How To Become An Apologist For Violence

1. Believe something. Believe something so fiercely that you argue with your family about it, post passionate tweets about it, consume internet content about it. Seek out publications that understand “how it really is”. Ignore all the fake news and bias.

2. Find friends who believe this “something” too. Start investing more energy with them, and spending more time with them. Begin to talk about how people who don’t agree are so misguided, so lost, so irredeemable.

3. Reinforce each other’s thinking. Stop challenging the fringes. Take pride when you are the one to expand your beliefs to a new idea or concept with less room for compromise. Take pride when you speak disdainfully about those who disagree.

4. Get fatigued by those who don’t “get it.” Rant about your parents, your uncle, your daughter, your classmate. Seek feedback from people who you know understands what’s really going on. Don’t be afraid to cut people out of your feed and your life who refuse to see reason. Tell Facebook exactly what you want to see on your timeline as you swipe through social media between shifts at work.

5. Stop talking about changing others’ minds. Start talking gleefully about when people “die off” so that finally your totally right opinion will prevail.

6. Find new reasons to reject the concepts of compromise and moderation. Look back into history to find instances of horrific, terrible tragedy to justify not talking to anybody who disagrees with you.

7. Reduce those who disagree with you to caricatures. Stop seeing them as human. They aren’t human. How could any true human believe what they believe?

8. Reject any attempts to humanize them. There is no excuse. Not with everything that is going on. They should know better. They hate you. They hate everyone like you. They hate America. America should hate them back.

9. Give up on America’s institutions. They aren’t working. How could they be working? Look at how the world is. Look at how messed up it is. Nothing works anymore. We need to shake up the status quo. We need to topple the boat. Something needs to change.

10. See your opponents engage in violence. Be legitimately afraid. Be consumed with fear. Panic. These are the people who hate you. Who hate us. Who hate America. They are being violent. They are savages. They are animals. They are dangerous. They should be put down.

11. Share and retweet when your side finally strikes back. They finally got what they deserved. “Ha. Hahaha! They finally know how it feels. We are finally defending America.”

12. Make excuses for your side and those who agree with you. “This isn’t violence. What they are doing is violence. They are the violence. Didn’t you hear what they said last week? Didn’t you see the video that went viral last week?”

13. “No, there’s nothing wrong with defending yourself! That’s what this is. Defending ourselves. We are under threat. We are under attack. This is an attack. Haven’t you read your history books? Standing by passively has never secured anyone’s defense. Do you want countless people to suffer under them? Don’t you care about America? You aren’t making excuses for them, are you?”

14. Attack anyone who doesn’t buy into these obvious truths. They are the complicit moderates. They sympathize with the enemy. They don’t understand. They will never understand. The moderates are the ones who are actually violent.

15. Evangelize your new religion of violence to rid the world of violence.