> anyone can be evil, anyone can be good,

Not to be dismissive of your point, but this may be a thought-terminating cliché. That's not an argument that would hold up in court against pedophiles and murderers; I would argue that it shouldn't also hold for fascists.

The last one... well, we thought that decent people were the norm and that people would understand the nuance and spirit of laws; however, that hasn't been the case, so you see evil fascists skirting by because they're convinced that "the letter" of the law didn't specifically ban something, so it must be permissible.

> so perhaps painting specific groups of people as the incarnation of pure evil is not a good idea

Sorry to burst your bubble, but people consistently doing evil things that don't course-correct once exposed to new information are evil; those are the people we're referring to... (i.e. "a turd by any other name would smell as shit").

"We live in a society", we have a sort of social contract with each other (meaning, it's in our best interest to be nice to one another) and laws that we follow (in case someone isn't following the former).

I think most people would agree that 10 or 20 years ago, we'd be (mostly) lineally progressing towards peace and unity (glossing over some wars, as most people wanted to believe that "once that is over, we can proceed with 'progress'")...

Most people believed it so, that we didn't really give any attention to people that asked "what do we do if the fascists rise to power?"... Many laughed it off! "Fascists!? That's SO 1930's Europe! Besides, everyone knows that fascists are evil, and no one wants to be evil, right?".

So, you can imagine that almost nobody had "coordinated fascist international takeover" nor "brainwashed pedophile-apologist fascist takeover of the US" on their bingo cards. Interesting times...

The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy