Random things I am unfortunately qualified to comment on:

The Brony fandom became a hotbed for right-wing radicalization, and this shouldn’t surprise you.

First, why so many men became Bronies in the first place:

It started out as a bunch of men who just so happened to enjoy the cartoon, but toxic masculinity reared its ugly head. The men who enjoyed the show created their own sub-fandom, the Brony Fandom. For awhile it was used by exclusively men who enjoyed the show, but eventually it became a term for all adults who enjoyed the show, regardless of gender.

Toxic masculinity reared its head again, and there became a massive push for Brony spaces to once again be ONLY be for men, who had the “unique challenge” of being men who liked a show for little girls. Adult women who enjoyed the show were relabeled as “Pegasisters.”

So now we have a very large, very visible part of the fandom claiming to be marginalized, on the grounds that, as men who visibly broke gender norms, they were being targeted by the media and in memes.

This COULD have opened up conversations about toxic masculinity, and the way patriarchy hurts men, but it didn’t.

We eventually wound up with spaces that had forced out all the non-men, and were full of men who really, genuinely bought into the idea that they were oppressed for liking the show about cartoon horses.

Naturally, this began to attract men who felt oppressed for not meeting society’s standards of masculinity, not because they liked the fun pony show, but because there was a ready-made space of angry men willing to accept and validate them. There were countless Bronies who didn’t really watch the show, but used the characters and memes to form an extremely MRA-adjacent subculture.

This of course created an absolute hotbed for toxic, dangerous ideas to flourish.

Back in the early days of Pony Fandom, as all of this was starting to develop, there was a large and aggressive section of the Brony community that used the fandom’s catchphrase, “love and tolerate” as a weapon. They used it as the basis for manifestos about how if we are to truly “love and tolerate” in the spirit of the show, that means we don’t have to kick out the bad parts of the community. We should “love and tolerate” bad behavior away.

Some of this was perpetuated by people who wanted to get away with bad behavior right out of the gate, some of it was perpetuated by the “UwU we should all just get along, no drama in our fandom spaces!!!!!” people. This is something that has always caused issues in fandom, but it was particularly intense in the MLP: FIM fandom.

The shitty parts of the fandom used it as a shield, and the centrists do what centrists always do and “refused to pick sides.” The overwhelming majority of fan spaces, whether due to vocal shittiness or passive allowance, became a hotbed for really nasty stuff.

This contributed immensely to the issue of non-men and children being pushed out of MLP fan spaces, because under the cudgel of “you have to love and tolerate!!!” things like hate speech, untagged pornography and violent fanfic, and general bullying/harassment became even harder to fight back against.

This caused a massive fandom rift, and it was about that time that I and a lot of others stopped watching the show, because the community was so awful that it ruined our genuine enjoyment in the cartoon.

The result of this? A vacuum that led to an echo chamber of proto alt-right men who felt rejected by society, who had already spent countless hours fighting against accountability and content tagging and safe fandom spaces, united in their conviction that the world was out to get them.

It didn’t take long for this to develop into fascist thought. It didn’t take long at all.