Canada

Unfortunately its global. The internet allows for low number groups to coalesce and have a strong impact. Particularly if their members have time on their hands. Every small town as that one crazy person and in a city there was one almost always pacing around any particular accesible location like 7/11 and many on the street. They can now talk with each other and they influence the less crazy but bored but again with a lot of time to be online. There are now global forces harnessing this. Much of US stuff is influenced byrupert murdoch who is austalian and there was some equivalent nutter media guy from canada. The chinese are learning from the russians to just work at creating strife online as an overal favorable thing (helps keep inaction and impotency in their neighbors). Unfortunately the world is currently a paradise for bad actors.

Don't discount us, Gavin McInnes and Jordan Peterson are both Canadian and Harper currently heads the IDU.

There was the whole proroguing of parliament too after they had a non-confidence vote and an ndp-liberal coalition with bloc and green party supporter was proposed, fell through during that period and the Tories attacked coalitions as somehow being illegal or undemocratic.

More simply: Canadian conservatives have always followed their American counterparts, and that now includes down the rabbit hole.

There’s a lot of money to be made by keeping people ignorant

It's because state actors like the Kremlin and CCP are pumping misinformation into social media.

I was so hopeful back in the 90s but that sure didnt last long.

The Straight Dope has been at it since before the internet age and their slogan says it all...

"Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)"

Their end goal is to hurt other people to make themselves feel like they have a modicum of control over their own lives. Who those people are isn't really important to them in the long-term.

Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that's all that matters to religious zealots.

They know that if kids practice safe sex they won't get pregnant and 'shot gun marriage' rates will go down.

They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there's a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that "Parents Rights" includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because "Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they're still married". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

These people legitimately believe that it's morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there's one more marriage in the world.

Before it was gender it was “the gays.” Before it was the gays, it was feminists. Before feminists, it was black people. It’s always the same combination of them coming after your children and your wives and your masculinity. The same fears regurgitated onto different “others,” generation after generation.

Familiarize yourself with QAnon. The term "groomer" isn't being thrown around by accident. There is a large volume of right wing conspiracies centered on the idea that there's a left-wing cabal preying on children. Claiming members of the LGBT community are pedophiles is part of that horrifying tapestry.