At least in the U.S., from my observations, it's mainly a right-wing phenomenon and borne from the same culture that brought us the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Hal Turner. As a teenager, my friends and I would laugh at this stuff and assume by the time we were having kids, Fox News and similar right-wing, vaguely racist, puritanical media would be diminished to a point where it was hardly noticeable. We were clearly very wrong.