But that's a bit of an artificial distinction, isn't it? After all, we just talked about Christians who believe that drag queens are literally working to destroy the country by grooming innocent children; on the Left, lots of people stopped buying certain brands of paper out of the belief that funding the Kochs was helping them tear down democracy. When people confronted Trump administration officials in restaurants to harangue them over their mistreatment of immigrants, they didn't do it because they thought it was just a mild political disagreement but rather an actual moral crisis.
But what we're also talking about is whether these facts should inspire everyone to discover who is doing what in their spare time
in order to ascertain if they can dine in a restaurant. And we're even more specifically talking about whether the restaurant should ban the patrons. Obviously if a left-winger doesn't want to eat at Chick-Fil-A they just don't have to go. That's not going to ruffle anyone's feathers as it's literally a non-event.
Now I would indeed go further and suggest that researching a corporation to learn the management's politics is probably a loser of a proposition if the goal is to avoid contributing to the wealth of the owner. I don't think it's realistic for pretty much anyone to actually comprehend (to the extent that this information is even public) who has financial interests in what, so that they could actually avoid this. Do you know offhand, or could you even discover if your life depended on it, all the companies the Kochs are invested in? I suppose it might be easier in the case of a CEO/owner of a single private company, but in my experience I've heard lots of people say they will boycott XYZ companies for various ok reasons, like Nestle, miscellaneous banks, and so on, and in each case the thing they are trying to avoid supporting they are almost certainly supporting in some other equivalent manner. I suppose this might be a sideline to your general observation that people view these disagreements as mortal dangers, but maybe it's not such a sideline you consider that I don't think the people trying to avoid corporate bad guys are willing to follow through on their intense research programme they would need to engage in to do this. It's kind of like saying you've decided to avoid eating anything with nuts or traces of nuts. Sounds easy on paper, but ask someone with a deathly nut allergy, it's not easy at all! So even a seriously objective grievance like slavery in the supply chain is quite hard to support with boycott-type actions. Have fun memorizing all of Nestle's subsidiaries and product lines. Just imagine if it was Proctor & Gamble you had a problem with...learning which products are theirs would be your new full-time hobby.
But if you did want to take very seriously the "they are destroying America" premise of a socio-political disagreement - anything ranging from the conservatives want to undermine governance to the liberals want to destroy marriage - you could surely lump many more categories in there if you were being serious about it, no? After all, what's a drag event compared to for-profit wars, murder for money? What's filibustering the debt ceiling compared to lobbyists trying to pass through legislation undermining democracy? You could make long lists of groups that legitimately are
in fact (not just in someone's partisan opinion) trying to dismantle the protections America offers, and endangering everyone in the world for that matter, for their own personal gain. Well I think we could ban them from restaurants too while we're at it, no? If you accept this type of proposition, then I think it becomes evident how false it is to claim you're banning someone because they espouse dangerous or offensive views: there are people with much more dangerous and offensive views you're happy to let in. It seems all too convenient that the people who are harassed or banned are direct partisan opponents, wouldn't you say? It's not like customers in restaurants are harassing, say, Jamie Dimon, or maybe someone in some corrupt oversight committee. No, they go after politicians or people who represent their opponents in the culture wars. I'd say that fact alone is pretty telling about the motives in regard to upholding virtue or anything like that.