Firing people for providing criticism of a company's diversity police, while citing science, and letting your friends in media drag the plaintiff through the mud.
Cancelling events and boycotting sponsors because their speaker line up isn't sufficiently in line with imaginary industry demographics. Or even because a blind selection process, the thing people say they want, ends up selecting a wrongthinker.
Bullying comet-chasing scientists into tearful apologies over their choice of shirt. Or a self deprecating joke. That's just in STEM, you see the same in comedy, in politics, etc.
In each instance, a pitchfork wielding mob was summoned with social media outrage by bad faith actors. And get this, they are the ones who also loudly complain about trolls.
The rule to make sense of it is quite easy: when they do it to you, it's just consequences for speech. When it happens to them, it's targeted harassment that makes people feel unsafe and someone needs to step in and ban it.
Sure, you can use science for evil things, like you could use a hammer to hit somebody on the head and a car to run somebody over. The problem here is not hammers and cars. If Damore were challenged on scientific grounds and refuted as such, it'd be fine (tbh, many people did exactly that and stopped there, and they were doing it right). But he was chased out as a heretic, not as someone who wrote scientific paper that was less than solid. He was chased out because him questioning this particular dogma is incompatible with being employed at this place, and because the culture we have now does not allow Google to be perceived as tolerating heretics.
One of the examples is trying to find offense in anything - literally from milk and pumpkin spice lattes to national anthem and math and logic as a basis of science. It's ok to think whether our actions could hurt anybody and adjust accordingly, but when it turns into obsessive offense mining and paranoid banning of anything that could that could be construed as offensive to anybody (usually only by the same people who do the banning, not even by the people that they purport to protect) - for some people it is just too much. It's a difference between reasonable hygiene and OCD when a person washes the hands for 4 hours. The first is great, the second is a debilitating disease. Many people feel the American culture has crossed the boundary into the disease and keeps marching on.
