What frightens me most about this dumpster fire of a presidency is the outright hostility to truth.
I hope you were bothered by Obama's war on whistleblowers, then? This is not unique to Trump. It's just more obvious. He does mostly the same things as every previous president. He's just really, really bad at selling it to or hiding it from the public. Not saying this to make Trump look better. It just needs to be understood that Trump is not the problem. He's just the next step in the direction things have been moving for a long time.
This is absolutely part of the problem.
What you describe here is something I witnessed up close. I once joined what seemed like an innocent place for shy people. It turned out to be an online meetup of self-described "incels" who were busy feeding each others anger and radicalizing each other. Exactly in the way you describe. I fled that place in a hurry, it was frightening. They way they were collectively developing their sense of victimhood and hostility toward the big bad world of slutty women and guys who get laid. I was not surprised at all with the news report of this incel guy who drove his car into random strangers.
And history had witch hunts. This stuff isn't new. Take it from someone who remembers life before the internet.
I do think the internet aids radicalization, due to the algorithmic aiding of echo chambers and the incredible availability of information both true and false. But I think it works in every direction, not just in the raving mad conservative terrorist direction. Lots of the conflict going on today is because of radicalization in a positive direction - the social global interconnectedness and availability of information on the internet has torn down decades or centuries of bullshit and propaganda. Younger people today have grown up in a world where they're freely able to socialize with others from outside of their own country, and this alone has annihilated the viability of a lot of propaganda, xenophobia, jingoism, etc that plagued us for a very long time pre-internet. Like we can't be expected to believe the lies told about the rest of the world's socialized healthcare systems anymore. It just takes meeting one person online from Canada to know they don't have death panels or months long wait times for emergency treatments or whatever.
I think much of the radicalization in the conservative direction is backlash to that naturally happening. Lots of older people don't like the illusions they grew up with being dispelled. The younger conservative radicals are a much smaller, but very energized minority, and I think partly it's just natural that progress isn't one-dimensional and linear. Some people will still fall prey to bullshit, and some bullshit will be adapted to the new environment, such as the incel phenomena. But I think a bigger part of it is that material conditions for the majority of people keep getting worse. They're overworked, underpaid, lonely, and psychologically abused by our power structures. They're angry. And that's good. I'm angry, too. And we all want to understand why we're in these situations. Unfortunately, some people fall prey to misinformation that is deliberately designed to misdirect their anger. And echo chambers are real. Although, I think the neoliberal sterilization of our daily meatspace social lives is as much to blame for the impact of echo chambers as the social compartmentalization of the internet. People still have to go to work, school, etc. We compartmentalize our social lives online, but we still don't have much control over who we interact with in person. But our meatspace socialization is so strictly controlled. Everything's monitored and governed. And stuff like talking politics with your co-workers is normally pretty taboo. So we're denied what should be a moderating effect. If this were pre-internet, the effect would absolutely be the same. It's not like there was any material circumstance that caused people to socialize with larger, more diverse groups pre-internet. More likely you wouldn't have the opportunity to do that even if you wanted. And now we have stuff like Omegle.
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