Focusing on the individual means dropping the notion of “sides”. Identifying people (or even arguments) by their alleged “side”, instead of taking them on their own merit, is where things go wrong.

I think your point is what gets missed in this conversation.

Many people just want to go to work and do their job … and not have social topics or politics discussed at work.

That doesn’t mean they don’t care about those topics, they just don’t feel like work is the correct place for discourse.

And the sense I get from recent moves by tech execs is that they simply want employees to focus 100% on work (because obviously they want to get the most productivity out of their paid staff), and anything non-work related is viewed as a distraction. Regardless of what that non-work topic might be.