political views !== who you think deserves human rights
Step 1: first, identify truly evil people (like self-avowed white supremacists)
Step 2: find a unfalsifable or weak method to associate non-evil people with the evil ones.
Step 3: once this method becomes part of the zeitguist, infer the association implies agreement.
Step 4: once agreement is assumed when stating the association, imply the person's agreement is in the realm of intolerance or hatred.
Step 5: once a person is assumed to have hateful or intolerant beliefs due to the association, 'intolerance of intolerance' kicks in and it's no longer considered ethical to do anything other than push that person out of the public sphere, or, as this comment does, claim they are not free to hold their beliefs quietly. (despite the fact, of course, that these beliefs aren't the ones they have, but the ones projected onto them via the tactics of the previous steps.)
Through this mechanism you can pull anyone you want into the realm of being cancellable or ostricized, once you find a suitable associative vector. The vectors being used today are quite weak, such as being seen in a photograph with someone, sharing news from a website of a particular political slant, or even using a specific phrase.
I wonder if there are resources on creating divisions. It's a very interesting social science topic.
Humans are (somewhat) pre-disposed to form in-groups and out-groups, and clearly those people are worse than us.
The only real difference between pre-internet and post-internet is that it's much, much easier for fringe ideas to spread (and often this is good, like gay rights were a fringe idea twenty years ago).
However, we don't get only the good (for whatever your definition of good is) stuff, we also get people who particular in-groups don't like organising, and this sucks. But everyone's out-group is someone else's in-group, so unless you can solve humanity, you're not going to fix Facebook.
To be fair though, I trace the divisions in American society mostly from the decline of the Fairness Doctrine, and all the downstream consequences of that (specific channels for particular worldviews leading to increased radicalisation).
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
[1] - https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...
A witch-hunt or a witch purge is a search for people who have been labelled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft, and it often involves a moral panic or mass hysteria...
In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of intimidating political opponents.
I’m jealous of you and angry at the rise of unabashed white supremacy in my circles
Note that I didn't say anything about white supremacists or nazis above. This is the party platform, and people who support that party either support -- or at least aren't strongly enough against -- these policies. And I really can't tolerate the attitude of "I want lower taxes and less regulation and smaller government so much that I'm going to vote in people who want to deny certain people their rights". I don't think these people are nazis, but I am continually disappointed that they make choices to enrich themselves at the expense of others. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, and many voters end up misunderstanding the effects of some policies to the point that they're actually voting against their own interests anyway.
I won't claim that the other party is all rainbows and virtue, or that they don't pull dirty tricks when they get the chance, but at least they generally don't try to take people's civil (and voting!) rights away or advance laws based on religious beliefs that discriminate against minority groups. It's telling that nearly all of the things I dislike about the Democrat party platform (expansion of surveillance state, willingness to invade foreign nations, lack of respect for due process, war on drugs, tough on crime) just happens to be shared across both parties, and often the Republican party takes a much more extreme stance on those issues.
I will also absolutely agree with you that cancel culture has gotten out of hand to the point of having a chilling effect on discussion that could be productive, critical, and worthwhile. And many people do make the awful, lazy, polarizing associations that you describe ("white supremacists are far-right so all conservatives must be white supremacists"). It's lame and I hate it. But let's not pretend that means that there aren't serious issues with the right's attitude toward civil rights, freedom from religion, equity and equality, social justice, criminal justice, and other things. If you vote Republican, you're voting for those things, even if you don't actively support them. We certainly shouldn't ostracize or alienate people who we don't agree with, or refuse to talk to them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call out people for supporting reprehensible policy.