The Google anti-diversity memo guy has now unleashed the world’s worst KKK take
Please recall from your crowded memory the name James Damore, the mysterious Google employee who, it was later revealed, was behind the viral anti-diversity memo that made the rounds earlier this summer. The memo was a long, pedantically “logical” argument that women were biologically incapable of doing the heavy rational work of being tech employees, thus justifying the massive hiring biases that’ve made Silicon Valley a bastion of institutional machismo. After Damore was fired, he was positioned by the typical cadre of dog-whistle enthusiasts as a civilized “critic of diversity,” a victim of our overly politically correct times. He became a cause célèbre for a “march on Google” and popped up on Twitter with the notably strident handle @Fired4truth.
However, as with any supposedly civilized “critic of diversity,” eventually the mask slid away to reveal the same hard-right troll that you can find under any old rock online, and he began palling around with alt-right figureheads like Stefan Molyneux and “the Annie Liebovitz of the alt-right.” Anyway, today he unleashed the sequel to his anti-diversity memo, which can only be described as his “Pro-KKK Twitter Thread”:
If you act now, you can still vote, at least until he wises up and deletes it. (Currently the nays have it, almost 3:1. It’s a bad poll, structurally.) What’s remarkable is how he immediately started positioning the shitty poll as, in fact, a real question, brought up by his real, actual, extremely large-brained insights!
Damore’s logic is muddy, but he seems to be saying that there’s an important conversation to be had about the KKK’s willingness to tap into our culture’s latent, unexplored desire for wizards and dragons. The A.V. Club, a popular culture publication, can enthusiastically rebut his argument: While people are very fucking into wizards and dragons, they avail themselves of many non-racist avenues for exploring them, including the most popular show on television, the most popular books of the millennium, and six fucking Peter Jackson movies, among others. People probably join the KKK less for the ability to use the word “dragon” than, you know, the fact that they are racist people.
Anyway, he picked the wrong website for this sort of weird, half-assed trolling—but not-trolling! seriously asking questions!—and has been punished by being ritualistically dunked on for the entire afternoon.
That would probably just be the end of things, but following the dunking, Damore has fully walked back the bad joke and half-assed take he fired off in the first place.
We’ve all learned something here today, particularly James Damore, the brain-genius ex-Google alt-right paragon of logic-based sexism, and now racism, too.