JD Vance and a DOGE top dog remind us: It’s not racism when you’re part of the team | Opinion
Vice President JD Vance rang in the weekend by defending a quasi-coworker who bragged he “was racist before it was cool” from accusations of, well, racism.
Marko Elez, a recent-ish college grad and lieutenant in Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) resigned after the Wall Street Journal found his posts, but was then was reinstated shortly after Vance criticized anyone who “denied grace” to the 25-year-old child coming of age during the summer of 2024.
Remember that the second lady Usha Vance is Indian American, while Elez once wrote we should “Normalize Indian Hate.” Shouldn’t the vice president of the United States, especially this specific vice president, have different priorities?
Vance wrote: “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts” — sidebar, after spending your summer baselessly claiming Haitian immigrants were spreading HIV and eating their neighbors’ pets, it wasn’t that obvious! He continued: “But I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” Vance added, “If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Right there, the veep’s dilemma had, to me, never been more relatable. If you’re a sports fan, especially one paying any attention to the athletes off the field, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Rooting for a team, for many, requires a full embrace of Seinfeld-ian “rooting for laundry.” These men you passionately cheer for could at any time, reveal a serious moral failing — domestic violence, sexual assault, or violent behavior spurned by substance abuse — directly in conflict with your admiration. The noncriminal end of this misbehavior spectrum of misbehavior might involve one of your favorite laundry wearers sprinkling the n or f-word — the other f-word — on social media. This happens a lot.
Even when they aren’t using slurs, athletes reveal views some of us wish we didn’t know. Take 49ers star Nick Bosa and his tweets disparaging Beyoncé, exiled Pro-Bowl QB Colin Kaepernick, and 2018’s “Black Panther.” Three pop culture icons with nothing in common except their success, and maybe one other thing. When fans noticed his disparagement resembled something of a trend Bosa deleted those tweets, reasoning to ESPN that he “might end up in San Francisco.”
Bosa to me, best represents the jock version of what Vance is dealing with corralling the nerds. Modern GOP politics is a lot like sports fandom in the social media age. If you chased off all the 25-year-old children with bigoted posts, out you simply wouldn’t be able to fill out a team.
You do not need to listen to me. Go to the farm system and the prospects will tell you themselves. One New York Magazine journey through the social circles of MAGA youth on Inauguration Weekend – particularly the slender and smooth-skinned influencers with millions of TikTok and Instagram followers – chronicled the many who candidly shared they swung Trump because they yearned for, as one former Bernie Sanders devotee revealed, “the freedom to say “[a gay slur] and “retarded.”
Some might hope there’s some ironic remove from the partiers and influencers. If only.
In 2022, National Review writer Nate Hochman told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration had read “Bronze Age Mindset,” Costin Vlad Alamariu’s rambling, paranoid manifesto arguing, among many deliriums, that “the white race … is in general hostile to the way of life of the tribes.” I don’t love where Alamariu — better known by his pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert — was going with that. Maybe that’s my tribal senses tingling.
Republicans who want fresh talent young enough to fix the WiFi but don’t want them using it to spread “Mein Kampf” talking points have quite the challenge. Nobody understands how this challenge has manifested in Texas better than Texas Observer correspondent Steven Monacelli.
Last December, Monacelli uncovered the people behind four high profile anonymous neo-Nazi accounts with a combined half a million followers. Three of them Texans, all millennials. On Sunday, Moncaelli discovered a twentysomething posing with Mussolini fascist literature, and naturally, another Alamariu text. He was none other than Dallas City Council member Cara Mendelsohn’s 20-something son.
Monacelli knows what he speaks of, and he thinks the rank and file “have replaced dog whistles with fog horns.”
“Many young millennial and zoomer conservatives seem more willing to voice hardline positions on issues of race and identity than their predecessors,” Monacelli texted me, recalling the young men he saw at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference who also attended that year’s America First Political Action Conference organized by Nick Fuentes, who he described as “admitted Hitler admirer and white nationalist.”
Now, Moncaelli said, he finds those Fuentes fans, who often refer to themselves as “Groypers” “working now [as] staffers for state and federal lawmakers.” The trend is widespread enough that the Observer intends on pointing people to groups that specialize in deradicalization like Life After Hate and Parents For Peace.
Which returns me to those in conservative leadership sifting through resumes and “extending grace” over social media profiles. Vance is especially obligated, both by his vocation and his political fandom, to compartmentalize like a sports diehard. The veep must constantly separate the art (illegally dismantling the federal government) from the artist — in this case, a computer programmer who tried and failed to maintain his anonymity while mocking Indians on the internet.
Again, I get it. Just as a zero tolerance policy on being racist online would empty out our beloved huddles and starting nines across pro sports, holding a red line on bigotry would also decimate congressional offices. Certainly the Oval Office!
Credit to Vance and his squad for rallying together. Musk polled his X followers over whether he should bring Elez back into the fold, which nearly 80% of respondents supported. President Trump backed him up in a news conference. Musk soon vowed to give Elez his uniform back.
Vance, Trump and Musk know that being part of a successful team means holding your nose in the locker room. Unless you like the smell.
This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 5:32 AM with the headline "JD Vance and a DOGE top dog remind us: It’s not racism when you’re part of the team | Opinion."
