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.