I've never had a discussion about abortion or guns-rights or whatever in the general workplace - maybe I've had social conversations amongst work friends - but really the "political" conversations I've had at work are mostly focus on building diverse teams to build better products or calling out and addressing bad behaviour.
Absolutely. The US government considered the entire civil rights movement to serve the Communist agenda. Read about J. Edgar Hoover's enemies list[0] or COINTELPRO[1]. The FBI believed MLK was a Communist agent[2]. Any anti-war or Black activist group was portrayed as enemies of the state and left-wing extremists.
You can see the same playbook being used against BLM today. No one on the right will fail to refer to them as anything but a "Marxist terrorist group" that "burns entire cities to the ground" and "murders innocents with impunity."
[0]https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862081/the-history-of-the-...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[2]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/federal-bure...
People who are criticizing Basecamp want their politics in workplace. Every single one of them knows they won't be in the minority. They won't have to be one of the few opposing voices in a sea of anti-abortion, pro-gun-rights, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigration coworkers.