Right, sure he picked the most glorified fantasy race out there, “but evil”. When in reality he’s a Duergar at best:
Personality Tyrannical, grim, industrious and pessimistic,[11][20] the lives of the gray dwarves were bleak and brutal. Rather than a flaw, however, they viewed their lack of happiness as their greatest strength, the defining feature of duergar pride.
Sounds about right for the joyless world he imagines his ideal society would represent.
York and the surrounding counties are currently very much a culture war battleground. There’s a bunch of school board initiated censorship, bomb threats against libraries (and then subsequent defunding of those unless they promise not to do anything that could cause offense to domestic terrorists), that sort of thing. (Edit: forgot to mention the hate tracker, some more stuff I didn’t think I wanted to know about my own neighbors)
That crap is done by people and I imagine these folks are among those doing it, and so are their friends and neighbors.
They’ll react to it … by swerving further right.