Screwtape writes to Wormwood:
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.
How well this describes the activist who will readily turn an interlocutor into an opponent, who will bulldozer that opponent in order to have his opinion known, who is eager to pigeonhole that opponent as belonging to x, which is responsible for so much suffering in oppressed group y. The fantasy figures he dreams up in his review of statistics -- those are the real humans. But you, should you ever be drawn into conversation with him, are nothing but that which must be converted or at least neutralized.