The Free Press
Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who resigned after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X posts that he made under a pseudonym in 2024. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he had posted. Also, “Normalize Indian hate” and “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
Elez’s reinstatement was nominally a democratic process, conducted via—what else—a poll on X, where 78 percent of respondents agreed that the software developer should get his job back.
As DOGE developments go, none of this should surprise us. If Trump’s reelection can be interpreted as a backlash to the excesses of woke culture, nothing was more symbolic of the excesses of the era than having one’s livelihood subject to unilateral veto by a class of digital archaeologists. To that small but voracious group, every hiring announcement or viral sensation was like a clarion call to begin frantically rooting through the honored party’s virtual trash in search of evidence that he or she was Very Bad. At the height of the panic, casualties included SNL cast members, Teen Vogue editors, potential Oscar hosts, college cheerleaders, and even a random dude who had raised $1 million for charity after ESPN’s College GameDay captured him holding a sign asking people to donate beer money to him via Venmo; he had made two racist jokes when he was 16.
Given the ages (young) and online status (extremely) of the DOGE youths, there’s likely to be more where this came from. Already, the media are abuzz with the news that one of them was formerly a prolific poster under the name “Big Balls.” I, for one, am hoping any further revelations are in the “juvenile scrotal jokes” camp rather than the “weird racist meming” one. Since just because we’re past Peak Woke doesn’t mean we need to throw the doors of the government open to the kind of guy who throws around ethnic slurs for fun.
But is it possible to respond to the checkered online histories of the DOGE dudes without whipping ourselves into the kind of hysteria that dominated such conversations during the first Trump administration?
We’re about to find out.
Nobody liked the old system of public reckoning, except maybe the people at the controls of the apparatus—and then only because they could rewrite the rules of cancellation on a whim, on those occasions when a fellow progressive accidentally got their hair caught in the machinery. When star reporter and #Resistance celeb Lauren Duca was revealed to have been a serial bully who attempted to sabotage colleagues at her previous job, Jezebel graciously described her as "fairly young, and like many young people, still figuring it all out." (Duca was 28 at the time.) And then there was Sarah Jeong, whose appointment to the New York Times editorial board in 2018 was followed by the discovery that in 2013, she had authored a series of fairly outrageous tweets, including one featuring the question, "Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"
Naturally, the left-coded media consensus was that Jeong was being cruelly and unfairly targeted by a right-wing mob for her edgy posts. An explainer from Vox instructed readers that the tweets were clearly jokes, but that “Jeong’s detractors organized to deploy a system of performative outrage, using the screencaps as ‘evidence’ that Jeong was racist.”
But these were the exceptions. Indeed, one of the worst things about the peak woke years was progressives’ insistence that not only should speech come with consequences, but that those consequences should be maximally punitive, with no possibility of redemption.
This led to an equal and opposite consensus among the MAGA folks that offensive internet posts should merit no consequences whatsoever, and perhaps should even be celebrated for triggering all the right people, which is to say, people on the left.
Which is fine, if you want to live in a world where the discourse is permanently dominated by shrieking authoritarians on one side and smirking edgelords on the other. In this world, the only difference between being an internet folk hero and being canceled to death is whether the current White House occupant is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s a world where we are all being driven slowly insane by perpetual exposure to the inner brainworkings of people who cannot tell the difference between a thought you should broadcast on the public internet versus one you should leave unexpressed—or at least keep confined to the relative privacy of a group chat.
This last thing, those revealing public proclamations, is perhaps the biggest issue we’ll have to reckon with.
A common argument in favor of firing someone like Elez is that a person who harbors such beliefs—or even just expresses them in jest—simply can’t be trusted to have even a proximal position to the levers of power. But this mistakenly implies that the existence of biased or bigoted people in positions of authority is something new. What is actually new is our ability, previously unimaginable, to fire up X or Facebook or Bluesky and see exactly what those people are thinking all the time—and, more to the point, what they were thinking back before they had power and professional reputations to manage.
This is only going to become more of an issue as Gen Z enters the workforce, leading to questions about how institutions, government and otherwise, should deal with the presence of former edgelords in their employ. A stern talking-to? A forced apology? After Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X in favor of Elez’s reinstatement, Representative Ro Khanna replied, “Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Vance, who referred to Khanna’s comment as “emotional blackmail,” wrote back: “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes."
Perhaps someday, as Vance suggests, we’ll find a way to undo the damage to our social trust caused by the window social media offers into the minds of our fellow citizens. Bonus points for whoever can untangle the unprecedented incentives social platforms create for a certain type of usually young, usually male person to engage in performative, trollish provocation with the sole intention of fomenting outrage. The truth is, a tolerant society benefits from a certain level of blissful ignorance as to the oddities, prejudices, and half-baked opinions of the people around us. But if blissful ignorance is impossible, then a measured response remains an option, which brings me back to Sarah Jeong and The New York Times, a parable that institutions everywhere, DOGE included, would do well to follow in a post-woke world.
In the end, Jeong was held accountable for her bad, racist tweets—which, despite the protestations of Jeong’s defenders, were, in fact, bad and racist. Accountability in this case looked like a formal apology, not a firing, and this is as it should be. It doesn’t even matter if a person who made offensive posts is truly sorry; what matters is the public admission of fault, an acknowledgment that they breached the social contract, and a promise not to do it again.
For years, the left insisted that the only appropriate consequence for making bad jokes was total personal and professional annihilation—a toxic and untenable notion that we have rightfully dispensed with. But having done so, surely we can also agree that for those whose jobs involve a certain level of power and influence, be they government workers or editorial board members, it still behooves you to maintain a level of decorum befitting that role. And, if it’s not too much to ask, an online handle that does not include the word balls.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said Marko Elez was fired. He resigned. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.
