Can we differentiate between firing Damore and participating in a nation-wide metaphorical public hanging?
Yes. Starting with the first is a thing that actually happened, and the second is not, so it's not worth talking about.
This willingness to "un-person" someone for reasons of ideological fervor -- this is precisely why I, as a liberal, feel so alienated from so much of the far-left politics going around nowadays. I've personally been a target of such things. (I can't discuss it, but I can say that it was not gender based.)
It's such attitudes and the unreasonable fury behind them which most worries me.
Claims of anti-white-male discrimination in tech are man-bites-dog stories, and naturally get more attention for that reason, plus, Damore immediately sought out media with political biases to maximally promote that kind of story. It becoming national front page news and getting the degree of attention it did in part just novelty, and in very large part the foreseeable result of how Damore soguht to promote his story.
> This was a public assassination
No, it wasn't. It was public, but there was no assassination.
It sure looked like an intellectually dishonest, ideologically fervent character assassination to me.
Was this before or after he'd already made national headlines for having written an "anti-diversity manifesto?"