Red Scare
The first commie alarm occurred between 1917 and 1920, induced by WWI and the Bolshevik revolution. A second round of hate panic happened after WWII and into the 1950s. First Amendment rights providing for free expression and free association were put on trial in both periods.
The Red Scare is the start of defining some people as dissenting vermin, and the FBI was re-tasked to fight socialism. After a series of bombings in 1919, a young J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of the new "General Intelligence Division."
It is not possible to define some people as vermin without some assholes claiming to be special. The Red Scare as a point of divergence where capitalism got a chip on it's shoulder that would eventually morph into the current fascism makes sense. Another milestone was the Powell Memo, and the Supreme Court has greased the wheels of fascism for decades now. The purpose of the Supreme Court is to maintain class differences in my opinion. and their contribution to the current sideshow should not be ignored.
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There are many threads that got America to where it is now. Another thread in the current fabric is raw racism.