The Dictatorship
JD Vance’s response to this DOGE staffer’s racist comments reframes amnesty as mercy
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who has worked with Elon Musk’s DOGE operationwas very busy last week. First, he resigned after the The Wall Street Journal reported that he had made racist remarks on a now-deleted social media account last year. Then, Musk himself said Elez will return to the government. The decision was backed by none other than Vice President JD Vance, who helped Musk out in his agenda by framing it as an attempt to fight cancel culture. The expected rehiring of Elez and Vance’s excuses for him show the lengths the new administration will go to downplay bigotry.
The Journal reported last week that those archived posts from a deleted X account used by Elez included comments such as: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” And “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Also, “Normalize Indian hate.” And “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” NBC News has not seen or verified those posts.
What Vance frames as a call for mercy is in reality a declaration of amnesty for bigotry.
But after Elez’s resignation, Musk posted a survey on X asking his tens of millions of followers whether he should rehire the “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” About 80% of the respondents said he should be rehired — an unsurprising result given Musk’s cultlike following on the site. Vance then shared Musk’s survey with his own comments:
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
At a press conference Friday, President Donald Trump said he wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Elez’s case, but co-signed Vance’s judgment and said “I’m with the vice president.”
Vance’s post slyly attempted to reframe openness to bigotry as a compassionate demonstration of forgiveness for a vulnerable person. Vance calls Elez a “kid,” implying that Elez was being punished for posts written when he was too young to have known better. Vance’s comments helped turbocharge this particular myth — across X, prominent users misleadingly described Elez’s comments as the indiscretion of a child or a teenager.
In fact, not only is Elez 25 years old, but also all the posts cited by the Journal were reportedly published within the last year. Besides, if Elez is too young to be held accountable for his commentary, then why should he hold a position in government requiring public trust? Vance’s framing of his position as a show of strength against “journalists who try to destroy people” is disingenuous. It was in the public interest for the Journal to shed light on a government worker’s comments that suggest a possible appetite for discrimination. That concern is all the more pronounced because of the way Musk has sought to skirt norms of transparency and process and in his efforts to purge the federal workforce and seize control of its data.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., asked Vance on X, “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 is married to an Indian American woman and has three children with her.) Vance replied by implying Elez’s posts should be viewed as “stupid jokes,” and treated Khanna as the real villain:
I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro?
That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressmen who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts.
You disgust me.
Note that Vance dodges Khanna’s reasonable suggestion that Elez at least apologize. (To date, Elez has offered no known public comment on the matter. A text message and phone call by NBC to a number associated with Elez were not immediately returned, and he did not comment to the Journal either.) Note too that Vance implies Elez regrets saying what he did, despite the absence of public evidence supporting the claim. And note that again, Vance implies the adult in question is a child.
In other words, what Vance frames as a call for mercy is, in reality, a declaration of amnesty for bigotry. Second chances and the opportunity for rehabilitation are good things, but Vance does not articulate why this specific person should get that treatment, nor does he mention any other means for accountability.
During his first term, Trump was rightly dogged by controversy for saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes at the “Unite the right” Charlottesville rally in 2017 which was attended by white supremacists. Now, he’s co-signing his vice president and his purger-in-chief’s attempts to shield an underling from the bare minimum of accountability for views so evidently repugnant that Musk and Vance had to alter the timeline of when those views were uttered. And this administration is just getting started.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.