Should People Be Fired for Social Media Posts? What JD Vance Gets Right and Wrong.

The brouhaha around an Elon Musk staffer raises questions that are harder to answer than you might think.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Earlier this week, a staffer named Marko Elez at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team was exposed to have run a social media account that trafficked in all kinds of racist beliefs.

The account called on people to “normalize Indian hate” and bragged that we could not pay him to “marry outside of my ethnicity” while also suggesting that the government should be staffed by mostly white people because they’re more competent. Elez also managed the feat of angering both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling us that he couldn’t care less if both Israel and Gaza were wiped out. He also argued in favor of a eugenics-based immigration policy, whatever that means.

After the Wall Street Journal reported on Elez’s tweets, he resigned from his post. In politics, these sorts of affairs are a dime a dozen — a staffer at a key post happens to say something on social media that sets off a firestorm and a rapid firing or resignation.

But something different happened this time. Musk took to his website and commissioned a poll about whether Elez should be rehired. Vice President JD Vance argued that Elez should be shown “grace” and be brought back (he also replied to a Tweet of mine where I questioned whether a senior government staffer should really be evincing those views). And it looks like Musk will indeed rehire Elez.

The debate prompted by Musk and Vance is one worth having because it’s something we’ve all grappled with in an age where an errant thought doesn’t just sit in your brain but often makes it out to thousands or millions of people via social media. If we were living in the 1960s, most people would never know what your most offensive belief is.

In some sense, people who are fired for their social media posts are victims of circumstance; they were born in an absurdly transparent era.

But should people be fired for offensive conduct on social media, often outside of work hours?

In general, I find myself in agreement with Vance’s argument. “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” he said (Elez is 25-years-old, for what it’s worth). I have never asked for anybody to be fired for their social media conduct. Their thoughts might offend me, but taking away someone’s livelihood is often much worse than offending someone.

On the other hand, people who serve at the highest levels of government have to have the public’s trust. They have to be able to represent all Americans. And if you’re diving deep into Americans’ personal data and tax dollars — as the DOGE team is — it’s fair to wonder if you can treat people impartially if you’re telling us how much you hate certain ethnic groups.

So, I want to review a scenario where I think that taking someone’s career away over offensive social media conduct was deeply unjust and then we can return to the case of the Trump administration and why that might be different.

He played a reformed villain. But he was given no chance to reform himself.

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

In the Summer of 2020, America was hit by our version of a cultural revolution. Institutions ranging from universities to large corporate firms to tastemakers and culture shapers like Hollywood all became acutely focused on reducing racism, especially anti-black racism.

Like many revolutions, this one had its victims. One of those victims was Hartley Sawyer, a young actor who played Ralph Dibny and the superhero The Elongated Man on CW’s The Flash.

Sawyer, who joined the series in 2017, had made a series of tweets where he was trying to do some kind of edgy comedy.

“The only thing keeping me from doing mildly racist tweets is the knowledge that Al Sharpton would never stop complaining about me,” he tweeted back in 2012. He also made similar homophobic and sexist tweets, all of them in a comedic vein.

All of these tweets were from years before he joined the show. Appropriately, Hartley apologized when they were resurfaced. “I am incredibly sorry, ashamed and disappointed in myself for my ignorance back then. I want to be very clear: this is not reflective of what I think or who I am now,” he wrote on his Instagram.

It was the last public communication Sawyer apparently ever made. After being fired from The Flash, he never acted again. As a fan of the show and as a reporter, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find out what he’s doing with his life now. I contacted his agent, spoke with people who had run into him when he was still living in California, and I couldn’t figure out where he is now or what he’s doing. It’s possible that he simply decided to quit public life altogether and retire quietly somewhere.

The irony of Sawyer being hounded out of public life for good is that the character he played on The Flash, Ralph Dibney, was a villain who later reformed himself. That was an opportunity that Sawyer was never given. Tweets that predated his appearance on The Flash by years were used by people judge him guilty and essentially execute his career, despite there being no evidence that he ever engaged in racist or sexist conduct while working on the show.

(Ironically, Skai Jackson, the celebrity who dug up the Sawyer tweets, has been in and out of controversies of her own since. Let he without sin and all that.)

What we expect from people who rule over us

Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash

Lost in the brouhaha about Elez was another senior hire in the Trump administration whose social media conduct is even worse.

Darren Beattie, a former Trump staffer who was fired from the first administration for meeting with white nationalists, has been offered a position in the State Department. For those of us who spend a bit of time on social media, you’re probably aware of Beattie’s work: he’s a bit of out racist himself who thinks that “competent white men” are what’s really needed in government. He loves to publicly fantasize about sterilizing or murdering minorities. “What if America moved on to some national religion other than coddling and excusing inner city black dysfunction, violence, and misbehavior?” he asked in September. For a guy who has basically no accomplishments in life besides being a fringe academic and a blogger, he has a mighty big opinion of himself.

I’m not exaggerating any of this. If you’re so inclined, check out his Twitter account. He’s so confident in these beliefs that he didn’t even see fit to clean up his past messages.

Here’s the part where I may have to break my initial agreement with Vance about how social media shouldn’t be used to damn a person. Beattie’s new title at the State Department will be Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

A guy who spends his time on social media promoting white supremacy (actual white supremacy, the real stuff, not the lame exaggerations progressives have made in recent years) and degrading various minority groups is…fit to be a public diplomat?

We all say some stupid things on social media. Sometimes we grow out of them, like Sawyer did. Other times — who cares? If a cashier at Krogers says something sexist on Facebook, do they really deserve to not have a job? A livelihood is a human right.

But being a diplomat representing the United States isn’t. There are some jobs where you have to have the public’s trust and you have to be able to demonstrate that you will treat people equally and fairly. If you’re posting like a Hitler fan on 4chan, that is not going to cut it.

I reached out to Suhag Shukla, the executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, which works to defend Indian American civil rights, to ask her what she thought about the whole brouhaha.

“I’m not a fan of firing people or taking any extreme measure for what falls within the contours of free expressions (there might be very few, limited expectations),” she told me over email. “It’s just not the way to change hearts or minds and I believe, entrenches opinions and bigotry.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, and I can think of two examples that validate what she’s saying.

I think that supporters of Israel’s government pushing censorship so hard all over the United States since last year has probably backfired and made people even more skeptical of what Israel is doing in the Middle East. And from the other side, a lot of the anti-racist political correctness regimes have made it impossible to have honest discussions about things like culture and inequality and have probably contributed to white resentment and made racism worse.

But Shukla also expounded on the exceptions to this rule.

“Positions like educators, healthcare workers, political leaders all entail a duty to and close interactions with people of all backgrounds and thus have a higher obligation to ensure public trust and demonstrate an ability to uphold their duties in a manner that treats all people equally without any personal biases impacting their duties/obligations and level of service,” she said.

She also expressed disappointment in how Vance has tackled the topic.

“I think VP’s take is off on this episode and he of all people, given his position and personal connection to this issue, should lead from a position of moral clarity and courage and not make excuses for the uptick in anti-Indian hate, and make a strong call for civility and values of diversity and equal protection,” she said. “His response also reflects an inability to hold two truths at once. Yes we need to raise tough resilient children AND we can call out bad, in this case, racist behavior. That’s what being an adult and an American is all about.”

That last part is something where I have found Vance to be lacking.

I understand why the vice president feels so strongly that he has to defend Musks’s staffer against what he perceives to be a liberal onslaught. Over the past decade or so, so many people have lost their livelihoods as a consequence of liberal political correctness that often views people as disposable if they happen to utter the wrong thought. Not only is this inhumane, it undermines progressive values. Progressives are supposed to value compassion and mercy, not serve as judge, jury, and executioners for WrongThink.

But I think Vance is making a mistake here by being so defensive of conservatives without taking into account how the rest of the country feels. Just look at the vote total in places like Irving, Texas, or Edison, New Jersey. A lot of Indian Americans swung towards Trump-Vance in this recent election. What those people want to hear is not just a defense of classical liberalism or mercy towards racist posters.

They also want to hear that the Trump administration will not be judging you by the color of your skin or your ancestry or your faith. Vance could’ve said all that he said against firing people over social media posts while also rising to the defense of Indians, Arabs, Jews, and others that Elez had insulted.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna offered one way to do this: just ask Elez to apologize. Maybe it wouldn’t have been sincere, but it at least would’ve been a sign that the Trump administration finds hatred unacceptable.

It doesn’t make you weak, Mr. Vice President, to be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. Instead, it makes you a strong person who demonstrates nuance and intelligence. You can oppose the vindictive culture that some progressives have promoted the past decade while also opposing some of the caustic racism and dehumanization that is swirling around the gutters of right-wing social media.