The tribe currently wielding the sword is the red tribe. Framing their actions as "squashing a rebellion" rather than seditious conspiracy to undermine our Constitutionally-limited government is a form of empathizing with their particular violence.

The framing of corporate vaccine mandates is from the same vein - both the implication that it's at the same level of coercion as de jure government action, and also the normalization of what would normally be a fringe viewpoint as a mainstream political rallying cry (a direct result of tribal propaganda). If you want to talk about needless escalation, sane leadership would have unequivocally told everyone they should get vaccinated, and then the number of people defecting would have been small enough to just cope with.

Furthermore addressing your original appeal for "open, peaceful, extended discussion", this doesn't particularly work when the red tribe is still fully cheering on their spite-candidate looting and burning our country's institutions to "own the libs". From what I've seen there are many Democrats still asking "how can we compromise" (even if half are tone deaf about the reasons), while the red tribe continues to reject any criticism of what they're told is "winning".

I'm not on either side. I'm certainly not a fan of a company or government, both with the ability to negativity affect my life in considerable ways if I am unwilling to bow to the current whim of leadership.

Corporate life under a tyrant who demands prayers or pronouns were unthinkable not long ago. Today if enough leverage is used to press the buttons the demands on us workers may be unpleasant at best or deny us our livelihood.

>Corporate life under a tyrant who demands prayers or pronouns were unthinkable not long ago.

See you give the game away with shallow complaints of forced pronouns. It's a fantasy that allows you to sit fence while only really casting strong blame in one direction, while excusing it when the wind blows a new way.

I myself was both sidesing up until June of 2020. But doing it at this point just seems like a type of denial.

Appealing to "prayers or pronouns" is specious. There have always been things that are politically incorrect to say, and which saying will alienate you from a chunk of people. Hence the heuristic of "no politics or religion" - a decent first-pass at avoiding putting your foot in your mouth. And in the workplace, there have always been vectoralist politickers with whom you just have to smile, nod, and validate their world view / ego. Whether you're smiling and nodding about the virtues of "DEI" or the virtues of playing golf, does it really matter? Plus ça change...

For more context of where I'm coming from, when Obama projected the rainbow flag on the White House, my immediate reaction was "the backlash from this is going to be terrible". I got how that alienated a large number of people, who in my opinion just kind of needed to be left alone until they and their prejudices pass, rather than being gloated at. But groupthink gonna groupthink...

If Trumpism were merely the opposing flavor of that, I wouldn't care! Project a cross on the White House and send every kid a copy of the ten commandments - ridiculous and inflammatory, but eminently ignoreable and recoverable. But Trumpism is not merely some traditionalist mirror of progressive virtue-signalling - as illustrated by the government-enabled terrorist gangs physically attacking American cities and whatnot. Rather, Trumpism is the wholesale vivisection and looting of the Constitutionally-limited US government, in favor of some autocratic big tech surveillance dystopia.

That's what flipped for me in June 2020 - the hard objective realization that Trump was never going to come around to accepting Covid as a pan-political problem that needed to be addressed to lead us through. If he had done this, he would have had a shoe-in second term, from the "war president" effect. But rather, the only thing he and his "base" know is division. It's why all of the policies currently being championed are merely some combination of destructive and ineffectual - constructively fixing the issue is never the goal, rather its merely letting the problem fester while preaching to an increasingly-committed choir of true believers.

If you're earnestly championing "open, peaceful, extended discussion", then you should at least be willing to recognize that Trumpism is a severely-escalated destruction of that ideal.