To stand up to hate in our community, or anywhere else, we must be as hard as granite: an impenetrable stone wall of opposition. Don’t ever give hate an inch or it will take a mile.
Hate will look for ways to use your goodness against you. Hate will look for ways to use your senses of fairness and decency as weaknesses to exploit. Hate will, for example, appeal to your values of fairness and free speech to persuade you to politely stand by and do nothing, all in the name of respect, while they spread propaganda aimed at banning books, criminalizing peaceful assembly, and targeting marginalized groups.
By all means hold fast to your pro-humanity values. But don’t let your human values be exploited to be used against you and others.
Never show haters fear. You can feel it, but NEVER show it. You can quietly feel fear for a while, but if we let hate win, we’ll be living in fear forevermore, and that is NOT an outcome that you want.
And never try to appease hate by “meeting them half way” on a point. Hate isn’t looking for common ground.
Hate seeks one thing and one thing ONLY: total destruction. YOUR destruction. You will never appease or placate it, so don’t try.
Don’t try to reason with hate, because hate has no intention of being reasoned with. Hate will never listen to any reason why it maybe shouldn’t exist. The only viable response to hate is rock hard, unyielding, unflinching, fearless opposition.
Instead, use every tool available to stop hate. Treat hate as if you’re treating an aggressive, malignant cancer, because you are. Use the Terms of Service and Guidelines on social media to report hate, and report it with pride.
That said, always give people consumed by hate a way out. Never close the door on someone forever. Make it clear that they will ONLY be welcomed back into normal society when they relinquish their hate, but always keep that off ramp open, because one day they may seek it.
In the interim, Right To Be is an organization that offers free training in how to combat hate when you witness it in person.
Right To Be. I highly recommend it. https://righttobe.org/