from Stanley Fish on the NYT Opinionator blog, via Time magazine

If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to
demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the
individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile,
interests and agenda are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the
malefactor from everything that is going on...and characterize him as
a one-off, nongeneralizable, sui generis phenomenon.

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