CRISIS MANAGEMENT — A fierce proxy battle over “cancel culture” is taking place behind the scenes of Elon Musk’s DOGE-led purge of the federal bureaucracy, illustrating the right’s new willingness to flex its muscles in the culture war. The controversy kicked off Thursday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that a 25-year-old DOGE employee named Marko Elez had resigned from the department after the paper discovered racist posts Elez made last year on social media. The posts, from an anonymous account connected with Elez, bragged about “being racist before it was cool” and featured a call to “normalize Indian hate.” In a statement provided to the Journal on Friday, a White House spokesperson confirmed that Elez was no longer working for the government. It was a standard exercise in crisis management, but less than 24 hours later, the tide had turned unexpectedly in Elez’s favor. On Friday, Musk posted a poll to his 216 million followers on X asking whether he should “bring back the @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” By 1:00 pm on Friday, the poll had recorded over 385,000 responses, with close to 80 percent of them answering affirmatively. (Musk did not say why Elez, who reports to him, had resigned in the first place.) On Friday afternoon, Vice President JD Vance joined a chorus of online voices calling for Elez’s reinstatement, writing in a post on X that while he “obviously disagree[s] with some of Elez’s posts,” conservatives “shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.” “If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that,” wrote Vance. Just a few hours later, Musk took to X to broadcast his intentions to rehire Elez, writing “To err is human, to forgive divine.” (Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to questions about whether Elez had been formally rehired as of today.) The episode spoke to the newfound sense of cultural defiance that conservatives are feeling under the second Trump administration — as well as their very real power to impose their own values on federal policy. Though activists on the right have long complained against the rise of “cancel culture” and related speech norms, they have been largely unable to roll back those norms — until now. In addition to Elez’s rehiring, the Trump administration recently announced the appointment of Darren Beattie — who was fired as a speechwriter from the first Trump administration after it was discovered that he had spoken at a conference attended by white nationalist — to a senior State Department role. The perceived stakes of the debate over Elez’s dismissal became clear in the flurry of social media posts over the weekend calling for his reinstatement. On X, several prominent conservative influencers argued that reinstating Elez would represent a symbolic rejection of “cancel culture” and liberals’ perceived power to set the norms of appropriate online speech. “What @elonmusk and @DOGE have the power to do here is reset how speech norms get adjudicated,” wrote the conservative publisher Jonathan Keeperman, who posts under the pseudonym “L0m3z.” “The old way was that the media and the left got to play cop, judge, jury, and executioner. The new way is that we adjudicate speech norms for ourselves, based on criteria that is [sic] relevant to the individual organization.” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo also chimed in in support of Elez, writing, “The Left has defined the terms of social annihilation for the past decade. Vice President @JDVance has the opportunity to shift the calculus and end the era of doxxing, smears, and cancelation.” Democrats, in turn, seized on the debate, suggesting that Musk and Vance were not so much taking a principled stance against the excesses of cancel culture as much as they were defending Elez’s racist rhetoric. “Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire?” posted California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna, who is of Indian descent. “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids,” Khanna added, a reference to the fact that Vance’s children with his wife, Usha Vance, are also of partial Indian descent. Vance fired back, reframing the skirmish as a referendum on broader cultural norms about the consequences of offensive speech. “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,” Vance wrote. In other circumstances, the exchange could be written off as another minor internet fracas with little bearing on the direction of the federal government or the country. But as Trump, Musk and their allies continue their assault on federal DEI programs and government aid for progressive-coded projects, the pugnacious attitude on display in Vance’s posts — and the online right’s broader willingness to punch back against what they see as excessively liberal norms around race and gender — appear to be shaping federal policy. And with Elez apparently set to return to DOGE shortly, it appears that conservatives may well now have the upper hand. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports.
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