What I really disliked was how weaponized all of this became.

First of all, you had complete assholes laughing at journalists losing their jobs and saying they should “learn to code” because they were told to hate Hillary and so on for the - gasp! - notion of helping people working in the coal industry to transition to something else by retraining. So yeah, that became a phrase that is roundly mocked by the hard right.

They took messages like the positive one in Shop Class as Soulcraft and twisted it.

And now these assholes are also actively hoping that people in white collar jobs - most especially tech - are made poor and homeless or something because those are “feminine” jobs and real men need to have more jobs again, etc. The people pushing the very most are, not the least bit ironically, because the right wing loves being hypocritical as hell, usually in right wing think tanks and on the air as talking heads and then pushed by “influencers”. Not one of them are working in trades or in mining coal or in manufacturing…