This is a great point that put into words something that I've thought about before. When you look at negative news coverage of some group, it almost always foc

This is a great point that put into words something that I've thought about before. When you look at negative news coverage of some group, it almost always focuses on some fringe caricature of what that group actually believes in. For example, BLM's coverage in the conservative media sought to paint them as "black racists" due to pictures/comments/videos portraying a small number of BLM supporters in that light. Note that the Russians are aware of this tactic because they ran several BLM-related twitter accounts that they would occasionally use to this effect (although that's more of a false-flag). This can be used to frightening effects. A lot of alt-right recruiting spaces (tumblrinaction, /pol/, cringeanarchy, the_donald, KotakuInAction, breitbart, Drudge Report) deliberately focus on a caricature of "leftists" and liberals that is designed to make relatively-rational people feel disgusted and alienated by what they feel the "left" or liberals represent. It's way easier to discredit people in favor of "forced diversity", or unattractive people with weird colored hair who identify as different animals, than it is to discredit actual champions of equal rights or transgender(fixed!) people.