"A snake, am I? Perhaps you'd like to see how snake-like I can be." -- I find myself thinking about this line from the Aladdin cartoon pretty often recently.
It is part of what I call the "big flip" -- the phenomenon where an accusation "permits" someone to be even more like the accusation than they were already.
A different kind of "big flip" is where Person A points out Person B's prejudice, and rather than Person B processing their prejudice, they simply expand it to include Person A, too.
I use the "big flip" to describe the way people's emotional momentum, or their internal drive to be right, is more important to their self-image than their human connection or credibility.
Whatever is used to reach them just becomes another "part of the problem," hence the flip.
A lot of people have been conditioned to believe that self-awareness is a weakness. They become caricatures of themselves, and end up supporting a bunch of things they don't actually value or even believe in.