PoliticalAccusations

Quora Answer : Why does Momentum and the hard left become aggressive and hate people questioning their views, and automatically accuse them of being Tories?

Dec 28, 2019

People accusing their political opponents of things is across the board.

Sometimes its genuine. Sometimes it's true but exaggerated. Sometimes its an outright lie.

Often it's a more subtle intermediate position. If you don't support the right of Israel to exist you must want to kill all Jews. If you campaign for the LibDems in Kensington you are helping the Tories win. If you don't support Brexit you hate Britain.

These are all examples of statements which are not true, nor "exaggerations", nor outright lies. But where the speaker believes they have reasons to think that the first part entails the second.

They can almost certainly tell a coherent and somewhat plausible story of how and why the first part entails the second.

Some listeners will find the story credible.

Others will find it flawed, misleading or downright dishonest.

A lot depends on the speakers' and listeners' own fine-grained model of the world, its arcs of cause and effect, human motivations and psychology etc etc.