> Here's how ordinary, regular people can help. When people start being extreme and a bit divorced from reality and engaging in violence, unsavory almost-violence, and untruthful agenda pushing, people need to call it out, and also call it out from their own sides.

I've done this before on Hacker News (on a different account). I've pointed out that an asserted fact was untrue and linked to a PDF compiled by a government agency and pointed out which data table to look at. I agreed with the conclusion the original poster had, but not the facts he used to support the case, and I didn't mention what my political views were.

All I ended up with was a lot of downvotes and lots of comments accusing me of supporting evil policies and that I should read certain books and I'd get my eyes opened. No one even discussed what I said. The funny thing is that I had read the book that was recommended and had it with me in my bookshelf. I was thinking of taking a picture of me holding the book and posting it with the comment saying: "Hey HNer, I'm on your side! But when people use incorrect facts to try to push an agenda, it causes the whole side to lose credibility. There are enough reasons to support policy X that we don't need to make stuff up".

It opened my eyes that people don't engage with the actual content. They just make assumptions of a posters point of view, and then argue against stereotypes.