The fascists and their reactionary centrist friends in the media went out of their way to portray marginalized people criticizing them for being bigots ("the woke left are attacking free speech!") or trying to undo systemic, institutionalized bigotry (e.g., DEI, affirmative action) as objectively worse than them being bigots and in some cases literal Nazis, which is how they got a large portion of the white American electorate to support them.