Just watched the new Borat. It can be cringe (that's the point), but it's main contribution is in demonstrating just how much ordinary people can go along with grosteque forms of racism, misogyny etc. In most societies, there are the raging bigots, but then the majority is people

who are not raging bigots but are indifferent or apathetic to bigotry, and conform to it, which is also a function of latent prejudice. When Borat says something outrageously offensive, people don't challenge him, they either conveniently go along, or say something outrageous

in response. Right wing movements are helped along to power with this conformity to bigotry. I was talking to a friend the other day, and he said where he comes from, anti-Muslim prejudice is so normal that no one bats an eyelid when someone says something Islamophobic. And this

prejudice precedes 2014. The difference these six years have made is not that bigotry has dramatically increased, but the spaces where the expression of bigotry is normalised have dramatically increased. It's not just the living room or a close circle of friends now, it's also

television studios, offices, RWA groups, public transport etc. Another difference is that since prejudice is now legitimized by the highest authority figures now, it further bolsters this conformity to prejudice. As the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments demonstrated, the

vast majority will conform to hideous behaviour, like torturing others, if the command comes from an authority figure. We all have a desire to belong, to accede to certain norms, and if certain people are constantly painted a threat to those norms, and the sanctity of your

in-group, even otherwise decent people become even more apathetic to what's happening to that out-group. For ex, something I've always felt is that most people do not support say lynching a Muslim, but most people are indifferent to it, it doesn't affect them in any way.