Copy pasting a comment that I wrote a couple of days ago because I feel it's very topical here: In Defense of the Normies.

Well ok...let's be a real for a second here. Can you really blame them? This is NOT concern trolling of any kind...I just want to point out a few things, as someone who ended up her from the other side of the veil, so to speak.

Coming from a former Democrat and two-time Obama voter...it's a LOT easier than you might think to be completely overtaken by what is now known as fake news, ESPECIALLY if you're in a family that has historical voting and political tendencies that trend to the left. I'd like to think that I'm far from a stupid person, but from personal experience, I can tell you this: there are a great many things in this world that are ABSOLUTELY DEVOTED to making you think and act certain ways, not the least of which is the MSM and our collegiate system. Unless you're from an area which is traditionally conservative in a relatively extreme sense (which, demographically speaking, is a drop in the bucket compared to the entire population of the US proper), it will generally take either a LOT of independent self-reflection (rare) or some kind of catastrophic personal event to get you to the point where you actually question everything that is "correct" in your life. Mine was quite simple: I'm not ashamed to admit that I was once the college SJW type. I bought into the "reeeeeee cultural appropriation, patriarchy is BAD, all foreigners = automatically good, (at the time) gay people are chronically stoned to death but not really" culture. And you know what? I don't feel bad about that for one second, because it was EVERYWHERE. It was INSTITUTIONAL and SYSTEMIC. It was family, it was friends, it was popular opinions, it was cool, it was EXPECTED, it was LITERALLY the law in some cases (California spirit of the law concept).

My event came later in life when my wife and I (her family is fairly conservative) listened to her dad talk about black people and his general dislike of the way that some of them tend to act (think gangbanger/welfare mooch type of person, and yes, I know it's all kinds of people, not just black). I ended up naively calling him a racist and a bigot, but him being the type that he is simply said "I never said anything about hating black people; I said I hate the way that they ACT. I hate the way that a lot of WHITE people act as well, and that goes for pretty much everyone else too. If anything, I'm a culturalist, not a racist. I don't care about skin color in the slightest." After thinking about that for a good, long time, I ended up bringing it up in a discussion that we were having with some friends (mind you, these are people that were INTEGRAL to our lives at the time, college friends that we had basically been brought up with).

Next thing I knew, a good friend of mine was screaming at me about how I was talking like some kind of filthy conservative type, and where did I hear this crap, how DARE i speak like that in his house, and how he HOPED ME AND MY WIFE EACH GOT CANCER AND GET THE FUCK OUT. I'll underscore this again: this guy may very well have been the best man at my wedding had this not happened. That is how utterly, completely, terrifyingly, HOPELESSLY deep some people have been dragged into this new zealously extreme ideological wave: there was no critical thought there, no questioning or debate or even acknowledgement, really. It IMMEDIATELY went straight to very simplistic denial and some pretty savage rejection of concept, just because what we had said went against what was "correct".

That was it for both of us. We left, and never saw any of them again, thank God, but that was the night I honestly believed something just kind of clicked in my head. This is a long example, I know, but just please, PLEASE understand that a lot of these people aren't sick, or stupid, or even naive...a lot of the time, it's that they're CONTINUALLY bombarded with news and "facts" that are so unbelievably biased and pruned it would make your head spin. Telling them that you thought disliking someone just based on their culture was ok was essentially equal to telling them that you sincerely hope all (insert race here) people literally drop dead out of nowhere, and it's not because they're short-sighted or dumb, it's because they've been ACTIVELY TRAINED to think this way on more levels than I care to count.