It's actually relatively easy to explain. They spend 4+ years in college (and increasingly time in high school, as well) in classes where they are fed unfalsifiable bullshit based on theories that can be traced back to the Frankfurt School.

At some point, when you're fed years of lies about things that don't exist and are easily disproven, it becomes a game of the Emperor's New Clothes. It has nothing to do with the reality -- it's a choice of "accept the bullshit and stay in the club" or "burn every bridge and live on the outside." In my experience there is no middle ground between those two positions, and students are implicitly made aware of this.

So you have true adherents (mostly women, because they don't need logic to feel correct) and reprehensible losers who are 'faking it' until at some point they stop faking it because they have too much social capital to lose. It's also relatively basic psychology that if you 'fake' being someone or something for too long, you will eventually become it.

Call it a social contagion, call it a cult -- whatever you want, you're pretty accurately describing how fucked up it is.