I have just launched my Indiegogo campaign for Artificial Intuition, a deck of cards with strategies for modifying your prompts for ML models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
This sounds similar to a situation I know of that occurred a few years ago and the person in question got terminated for a particular cause, but they were the kind of person who decides if what they were saying was a joke depending on if you laugh or agree and has been very careful around their manager.
The language you are using makes me think you might be getting pinged from hiring processes because you are very angry/anxious about this whole situation and probably not putting your best foot forward.
That combined with the anxiety of the world being on fire may be making things worse in all sorts of ways, both for you and the teams you are interviewing with.
No damage that is solely reputational is permanent, so it seems you are stuck catastrophising. That can put people in survival mode and I know when I’m at work I want to be in a creative mode environment so you may not be coming across as a cultural fit.
I don’t think you’ve come to terms with the situation and I’d recommend you talk to a therapist before resuming your job search.
'He loves quiet chats over his own dinner table
with such friends as Gerhart Hauptmann
and Professor Schrodinger. He reads only
little. Modern fiction does not seduce him.
Even in science he limits himself largely to
his special field. "Reading after a certain
age diverts the mind too much from it's creative pursuits. Any man who reads too
much and uses his own brain too little falls
into lazy habits of thinking, just as the
man who spends too much time in the
theater is tempted to be content with living
vicariously instead of living his own life."
In his own field of thought Einstein follows every development with keen interest.
He has the gift of reading at a glance a whole
page of equations. Einstein can master a
whole new system of mathematics in half
an hour.'