"Lester Berg": "Confessions Of A Soulless Troglodyte: How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart In The Age Of Trump"

Worth a read.
The stuff that interests me doesn't show up until later in the piece, and then only briefly. But:

   After Trump was elected, I continued to seek the company of bookish kin, without fully realizing that they were in the process of excommunicating me. Something shifted in late 2016—and not just with Jamie. An author I’ll call Daniel, who’d solicited my critical feedback in the past, sold his novel to a top publisher, earning a huge advance. I was happy for him, and he was kind enough to thank me in the book’s acknowledgements. But the novel didn’t sell well. And Daniel found a way to blame the bad numbers on Trump’s presidency.
   “I hate every Republican, good or bad, with every fibre of my being,” he declared to the world. Trump’s supporters, he said, were all “soulless troglodytes.”
   While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”
   I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.
   “I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.
   On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”
   As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters. As with a massive gas giant orbiting a smaller body, the gravitational field of Trump’s symbolic presence has come to draw in the petty grievances, career anxieties and existential dread of a whole generation of intellectuals. I hate my boss: Fuck Trump! My spouse hates me: Fuck Trump! No one will buy my book: Fuck Trump! Please, I want somebody to love me: Fuck Trump! Here, at last, was somebody we could freely hate more than we hate each other or ourselves.
   “I have to say this for Trump,” Daniel wrote once. “All the hate and anger I had against the coffeemaker and at myself for backing my car into a tree, etc.., well, that’s all gone thanks to our imposter-in-chief. So…thank you, Mr. Trump, for channeling all my anger.”
   As shown by the arc of my relationship with Jamie—and the many other Jamies who populate the New York writing scene—Trump is as much a symptom as a cause. His appearance in American politics coincides with a larger trend on the left that now serves to elevate every form of personal disappointment into a symptom of “systemic” abuse. The result hasn’t just been that my erstwhile friends are afflicted with debilitating persecution complexes: It also has destroyed their ability to exercise independent thought. For free thought requires the free use of language, which is impossible when smart people like Jamie or Daniel are required to push the round peg of art and creation into the square hole of political sloganeering.

That's all interesting, and it all resonates with my experience--though Trump hasn't cost me any friendships. The last bit's of particular interest, though. It's a major gripe I have with the PC left: its reliance on the weird, tortured, dopey lingo and formulae they love so much. "Problematic," "toxic," "whiteness," "privilege," and on and on and on. In addition to everything else wrong with the PCs, there's something particularly repulsive about that bullshit. Perhaps the pat lingo has some association with the canned (and invalid) patterns of reasoning they lean on so heavily.