What's changed? Our culture. Radical ideas and worldviews have been mainstreamed and instituted. Think about even just how controlled and vanilla workplaces, and even many social interactions, are now as a matter of rule or law. Normal people acquiesced, so the neo-puritans, control-freaks, dullards, and losers had been able to dictate societal discourse for a while, but we have since seen a major pushback.
Some people today want to virtue-signal at every turn. If you disapprove of Shady Sadie the Khan-man, the pinkos call you a racist because, ironically, all they can see is the colour of his skin (and other known personal traits like his religion), and they no longer judge him by his actions due to the fact that he is a "POC." People have gone from thinking that being largely "colour blind" was good as a means to ensuring that society was based on equality to instead focusing always on colour and other superficial personal traits and therefore framing every interaction in regard to a neo-Marxist identity politics oppressor-oppressed dynamic. In this case, then, one asserts that any critic of Khan must be racist and an oppressor. The same heuristic non-thinking can be applied more generally to one's attitudes about immigration.
Indeed, logical thinking and tolerance are being exterminated by the left in favour of a growing radicalism, intolerance, and illogicality. This "simple" heuristic formula that is employed in order to avoid the truly complicated nature of the real world is how we now come to view Morrissey as an alt-right, far-right racist sexist homophobic Islamophobic bigot neo-Nazi who is evil and needs to die.
In short, a chunk of society has just gone totally bonkers.