This is going to be really unpopular, but there are a lot of people in the haydur community who are the exact same way. As best I can tell, this happens when you stop seeing someone as person, with complexity and nuance (even if they're a really bad person) and instead see them as pure evil or pure goodness. For Chantals community, that plays out in her never doing wrong, never being the bad person, always being an innocent victim, so they can never hold her accountable and they'll excuse any number of things.

In the haydur community, it plays out as deifying anyone "against" the evil person. Any interpretation that paints Chantal (or Amber) in the worst light possible will be the interpretation that cling to, despite any amount of evidence to the contrary, despite any logic.

Chantal is the epitome of evil, ergo everyone against Chantal is the epitome of good. Exact same thing happened with Amber. Or, well, with Poor Becky and her family. We can't talk about all the fucked up shit they did, bc that makes them less sympathetic. And if they're less sympathetic, Amber might not look as bad. And we need Amber to be all bad. So we will vilify her for eating Chick-fil-A but we talk about Norma calling Amber and her audience homophobic slurs.

And we sure as fuck won't talk about all the times we've eaten Chick-fil-A bc hate their politics but goddamn the chicken sandwich and a diet lemonade is so good. We can't be complex, nuanced individuals either. Because that doesn't make them look their very worst or their very best.

There's also kind of a... sunk cost fallacy going on. That's not the right term but I forget what the actual term is. It happens with religion, too. And politics. And ppl whose loved one commits a terrible crime. It's when people can't face the consequences of changing their beliefs, so they just keep believing in the problematic thing. Like if you finally recognize that Chantal is a bad person for willfully neglecting her cats, you also have to recognize that you cosigned all the shit that came before it that you blindly supported. And what does all that say about you. If x is wrong and damaging, and you supported and advocated for x, then you were wrong and damaging, too.

And that's hard for a lot of people to tackle, so they just don't think about it. They just blindly keep pushing forward with x. They're in too deep.