It's an interesting study and I understand why people would feel that way, the only thing that rubs me the wrong way about these things is the human tendency to paint someone in a totally negative light once they see the "red flag." I feel the comments are evidence to that fact. If you know someone who hold offensive opinions you should actually ask them why they hold that opinion. People are enormously complex and their personalities or even morals cannot be boiled down to a small handful of extremely polarizing opinions.
And that's jumping to conclusions, why would having an interest in a podcast automatically make one make you believe that the other thinks of you as lesser. Adults should have adult conversations with each other.
In racing a red flag doesn't mean stop and call the whole thing off. It's a chance to reset and see if/when it's safe to continue.
Just because you see a red flag doesn't mean someone thinks of you as less, It doesn't mean they're harmful or dangerous.
That's your assumption based on whatever raised that flag for you. A lot of people might not even see the same thing as a red flag.
Sure, you're probably right most of the time and they're not worth the energy. If you shut them down straight away though, without investigating, you might end up missing more green flags than red.
And just never race again?
Sure that solves the one issue you had that one time at one track but would that be worth giving up racing altogether?
What about the track you've never had an incident on? What about your favourite track to race on? What about all the new tracks you'd miss out trying?
Would you give up driving altogether because of it? There's still risk there.
That's a lot of fear and sacrifice for nothing more than a potential reason things could go bad.
Let's move away from the metaphor though.
There's always the risk anybody could go out of their way to harm you. That friendly neighbour, the nice guy at work or even close friends and family.
I'm not saying ignore the red flags, especially any serious ones.
There's a guy at my work who is very chatty, needy and desperate for my attention. Those are red flags for me so he doesn't get to find out where I live or socialise or go to the gym or anything like that because he's likely to just turn up.
I'm not going to stop being friends with my colleagues because of one person though.
Some of my best friends are current and ex-colleagues, I'd have missed out on some great people if I let one person/incident put me off.
If someone starts dating someone and they realise early on that their beliefs are incompatible, they have absolutely zero responsibly to educate the other person, especially if it might be dangerous for them.
By all means if your gut tells you run, run. All I'm saying is that simply holding a single, opinion is not nearly enough information. What scares me to begin with is that ideas are so polarizing that it turns off our ability to think. Not everyone who holds an opinion is polarized though, some people may be on the fence and that may show in their attitude. A better metric for measuring someone's moral compass would be how they treat waiters or waitresses or how they respond to animals.