No Stupid Questions

It's surprisingly easy to teach racism and sexism. Parents do it all the time very effectively. Not long after MLK was killed there was a classroom experiment done, which was later made into a documentary called Blue Eyes Brown Eyes. The whole documentary is an hour long, but I think even watching a shorter 5 minute clip from it will show you just how quickly kids pick up on bad behavior when authority figures feed it to them.

And there are so many other good answers that other people have already written. It's really neat to learn from so many perspectives.

Blaming others for things going wrong doesn’t require thinking and being self reflecting.

Don't underestimate how much resentment and anger a privileged people can develop when they don't get every. single. thing. they think they are entitled to.

fascist power structures, provide power to people who follow them, and people like power. Power speaks.

This is why literally every government in the world including the US is susceptible to fascism.

Remember that racial segregation in the US wasn't that long ago, historically speaking.

Some of children who lived through that era were raised with racism and these values were passed to their children who became Gen X and Y.

Religion also had a bigger influence in the previous generations. Homophobia and transphobia was normalized and you could even be arrested for being any of LGBTQ up until very recently and it's still the case in some regions.

Nazi ideology never really left either. And the way this ideology came to be was through disenfranchised people who were angry and needed someone to be angry against. Someone came at the right place at the right time and gave these people a scapegoat.

Fascism is kind of the same but with a cult of personality.

Here's a great Ted talk from a guy who got pulled into the neo-nazis and got out.

As a young person who grew up on the internet, with no parental oversight, I can say it's because there is a lot of right wing bullshit online that media companies love to push on their users. When I was a tween I got suckered into it hard when one day youtube decided to put mgtow videos in my recommended feed. I never initially searched for them. I did eventually get out of it, and I'm not entirely sure how, but I remember as a 13yo seeing trump in 2016 bully that disabled reporter and it really put a sour taste in my mouth. And then over the next few years that led to me leaving catholicism, becoming a socialist, and realizing I'm transgender and very gay.

With me being transgender and pan, that adds another aspect to it, because I think I knew subconsciously that I was queer as a tween, but growing up in an environment where I was repeatedly told those things were wrong led to me feeling absolutely miserable about myself, and misery loves company. And this also makes me wonder how many nazis are queer and don't even realize it or refuse to recognize it.

I overheard my kids talking about whites being replaced, and saying the big N word. YouTube and the internet in general is a great recruitment tool. Yes, I talked to them.

The people who claim that women are too emotional to be leaders, are themselves too emotional to make rational life decisions

Prob bcs they believe in conspiracy theories or watch and use and engage in sites that show this info

If you want something to be true and feel as if it's true then you're likely to believe it's true.

Facts usually don't change people's mind and might make them defensive about their views because if they're wrong it will hurt them personally in the ego and self esteem.

I can fully see how something like feeling superior can fit into that. This includes others being inferior as a corollary.

Then you mix in anger. You are angry and stressed about the current situation and then somebody that speaks well and is smarter than you in your opinion says "blame immigrants".

This fits in the world view.

Then you can go online and see other people and they say "Nazis didn't have this problem because they fixed it". So you in your newfound and knowledge go out and tell people unapologetically and if anybody inferior, that makes you angry, says anything bad things can happen.

There's a path to become a Nazi. I think people don't intend to be bad, they care about people, Nazis don't think everyone should count as people. It's societal cancer.

That's a very complex question with many, many answers. No individual life can be boiled down to a single phenomenon. A lot of the answers I'm seeing in here are great, ans definitely describe a phenomenon at play, but it's important to remember that nobody's just outright stupid enough to fall for a single piece of rhetoric. Instead, them coming into bigotry is the result of a complex web of ideas that brought them to that conclusion.

That being said, I'll add my two cents that I don't see anyone saying: privilege. Privilege insulates people from how cold and cruel the world can be; in doing so, they don't learn the comraderie that grows out of shared hardship (aka empathy). They see others experiencing it, and assume they are weak, both for "allowing themselves" to fall into hardship, as well as for "getting conned" by others who have fallen on hardship. This too adds fuel to the fire that is all the other reasons people get pulled into hateful ideologies.

Imagine being excluded from some perceived secret club based on conditions you didn't have a choice in, and seeing women or bipoc or lgbt or the working class supporting each other. You too would feel resentment towards those who won't include you in their circles. Yet you never developed the proper understanding of the ties that bind them, so you only see it as hate towards you and your demographic; this then becomes a feedback loop: your hate hurts thode communities, making them even more interdependent on each other, making you more resentful and frustrated.

You fall in with people you don't really like because of a shared disdain for The Others, and then, because that's your only lived experience, assume all identity-based comraderie is necessarily just a loose collective of people that only get along because of a common enemy. This reinforces your belief that The Others hate you, only adding fuel to the fire of your own hate.

This is also why these people are so easily manipulated: all you have to do is control their perception of who hates them, and they'll do whatever you say to make it stop. This is why politics and religion are such great examples, and no "side" is immune. Want to make a leftist out of a fascist? Convince them that The Jews are actually just the bourgeoisie, who must be killed for the good of ourselves and our nation. An anarchist who fears authoritarians will readily agree to being a part of an exclusive coalition of individuals that determines the way society is structured, so, y'know, the authoritarians don't get their way.

I know some people are born into these mindsets. I know what it's like to have been raised by a bigot; indoctrinated thoughts are the hardest to change.

I am convinced a large part of the problem is some people prefer convenient answers which make immediate sense, as opposed to nuanced truths.

Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.

I grew up watching WW2 movies and the Nazis were never shown as being anything other than Bad Guys. I would love to know how anyone grows up here in the U.S. and doesn't know that.

The Internet is like a library: repository of knowledge, it's also like cable TV where every crackpot has a broadcast license.

How you use it is up to you.

Many of these people overreact to good faith criticism and are narcissistic. There are some statistics that people become less self centered as they get older and incels definitely fall into that trap.

As for nazis etc, lots of that comes from like a lack of critical thinking about conspiracy theories. Its fine to think about conspiracy theories but the second you start embracing that like millions of people are conspiring against you to like stub your toe or something thats maybe the time to reign it in.

It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of what they want.

One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is 'in' and 'out', as long as you are in the 'in' group of course.

So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the 'natural order' justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It's convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don't want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get "uppity".

Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.

The examined life with all its critical thinking and guarding against bias is hard. The dark side is easier.

Incels are the easiest to understand. Some people are just unattractive.

Access to knowledge doesn't imply successful absorption of said knowledge. And a lot of the thing isn't about knowledge, but moral premises - things that are neither true nor false, but that you consider good or bad, and as others said here emotions and self-interest play a huge role on the later.

If you remember the post trump election memes about economic anxiety being mediaspeak for racism, this is basically where that came from.

Bigotry is a despair response, when the promises of normalcy fail someone, there's a chance for them to start looking for new meaning to understand a seemingly indifferent world, and in that state of mind, being told you're part of an exclusive club of inherent superiority is the ego stroke that gets them off.

From the moment they take that poison pill it basically plays out as an analogue of addiction. Even as they watch the sludge they're mainlining destroy everything around them it doesn't cut them off from, they just can't stop, because the validation of feeling that it's the entire world that's wrong instead of just you being shit out of luck is too much for a lot of folks to be willing to part with.

It also doesn't help that these people tend to get fired from jobs that don't put up with racist bullshit, turning the whole validation needing into a vicious cycle sort of deal.

This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they're the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think "just do a socialism bro" will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.

They literally think you can just pay the racists to stop being racists, and that you can pay a heroin addict to stop shooting up.

Echo chambers which most social media apps and websites really love to create

They get a community that supports and enables then out of it.