All right, I’m going to address this one step at a time, but most of my focus will be on the first point.
Slytherin House was founded by a man who wanted to exclude part of the wizarding community based on something they couldn’t control (heritage). I don’t care about his reasoning.
This is naive and a little ridiculous. Reasoning does matter. In real life, I live in an area that is very conservative, and an accusation of witchcraft can get you hurt or killed. I’ve been stabbed more than once for being a practicing witch, I’ve had rocks thrown at me, I’ve been assaulted with Bibles, I’ve been beat up more than once – and I’m talking real life traditional witchcraft, not even Harry Potter-style magic that is visible and provable.
Look at how witches were handled when Hogwarts was founded. Witch hunts resulted in dozens, hundreds, thousands dead, including children. Look at Harry’s situation with the Dursleys, and how abusive it was. Now imagine that in a time where witchcraft was accepted as demonic, and he sentence was death. How many children did the Founders lose to hysteria because they accepted muggleborns? We don’t know. We don’t know how many children were subjected to beatings to ‘beat the devil out of them,’ something that still occurs today.
When you’re saying his reasoning doesn’t matter, look at the Fat Friar, the nicest ghost in all of Harry Potter canon, who was killed for using magic to cure people of plague.
And before you use the argument about Wendelin the Weird, look at how difficult wandless and nonverbal magic is shown to be in the books. How many witches or wizards do you think could do a flame-freezing charm wandlessly, while bound, and possibly even gagged? And even if we ignore that, the majority of people sentenced to death for witchcraft weren’t burned, anyway. They were hung.
Take a look at this timeline (that I really need to update) which combines Harry Potter canon with real world history, and really think about it.
The Great Harry Potter Timeline 382-1970
He left a Murder Snake in a school knowing that his descendants would use it to kill all of the muggleborns in Hogwarts.
Okay, yes, he left the basilisk in the school, but people assume it was meant to kill muggleborns. The actual text does not say that, and even if it did, it is framed as a legend – we don’t have the Super-Secret-Diary-Of-Salazar-Slytherin to tell us what was intended. There is no suggestion given at all that he had any kind of foreknowledge to suggest that he knew his descendants would use it to kill muggleborns. The basilisk could have easily been a protection for the castle if it was attacked. Is it possible that the basilisk was meant to kill all the muggleborns? Yes, but that is an assumption based on non-primary sources. Keep in mind that Salazar taught in the school for years before he left, years where muggleborns were actively living in the castle as well. It is never suggested that he was violent towards them.
So in the time between Voldemort’s first rise and Harry’s first year there had already been 20 years worth of sorting the like-minded (i.e. blatantly bigoted) kids together and sorting anyone who disagreed elsewhere
20 years worth of internal radicalization before Harry even got to Hogwarts
But sure, Slytherin wasn’t labeled as the purist house at Hogwarts
Oh, they absolutely were labelled as the purist house, but the thing is, how much of that was because of bias that had filtered down. Why didn’t Harry want to be in Slytherin? Well. let’s see. What did Ron tell him? There wasn’t a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin. You get Sorted into Slytherin, and suddenly everyone thinks your evil. It doesn’t matter that Ron’s statement was wrong, it was what people believed. We explicitly see this is wrong, though, because everyone believes Sirius was a Death Eater, and he was a Gryffiindor. That gets forgotten, because Slytherin is the evil House.
And what about muggleborns Sorted into Slytherin? We know they exist, because in Deathly Hallows, Scabior explicitly talks about ‘Slytherin mudbloods,’ so it does happen. Everything in the books sets Slytherin up as the Us vs. Them House. Aesthetically, even the colours of the houses separate them from everyone else, with silver contrasting with everyone else having some warm shade, like gold, yellow and bronze. Harry immediately upon entering the wizarding world is taught that Slytherin is evil. That forces the house to unite. That forces Slytherins to distrust everyone else, because everyone else thinks that they are evil – and that causes radicalization too.
Were there a lot of bad Slytherins? Absolutely. Were a lot of them bigoted? Again, absolutely. Did a lot of them join a genocidal cult? Again, absolutely, but how much of that was caused by the attitude of the Wizarding World? We don’t know. J.K. Rowling has said that if Merope lived, Tom Riddle wouldn’t have become Voldemort. If Albus Dumbledore had looked at the abysmal conditions at the orphanage and placed him with a wizarding family to show him love, would he have become Voldemort? We don’t know. If Dumbledore had taken a look at Snape, who was in an abusive or at least neglectful household and placed him somewhere else, would he have joined the Death Eaters? We don’t know. Heck, we don’t know if even showing some care towards Snape when Sirius pulled his prank might have changed things and shown him that someone in authority outside of Slytherin actually cared.
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