when other people are being directly targeted. Silence can leave the impression that everybody in the room accepts what was said.

But correction and humiliation are different objectives.

If the real goal is to reach somebody you know, an audience often makes the job harder. Once pride becomes involved, the conversation can stop being about truth and become a contest over who backs down first.

When circumstances allow it, talk privately.

Not because the belief deserves privacy.

Because the conversation may deserve a chance to work.

Ask Him to Explain What He Actually Means

Extremist language often survives on slogans.

“They are destroying the country.”

“Those people are the problem.”

“We need to take our country back.”

“They only understand force.”

“Everybody knows what they are really like.”

Do not let the slogan do all the work.

Ask questions.

• Who exactly do you mean by “they”?
• What specifically have those people done?
• Are you talking about particular individuals or everyone in that group?
• How do you know that claim is true?
• What evidence would convince you that it is wrong?
• What do you think should actually happen to those people?
• Would you accept that same treatment if another group applied it to you?

You are not playing Socrates for sport.

You are forcing vague hatred to become specific enough to examine.

Sometimes a man hears the ugliness more clearly when he has to finish his own sentence.

Do Not Debate a Human Being’s Right to Be Human

There are subjects worth discussing.

Immigration levels are worth discussing.

Religious doctrine is worth discussing.

Crime policy is worth discussing.

Economic inequality is worth discussing.

Sex, gender, education, policing, war, government power, national identity, free speech, and civil rights all contain real disagreements.

But somebody’s basic humanity is not a clever debate prompt.

You do not need to spend an evening seriously considering whether Black people are inherently inferior, Jews secretly control society, Muslims are collectively responsible for terrorism, gay people are subhuman, immigrants are vermin, white people are collectively evil, poor people are parasites, or any other racial, religious, sexual, national, or economic category deserves contempt merely for existing.

You can say no.

Plainly.

That is a boundary.

It is not censorship.

Use the Relationship You Actually Have

A stranger on the internet has very little reason to care what you think of him.

Your brother might.

Your oldest friend might.

A man who respects you at work might.

Do not waste that advantage by pretending the relationship does not exist.

You can say:

“I’ve known you twenty years. This does not sound like the man I know.”

Or:

“You helped my family when we needed it. I know you are capable of seeing people as individuals. Listen to what you are saying about people you’ve never even met.”

Or simply:

“Where did this come from?”

You are not excusing the belief because you remember the better parts of the man.

You are reminding him that he has a self outside the ideology.

That matters when, as described in Why Extremism Feels Like Strength to Men Who Feel Powerless, grievance and group identity have started supplying a man’s sense of belonging and significance.

Separate the Grievance From the Hatred

Somebody may have a legitimate grievance buried under an ugly conclusion.

Let him keep the grievance if it is real.

Challenge what he built on top of it.

Maybe he lost a job and feels economically disposable.

That does not make immigrants responsible for his life.

Maybe he believes his religious community is mocked or ignored.

That does not make another faith his enemy.

Maybe he has seen real examples of crime.

That does not make a race criminal.

Maybe he has experienced racism himself.

That does not grant him a license to become racist in return.

Maybe an institution genuinely lied to him.

That does not mean every contrary fact is part of the conspiracy.

Sometimes the most useful sentence is:

“I understand why you’re angry. I don’t accept what you’re doing with the anger.”

Do Not Let Him Hide Behind Humor

Hatred frequently arrives disguised as a joke.

When challenged, the defense comes quickly.

“Relax.”

“Nobody can take a joke anymore.”

“I was just messing around.”

Sometimes a bad joke really is just a bad joke.

Patterns matter.

If every joke has the same targets, every conversation eventually reaches the same conspiracy, every news story becomes evidence against the same group, and every objection is answered with another layer of contempt, the humor is probably carrying something real.

You do not need to give a speech.

“No. That’s not funny to me.”

Then let the silence do some work.

Do Not Become Cruel in Order to Oppose Cruelty

This one is easy to lose.

A man says something racist, hateful, or grotesque, and immediately you want him punished.

Not corrected.

Destroyed.

Get him fired. Publish his address. Contact everyone he knows. Put his family online. Send the mob.

That is not what this Tenet asks of you.

Accountability is appropriate. Consequences can be appropriate. If somebody threatens coworkers, harasses people, discriminates unlawfully, or creates a dangerous environment, responsible people may need to know.

But doxxing a man, targeting his uninvolved family, encouraging strangers to threaten him, manufacturing information, or trying to make his entire life unsafe is not a principled rejection of extremism.

It is mob behavior with different branding.

Conviction without fanaticism means keeping your standards when the person across from you has failed to keep his.

You Are Allowed to Draw a Hard Boundary

Conversation is not an unlimited obligation.

You can care about someone and refuse to participate in what he has become.

Maybe the boundary is:

“You can believe what you want. You cannot use racial slurs in my house.”

Maybe it is:

“I’m not forwarding this garbage, and stop sending it to me.”

Maybe:

“If you start threatening people, I’m leaving.”

Or:

“I love you. I am not bringing my kids around this.”

A boundary does not force him to change.

It tells him what you will and will not participate in.

There is a point where maintaining access to you stops being more important than maintaining your own integrity or protecting other people.

Know When the Conversation Has Become a Safety Problem

Most ugly political talk is still talk.

Do not treat one offensive opinion, one burst of anger, or one disturbing joke as proof that someone is about to become violent.

At the same time, do not keep calling something “just talk” after it has clearly begun changing shape.

Take the situation more seriously when violent language becomes repeated or detailed, when someone begins identifying actual targets, talking about when or where something should happen, treating violence as the only remaining solution, obsessing over previous attackers, acquiring capabilities for an attack, testing a target’s security, or otherwise moving from grievance toward preparation.

At that point, stop trying to prove that you can handle him yourself.

Do not arrange a private confrontation because you think courage requires looking him in the eye.

Do not warn him that you intend to report him if doing so could increase the danger.

Do not investigate him, follow him, search his property, provoke him online, or turn yourself into an amateur intelligence operation.

Preserve what you legitimately have, tell somebody appropriate, and let people trained to assess threats do their job.

If somebody is in immediate danger, treat it as an emergency.

This is where the distinction in Political Violence Is Not Courage becomes concrete. Refusing political violence includes refusing to play games with credible warning signs because the person involved happens to be someone you care about.

You Cannot Drag Another Adult Back to Reality

This may be the hardest part to accept.

You can ask questions.

You can challenge lies.

You can remind him who he used to be.

You can introduce him to people his ideology has reduced to stereotypes.

You can refuse to laugh.

You can stop forwarding the propaganda.

You can draw boundaries.

You can keep a door open when keeping it open remains safe and does not require you to become complicit.

You cannot make another adult value truth.

You cannot make him surrender an identity he has decided matters more than every relationship around him.

You cannot love somebody so perfectly that hatred becomes impossible for him.

Eventually he chooses.

So do you.

Leaving the Door Open Is Not the Same as Leaving the Gate Unguarded

There is value in giving people a way back.

A man who begins questioning an extremist group may already be facing the loss of friends, identity, status, certainty, and belonging. If everybody outside the group has spent years telling him he is permanently irredeemable, the group becomes the only place left willing to receive him.

You do not have to pretend nothing happened.

You do not have to trust him immediately.

You do not have to place vulnerable people in his path to prove how forgiving you are.

But if he is genuinely stepping away from hatred, there should be some road back toward ordinary human life.

Accountability and redemption are not enemies.

A decent society needs both.

Do Not Let Politics Take Two Men Instead of One

Extremism has a way of recruiting its opponents emotionally even when it never recruits them ideologically.

You begin by confronting a man consumed with hatred.

Six months later, you are consumed with hatred for him.

You monitor everything he posts. You imagine his humiliation. You savor every failure in his life. You stop seeing anything human in him. Your anger follows you into breakfast, work, dinner, and bed.

He may still be wrong.

You may now be allowing his wrongness to run your life.

Do what responsibility requires.

Then remember that you have a life to live.

Your family deserves more than the leftovers after political hatred has eaten everything else.

Your community needs more than another permanently enraged man.

And your principles should produce something better in you than the thing you are opposing.

Sometimes Friendship Requires the Uncomfortable Sentence

I do not believe friendship means endless approval.

If anything, a stranger has an easier job. He can shake his head, walk away, and never see the man again.

Someone who loves him may have to say the sentence nobody else wants to say.

“This is getting ugly.”

“You’re starting to hate people you don’t know.”

“I don’t believe this claim, and neither should you without evidence.”

“What you’re talking about doing is not politics anymore.”

“I care about you. I am not going along with this.”

You may get anger in return.

You may get called weak, brainwashed, disloyal, cowardly, woke, fascist, communist, racist, traitor, snowflake, sellout, or whatever vocabulary his particular tribe keeps near the door.

Names are cheap.

Know why you drew the line.

The Point Is Not to Become His Opposite

There is a temptation when confronting extremism to define yourself entirely against it.

Resist that too.

You are not required to become politically timid.

You are not required to pretend every viewpoint deserves respect.

You are not required to maintain a friendship that has become abusive or dangerous.

You are not required to debate whether hatred is good.

You are required to remain responsible for what you become.

Challenge the lie without inventing one of your own.

Oppose hatred without deciding hatred is acceptable when properly aimed.

Demand accountability without turning punishment into entertainment.

Protect vulnerable people without using them as props for your own righteousness.

Recognize danger without seeing a terrorist behind every offensive opinion.

And when the line must be drawn, draw it.

Reject extremism because human beings are worth more than tribes.

Reject it when it comes from across the political divide.

Reject it when it comes from your own side.

Reject it when the target looks like you.

Reject it when the target does not.

And when somebody you care about begins walking toward that darkness, care enough to tell him what you see.

Then be wise enough to know that confronting evil does not require becoming reckless, cruel, or stupid.