> All I said was that I believe in "freedom on expression" and so I don't behave punitively toward people that hold different opinions. You chose to do what you want.

Difference without distinction. Everyone believes how they behave is the standard by which most people should behave, that's just human nature. You don't need to explicitly say "I don't think you should discriminate against me for mine" for it to be strongly implied in your sentiment. If you didn't think it was the optimum way to behave, you wouldn't behave that way, therefore at least some endorsement of that behavior to others is a natural implication of your statement.

If indeed you have zero issue with it in other people, then why leave this comment at all?

> Like I don't care about the politics of the employees of companies I buy from. ... I feel sad that this is the place the word has come to.

If you don't care, truly, then why do you feel sad?

> I wish you could see how awful this sounds to someone who doesn't believe themselves to be "moral beyond reproach" -- which you seem to.

I guess it's your turn to put words in my mouth then? Except nothing I said follows logically to what you've stated here. I don't believe I'm beyond moral reproach at all, far from it. I'm, in my mind, a reformed libertarian. I still believe many of the things I originally believed, the scales have simply fallen from my eyes with regard to the innate superiority of capitalism and markets. Those things, of course, have a place but I believe they are grossly overstated in our current world and I empathize with the people who suffer from that as a result.

> The hard line in both parties (in the US) today take such a "you agree with us or you are an evil person" approach to policy that the foundations of society feel like they are on more tenuous ground than I ever remember them being.

I mean, sure. But my thinking of them as evil people (which I don't, more on that later) rests on the fact that their policies are demonstrably harmful, that damn near everything wrong with our current world both in the United States and abroad can be laid at the feet, at least in part, in one way or another of extremely liberal economic policies with regard to trade and, alongside that, a massive movement towards privatization of public good services and the destruction of the welfare state, has left people acutely vulnerable to the sorts of violence and grotesqueness we now suffer under daily.

Conversely, their opinion of me being evil rests in heavily propagandized, inaccurate and evil versions of socialism and/or communism (which despite being two different things are used interchangeably, reinforcing the lack of true understanding on their part but I digress) conflated with basic pro-social, pro-worker policies that are not out of place in numerous other developed nations, which up until barely a generation ago had broad support even here in the United States and basically boil down to "maybe people shouldn't be completely subjugated to the wills of their employer who has fundamentally different motivations actually" and "maybe being broke shouldn't be functionally a prison sentence without a release date, or worse, a death penalty."

For example: Are you aware that what became the Affordable Care Act (or as the Republicans coined it, "Obamacare") was originally a pilot program established in Massachusetts by Republican Governor at the time Mitt Romney? But of course because a Democrat had suggested it, the fact that it was mostly a Republican idea didn't matter because the Republicans no longer govern with principles, they govern with rage and so we had a whole new round of propaganda that any amount of relief for people who didn't have insurance was communist and was going to destroy the West as we know it and yadda yadda yadda.

Like, I understand the across-the-aisle belief system inherently. I believed it, for a long time. But fundamentally as the American Right-wing drifted further and further away from actual conservatism which, while being an ideology I disagree with on most points, has an agenda and has principles it adheres to, I could no longer stand by it because it was so fundamentally opposed to all my own personal ethics with regard to the actual freedom they espouse belief in... while simultaneously advocating for massive government overreach and control to fight all the things in the world they feel inadequate compared to.

That was a bit of a tangent on my part, but the point is: I don't view my opposition as evil. Evil is a force of myth, of some unnamed power that holds influence over people. The right even now is not evil, it's an astroturfed movement full of well-meaning, frightened, and heavily, heavily misinformed people backed by an absolutely stressful amount of corporate funding to prop up what is, fundamentally, a broken ideology who's ideas have left vast swathes of the world objectively, measurably worse off.

I don't believe they're evil people but I do believe many of their ideas can definitely be categorized as evil, if someone is feeling poetic. I would use more precise language, like socially corrosive, misinformed and a result of coordinated monetary spend from powerful organizations and people trying to shift public policies in directions that allow them to accrue more power and money. And at the very least, I don't think it's unethical in the slightest for me to decide if a local coffee shop has an All Lives Matter sticker in the window, then that's not a shop I would like to spend money at.