When I was a public defender I got assigned to defend a number of skinheads. I got a pretty heavy exposure to their racist bullshit and it's one of the reasons I'm no longer a public defender.

Everyone thinks hateful thoughts in brief moments of anger, but very few people ever act on those thoughts or express them. Their whole recruitment process was to get someone to move from just thinking thoughts to acting on them, usually by spreading the message to others. Once you cross that line from thinking to action, the bright line divider is gone--it's all just a matter of degrees of action.