I seriously think we are in a modern version of the dark ages where science and rationality is abandoned in favour wild supersition and belief.
There's no few similarities to the societal triggers creating the Salem witch trials, and there were similar witch hysteria bursts in the UK where rational people suddenly believed in the highly superstitious and unseen over the rational and provable, and turned violently on friends and neighbours. Led by emotionally unstable and volatile teens. The fad raged briefly and consumed towns and villages with terrible violence and loss of life, then faded away within a couple of years.
Racism, sexism, all of this has always simmered away under the surface never quite gone over the last few decades, and we're going through a 'where's the line between feelings and reality/how much do feelings create reality/if I'm upset there's blame to place' phase culturally. In a way it's positive to get it all out in the open, take a full and informed look at it with modern eyes, and this time put it away for good, with laws that protect and work as they should without straying through unthinking sentimentality and popularism into the realms of regulating feelings, beliefs and thought policing. All things modern law and government has no business getting involved in.
We're already seeing the rise of women's liberation groups and meetings in a way that hasn't happened in my lifetime, and the average woman on MN starting to be aware that patriarchy and misogyny is alive, well and thriving in people like Owen Jones in a way a year or two ago we'd have claimed disappeared decades ago. We were told women had achieved equality and believed it. Now we're seeing very clearly that much of it was very shallow, those equal rights were on loan, and now men want those rights back it's becoming very clear that male socialised superiority is ingrained in society and our leadership. As an example, through MN I've learned some feminist theory concepts and language that previously only those committed to studying it would have known. That's a positive thing in the long term for creating serious change.