On Friday, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Elon Musk advocated for the return of Marko Elez to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to NBC News.
The 25-year old engineer resigned after his online activity, including one such post calling to “normalize Indian hate,” resurfaced, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Notably, Elez obtained his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, which is located in an area of New Jersey with a strong South Asian population that even features the Gujarati language on election ballots.
His slated return to DOGE calls into question the status of anti-Asian, and particularly anti-South Asian, hate in the U.S.
As of late 2023, South Asian discrimination has been on the rise, particularly as the 2024 election season amped up — an election that centered around former Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Lady Usha Vance, who are both Indian American, according to Stop AAPI Hate.
The organization monitored certain Domestic Violent Extremist (DVE) spaces and found that use of anti-South Asian slurs doubled between January 2023 and August 2024. In these spaces, 75 percent of anti-Asian online threats in August 2024 were directed against South Asian communities.
Typically, members of state and federal government have been observed to lose their jobs permanently following such incidents. For example, an assistant attorney general in Texas was fired in 2020 for calling Black Lives Matter organizers “terrorists,” calling Islam a “virus,” and posting other hateful and conspiratorial messaging online. An off-duty police officer in Seattle, Wash., was also fired in 2024 for his use of anti-East Asian and sexist terms in 2022.
Neither of the individuals involved in these cases were returned to their original posts.
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.”
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
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