The angry mob is irrelevant. There are more individuals watching quietly than people making their positions public. The mob will chill when their friends ask them to post-apology. I have been on all sides of this phenomenon: the chiller, the chillee, the apology. It works.
The mob is big enough that they are not necessarily even friends with each other. People who ask the mob to chill risk being mobbed in turn. Punishment of non-punishers is how mobs sustain themselves.
The angry mob is the reason people like James Damore get fired while his openly white-male-hating coworkers are free to post their opinions on Twitter with no consequences at all. They are not at all irrelevant.
