Where parents kept pushing their kids further and further away, right into the clutches of those with a far more nefarious and insidious agenda.

I mean, almost every Atheist is born from a parent who made Church and God so awful they resented it. And the Atheism movement was one of the founding roots of the current Wokeness problem. So I agree on that. Even in the "trans" household, its never the mom "letting their kid decide for themselves" truly but an overbearing force pushing them towards their own corruption.

So back to the original topic from the top, I think its less "predators being cartoonishly evil and wanting your kid unsupervised" and "a terrible broken person recognizing one of the things that made them that way long ago." At least somewhat, I'm sure some are outright evil about it.