Milo Yiannopoulos, the former tech editor at
Breitbart, shared the Reddit collage image
with 2 million Facebook followers. “Look
at who works for Google, it all makes sense
now,” he wrote—as if these eight employees
had been the ones who made the decision
to ax Damore.
For the employees who were being tar-
geted, the leaks were terrifying. How many
of their coworkers were feeding material to
the alt-right? How many more leaks were
coming? And what was their employer going
to do to protect them?
In the past Google had fired an employee
for leaking internal memes from Memegen.
But when the targeted employees reported
harassment, they say, Google’s security team
told them that the leaking of screenshots
might fall under the legal definition of “pro-
tected concerted activity”—the same labor
right invoked by Cernekee.
To Fong-Jones, the security team’s answer
was both shocking and instructive; she
didn’t realize a leaker could be protected.
“Everyone thought Google had an absolute
right to stop you from talking about anything
related to Google,” she says. Yet here Google’s
hands were apparently tied by labor law.
Executives felt that they were doing
everything they could. They offered to put up
employees who had been doxed in a hotel
for the night. But to the targeted employ-
ees, it felt as though Google was allowing
fear of a far-right backlash and the threat
of further lawsuits to trump the safety con-
cerns of loyal employees. (A spokesperson
for Google declined to specify whether the
company managed to uncover the identity
of the leakers in this case but said it investi-
gates all such incidents and enforces its pol-
icies without regard to politics.)
By the day when Pichai was supposed to
answer questions about Damore at TGIF,
chaos surrounded Google. That afternoon,
Damore returned to campus with a pho-
tographer whom The New York Times had
recently dubbed “the Annie Leibovitz of
the alt-right.” “Live in Mountain View,” the
engineer tweeted, teasing some impending
spectacle to his 40,000 new Twitter fans.
Punchy tech reporters, sensing an open-
ing, solicited employees to send them a live
readout from the town hall.
Forty-five minutes before the meet-
ing was supposed to start, Pichai sent his
78,000 employees an email. “TL;DR Sorryespecially familiar. Google’s engineers are not unionized, but inside Google,
Fong-Jones essentially performed the function of a union rep, translating
employee concerns to managers on everything from product decisions to inclu-
sion practices. She had acquired this informal role around the time the company
released Google+ to the public in 2011; before launch, she warned executives
against requiring people to use their real names on the platform, arguing that
anonymity was important for vulnerable groups. When public uproar played out
much as Fong-Jones had predicted, she sat across from executives to negotiate
a new policy—then explained the necessary compromises to irate employees.
After that, managers and employees started coming to her to mediate internal
tensions of all sorts.
As part of this internal advocacy work, Fong-Jones had become attuned to
the way discussions about diversity on internal forums were beset by men like
Cernekee, Damore, and other coworkers who were “just asking questions.” To
her mind, Google’s management had allowed these dynamics to fester for too
long, and now it was time for executives to take a stand. In an internal Google+
post, she wrote that “the only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to
no-platform all of them.”
A few hours later, Google’s internal networks received a shock to the system.
A screenshot of Fong-Jones’ “Medusa” comment appeared on Vox Popoli, a blog
run by the alt-right instigator Theodore Beale, along with her full name and pro-
file photo. The comments section quickly filled with racial and sexual slurs fix-
ated personally on Fong-Jones, who is trans. “They should pitch all those sexual
freaks off of rooftops,” one anonymous Vox Popoli commenter wrote.
On Monday morning, Google’s top management finally met to discuss what to
do about Damore. The room, according to reporting by Recode, was split. Half
the executives believed Damore shouldn’t be fired. Then YouTube CEO Susan
Wojcicki and head of communications Jessica Powell urged their colleagues to
consider how they would have reacted if Damore had applied the same argu-
ments to race, rather than gender. That persuaded them: The engineer had to
go. In a note to employees, Pichai said he was firing Damore for perpetuating
gender stereotypes.
In his message, Pichai tried to assure the left without alienating the right. “To
suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically
suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” he wrote. “At the same time, there
are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views
in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel
under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent.”
Then he promised to fly back to the Bay Area for a TGIF meeting on Thursday
where the employees could discuss the matter.
Damore’s termination set off a predictable onslaught of negative coverage
from the right. Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro all bashed Google;
New York Times columnist David Brooks called for Pichai to resign. Damore gave
his first interviews to YouTubers Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, the latter
of whom is a proponent of “race realism.” The alt-right took this as an endorse-
ment and started churning out memes of Damore, his head on Martin Luther’s
body, nailing his memo to the door of a church.
More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations
among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to
2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a col-
lage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of
eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color.
Fong-Jones was one of them. Each bio featured phrases that would make the
employees instant targets for online harassment: “polyamorous queer autis-
tic trans lesbian,” “just another gay communist site reliability engineer,” or, in
Fong-Jones’ case, “Trans and queer as fuck.” Two days after Damore was fired,