One of my simple pleasures these days is watching clips of corporate TV entertainers interviewing Vice-President JD Vance. I’ve come to really despise most network and cable news performers, which is how I regard them. Calling them “journalists” denigrates those who are serious and committed to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
Say what you want about Vance, he’s undeniably blessed with a superior intellect, and he’s demonstrated that he’s a reflective thinker who is fast on his feet. America’s Barbie and Ken TV journalists are no match for Vance, but they’re so arrogant and unaware of their limitations they naively try to take him on and argue their worldviews with him rather than seek to better understand his. Among my favorite Vance media putdowns was his cautioning CBS News performer Margaret Brennan: “Listen to yourself talk.”
My passion for watching Vance TV interviews has given me an understanding and appreciation for his love of his wife, Usha, and their three children. When Vance talks about his family, he lights up, and noticeably takes a certain joy sharing that being a husband and father are among his greatest pleasures and achievements. He strikes me as the Ward Cleaver of these troubled times, a particularly apt comparison given that the fictional Ward and the real JD both hailed from Ohio.
So when I read this Wall Street Journal story disclosing that one of Elon Musk’s DOGE nerds who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics, I figured Vance would be among those cheering the departure. The reported racist tweets of 25-year-old Marko Elez were primarily aimed at tech engineers from India, who Musk and former DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy previously said are better trained than most U.S. workers and have a considerably better work ethic.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez said in a post. Elez posted he supported Israel but added: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Usha Vance (née Chilukuri) was born in a working-class suburb of San Diego to a mechanical engineer father and a molecular biologist mother who had moved to the U.S. from Andhra Pradesh, India. She graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history.
Usha went on to study law at Yale, where she met JD. According to the BBC, the Vances met when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
Surprisingly, Vance neither chose to celebrate Elez’s firing nor to keep quiet about it. Instead, he championed Elez being rehired, and President Trump immediately deferred to Vance’s judgment.
“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” wrote Vance. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.
“If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Being the cynic that I am, I wondered if Vance was merely being a team player, looking to impress Trump and Musk and provide them some valuable cover for installing Elez in such a sensitive position given his poor judgement and alarming tweets.
Instead, Vance doubled down. When Ro Khanna, a California Congressman whose parents emigrated from India, asked on X if Vance would demand that Elez apologize for saying “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance fired back with a fusillade of posts.
Vance’s defense of Elez surprised me. One possible reason is that like many others, he was bothered by the WSJ messenger who delivered the Elez scoop.
The story was written by Katherine Long, and when I first read it, I found it odd that someone leaked the story to the Journal and not the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic, which salivate at every opportunity to fan their narrative that Trump, Musk, and anyone who supports them and their agenda are racists and Nazis.
It was subsequently revealed that Long previously worked at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — which the Trump administration has slashed and revealed some very disturbing payments. One could possibly argue that the Journal didn’t have to disclose Long’s USAID connection in her first story, but it was relevant in the follow up because critics perceived it as another Beltway insider hit job.
To the Journal‘s discredit, it made no mention of the furor about Long’s previous USAID employment in its follow up story.
If anyone should be forgiving about controversial social media posts, it’s the corporate media, particularly the New York Times.
In 2019, it was revealed that Tom Wright-Piersanti, a senior editor in the Washington bureau of the Times, posted a multitude of racist tweets when he was a student at Rutgers, which is where Elez went to school.
On New Years’ Day 2010, Wright-Piersanti tweeted, “I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews.”
Another one from the evening of Dec. 15, 2009, included a photograph of a vehicle with what looked like a Jewish Hanukkah holiday Menorah on the roof. Wright-Piersanti commented: “Who called the Jew-police?”
On Dec. 8, 2009, Wright-Piersanti tweeted at 10:39 a.m.: “There are four indian guys with mohawks in this one class, and each one is a douche in his own awful way. I hate mohawk Indians.” He later went on to clarify, “I don’t hate Mohawk Indians, though. I love those guys. I just hate Indians with mohawks. Different indians, different mohawks.”
The Times also took no action against former editorial writer Sarah Jeong when it was revealed she posted tweets expressing her disdain for white people and her joy seeing old white guys suffer. CNN former anchor and now White House correspondent Kaitlin Collins got off with an apology after it was revealed that when she was a sorority student at the University of Alabama she posted a series of homophobic tweets that included the slur “fag” and a declaration she’d never share a room with a lesbian.
Joy Reid kept her anchor job at MSNBC after it was revealed that she mocked homosexuality and claimed to out people as gay on her former blog, The Reid Report. Reid claimed her site was hacked and she didn’t write the controversial comments.
Vance has considerably more charity in his heart than I if he can so readily defend Elez, but I wonder how he, the president, and for that matter every American aren’t alarmed by this Bloomberg story revealing that Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s DOGE squad, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor.
“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”
Bloomberg revealed some other disturbing information about Coristine, including once seemingly looking for a tool typically used for hacking websites. Bloomberg also reported that in meetings at the US Agency for International Development and the General Services Administration, Coristine and other colleagues have discussed how they can use that data to potentially replace government employees with artificial intelligence and train chatbots to do the work.
There has also been a report that 19- to 21-year-old college graduates from DOGE are conducting 15-minute interviews with grown-up federal employees, forcing them to “justify their existence” within the agency before determining if they should be fired. It’s a real-life melding of the movies Office Space with Revenge of the Nerds.
I’m wary of DOGE but can’t ignore the speed with which the Musketeers claimed to have uncovered massive waste and some allegedly very disturbing payments, including to what Musk claimed were to known fraudulent and terrorist groups. I’m also mindful of China leader Xi Jinping’s reported view of Musk that he’s a “technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.”
Replacing federal employees with AI and chatbots certainly validates that Musk is a technology utopian. Given that Musk was instrumental in helping China gain its EV superiority and moved to help China’s EV suppliers establish a beachhead in Mexico to further buttress China’s EV superiority, I don’t perceive him as a great American patriot.
I’ve given up trying to make sense of the world and the ramifications and repercussions of the rapid-fire changes Trump hopes to implement.
David Cay Johnston, a thoughtful former New York Times reporter who worked at the publication in its glory days, posted on LinkedIn today that “right in front of our eyes, you’re seeing the destruction of the United States of America and the beginning of a dictatorship run by a career criminal and his enablers, drawn from the worst among us.”
Perhaps, but I can’t help but wonder if a coterie of unelected deep state bureaucrats and their corporate media enablers haven’t already wreaked considerable destruction on America and we’re only just now learning to what degree. Corporate media “journalists” failed in their watchdog duties to serve as America’s Fourth Estate and report on government corruption without fear of favor. The American public knows the corporate media repeatedly lied to them about Joe Biden’s mental acuity and Kamala Harris’ competence, so their warnings about Trump and Musk are just falling on deaf ears.
Corporate media journalists like to blame Trump for their travails, but the undeniable truth is they destroyed themselves and bear considerable responsibility for the chaos and turmoil that’s causing great anguish for many Americans. The only silver lining is watching Vance make minced meat out of all of them.