On Thursday, 25-year-old Marko Elez resigned from his unearned position in Elon Musk’s DOGE in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report exposing his very racist history on social media.
But not for long.
Elez, who was given access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive central payments system, “will be brought back,” Musk announced on X Friday.
This follows Musk’s unscientific poll Friday morning, in which he asked his dubious cesspool of simps and bots if Elez should be brought back to DOGE. As of the writing of this story, results showed that just under 80% of those polled support the reinstatement of Elez’s employment.
In contrast, recent scientific YouGov polling for The Economist found that the billionaire and his efforts to destroy the government are wildly unpopular.
Meanwhile, Vance took to X to express his support for Elez.
“Here’s my view: 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,” he wrote.
According to Vance, the solution to “ruining a kid’s life” is apparently letting them work jobs where they have access to hundreds of millions of citizens’ personal financial records.
While no one disputed the facts laid out in the WSJ report, Musk and other extremist right-wingers launched a campaign to bully Katherine Long, the journalist who wrote the story.
Misinformation machine Ian Miles Cheong called the story a “hit piece” and posted Long’s biography, highlighting her previous work “managing USAID projects in Central Asia.”
Musk quickly retweeted the post, writing, “What the hell? Certainly improper, possibly criminal.”
The irony, of course, is that there might not be a single thing Musk himself does that isn’t “certainly improper, possibly criminal.”
Very quickly, major right-wing X accounts joined in on the attacks against Long, painting her as some “woke” vigilante. One account with a couple hundred thousand followers disseminated the conspiracy theory that Long is a “deep-state operative.”
“She’s a disgusting and cruel person,” wrote Musk in reply to a post that damned Long for a 2021 article she wrote about the lack of diversity in video games.
When President Donald Trump was asked about Elez potentially being rehired, he stated simply„I’m with the vice president.”
Shortly after Musk’s announcement that Elez would be rehired, Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, got into a back and forth with Vance.
“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,” he wrote on X.
Both Khanna and Vance’s children have at least one parent who is of Indian descent.
“For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” Vance responded. “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. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”
Elez made the racist and offensive social media posts just a few months ago, so while “racist trolls on the internet” might not be considered much of a threat, perhaps we should hold them to a higher standard when they have full access to our country’s payment system.
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