I think the trick has been to give people a plausible narrative that makes them sound like the clever ones, standard power-play. People love that stuff, myself included, we’re all vulnerable to it. It’s why conspiracy theories work so well, but here, the same psychology is put to use rewarding people for saying stuff that’s obviously morally bankrupt. I think it works the same way a peacock’s tail works in evolution, the idea being that ‘surely no one would say something so obviously awful unless they had a really very complicated and convincing reason’

It’s allowed some of the decade’s worst atrocities to go virtually unopposed.