Well, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation (ie. conservatism – let’s not pretend there’s a non-authoritarian, non-dominant version) are both risk factors of torture-like abuse^[1], so yeah, if they started seeing their children as something other than the in-group (maybe the kids got “woke”?), a huge percentage of them would probably have no qualms literally torturing them if they knew they wouldn’t get punished for it