I would consider myself center-left, though when I was younger, I was a reliably conservative (though still fairly moderate) voter. I grew up in Mississippi during the 80s through the 2000s and moved to New Jersey in the early 2010s. Growing up in the 80s, there was a lot more contempt towards urban "culture" because the perception was that cities basically had no culture; they were perceived as existing in a state of anarchy. New York was still recovering from two-plus decades of urban decay at the time and was the setting for a million violent action and horror movies. Eventually, the economic boom of the late 80s helped cities recover, and in New York, a lot of the improvement was attributed to Giuliani because he was mayor at the time, and let's be fair, whatever Giuliani has become since, at least some of that praise was deserved.

I came of voting age in 1996, and my voting record was Dole, then W, didn't vote in 2004, and 2008 was when I started moving to the left, largely because of Palin. Then the Tea Party / Freedom Caucus pushed me further left, and Trump even further. I don't see how I ever vote Republican again unless the party drastically changes tack. It was really during the W. years that "contempt for rural culture" became a thing, and as a rural conservative at the time, I rankled at it, but looking back now, it seems pretty clear to me that the contempt for cities and their liberal inhabitants predates the contempt for rural conservatism by at least a couple of decades, and continues today with stereotypes about "liberal elites."

That being said, when I moved to New Jersey, I expected to weather lots of jokes about whether I was married to my sister or whether we wear shoes in the Deep South, but I never encountered any of that. I do know that this stereotype exists on the internet, but I've never encountered much of it in real life, even when I tell people I grew up in Mississippi. I don't generally tell people when I go back south to visit that I'm from New Jersey, so I can't say whether I'd encounter any contempt from people there about being a Yankee now.

As someone who has lived significant portions of my life in both rural and urban areas and who has been both a moderate conservative and a moderate liberal, I'll say that what people on both sides truly do have contempt for is the perception that the other side is trying to control their lives. With conservatives, it's contempt towards things like gun control, and as a gun owner, I agree with those people to some extent. While I support robust background checks, trying to ban certain categories of weapons is a step too far in my opinion. As an aside, I saw another comment somewhere in this thread that said 99% of liberals support gun bans, but that math doesn't check out, since about 1 in 5 Democrats own a gun (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/).

Likewise, liberals rankle at the perception that far right conservatives - and I'm going to limit this criticism to the far right, since I'd like to believe it's less common among moderate conservatives - want to control so many aspects of a person's identity: who they can love, who they can be, what they can identify as, what they can do with their bodies. This, for me, is the reason I won't be able to vote Republican again until they give up all the culture war stuff, and it's also why I don't think Republicans will be able to consistently win elections again until they do drop these issues. I'm Gen X, but millennial and Gen Z voters (even a lot of conservative leaning ones) are, by and large, supportive of gay rights, trans right, reproductive rights, etc.

Regarding free speech, I agree with what the author says about the tendency individuals have to believe that they they are resistant to brainwashing but others are not. I'm of two minds about this issue overall, though. On the one hand, I do think the increasingly heated rhetoric online is one of the chief contributing factors to our current state of extreme partisanship. in that regard, while I think brainwashing is certainly far too strong a word, I DO think we're all (myself included) subject to being influenced by what we read online. On the other hand, I think one issue that both sides take deep offense to is the perception of their side's freedom of speech being threatened. I certainly think violent rhetoric should be moderated, but beyond that, I have a hard time saying where the line should reasonably be drawn. To be clear, though, facing social consequences for offensive rhetoric, whether it be rightwing or leftwing rhetoric, is not at all the same as having one's rights to freedom of speech curtailed by the government.

To be honest, I was (and still am) sort of hopeful Elon would run Twitter completely into the ground and that nothing would rise to replace it because, the truth is, I don't know how we are ever able to get back to even the marginally less extreme partisanship of the eighties as long as we have people constantly trying to one-up each other with increasingly extreme hot takes on every single issue.