Because the internet has a thing for identifying with assholes. Look at Rick Sanchez or Dennis Renolds or Starship Troopers or Warhammer 40K or Helldivers. Take any character or group that's explicitly coded as terrible in the source material, hand it to the Internet, and they'll start making memes about it and eventually unironically decide that character is legitimately great actually. And the people spamming the shit everywhere will always act as though such a thing could never happen.

Meanwhile in the US...