Marko Elez, a software engineer working in Elon Musk’s DOGE, was recently “canceled” due to some offensive remarks . . . and then uncanceled the next day. Elez had posted some very obnoxious things, such as “Normalize Indian hate,” and “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” He was fired for the comments. But after conducting a poll on X.com, where an overwhelming majority voted for letting Elez return, Musk has said he will hire him back, remarking, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” 

Musk was initially inclined to go along with “canceling” Elez but changed his mind in response to the poll. Does this mean that the pressure organizations have faced to dismiss employees with unpopular opinions has dropped off? Does it mean that “cancel culture” is ending? 

Meanwhile, Danielle Salinas, a medical assistant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, was called out by Andy Ngo for posts approving violence against government officials she does not like, which apparently means pretty much anyone to the right of her. One commenter on Ngo’s post said, “Cancel culture is alive and well I guess.” Are people like Ngo who have attacked “cancel culture” hypocritical in calling out Salinas for her statements?  

To answer these questions, first let’s consider just what people were objecting to when they complained about cancel culture. The justified complaints about “cancellations” have arisen in cases where an employee merely expresses a view on some topical issue, an issue that has nothing to do with his organization’s core mission but that is deemed out of bounds by people in power within the organization. 

A paradigmatic case of bad cancel culture is the forced departure of CEO Brendan Eich from Mozilla, the company that develops the Firefox web browser. Eich is, among other things, the inventor of JavaScript, which is now one of the most popular programming languages in the world. But he was canceled in 2014 when it was revealed that he had donated to a campaign attempting to block gay marriage in California. This seems like a clear example of the cancel culture that people want to get rid of: Eich simply had an opinion that was unpopular with progressives in the tech industry. Rather than exhibiting the tolerance that they so loudly proclaim as one of their special virtues, they showed themselves to be completely intolerant of his simply disagreeing with them. It is worth noting that Eich himself never recommended that people who did support gay marriage be dismissed from his company. Nor was support for gay marriage any part of Mozilla’s core mission, which was to “promote choice and innovation on the Internet.”  

Of course, the situation is quite different if an employee advocates views that run directly counter to the main goals of the organization that he is working for. If someone posts that “all Republicans are Nazis” while employed by the Republican National Committee, it is perfectly justifiable to fire that person. In that case, he would have put himself directly in opposition to the organization’s stated goals. Similarly, someone working for a Catholic charity can legitimately be fired for advocating for abortion rights, just as it would be legitimate to fire an employee of an abortion rights advocacy group for publicly declaring that “abortion is murder.” And even some completely legal actions (rather than opinions) are perfectly legitimate reasons for dismissal from a group if those actions directly counter the group’s raison d’être: If you work for the Worldwide Council on Promoting Veganism but are “outed” enjoying a thirty-two-ounce porterhouse steak at Peter Luger, you have no legitimate complaint if you lose your job. 

Now let’s ask whether there any legitimate limits an organization might place on an employee’s speech and action outside of work if they do not relate to the group’s central mission. I would argue that there clearly are such limits. For instance, looking back to Eich’s case, if instead of just disagreeing with the legalization of gay marriage he had posted on social media “death to all the gays,” we would have a completely different story. In that case, gay coworkers really would have a good reason to feel unsafe around this person. A company would be perfectly justified in firing someone who posted that statement. (And if the poster responded that “I was just joking,” then he should be fired for being too stupid to hold any serious job.) Or imagine that some person is discovered to be flying a Nazi flag at his house. Understandably, this might make his Jewish coworkers feel more than a little threatened working with him. Again, it seems that dismissal in this case would be perfectly justified. 

Of course, the protesting employees at Mozilla would claim that Eich’s position on gay marriage made them feel threatened. This is where practical reason must come into play: Eich simply disagreed with them on a proposed change in California’s laws. He did not advocate violence against gay people (as Nazis do against Jews), and, crucially, as noted above, Eich was perfectly happy to work alongside people who were in favor of gay marriage (unlike Nazis, who want Jews excluded from mainstream society). If the board members of Mozilla had had any courage, they would have told the outraged employees, “You’re the ones being intolerant. Work with your new CEO, who is perfectly happy to work with you, or leave.” 

As for Salinas, if a healthcare worker repeatedly and openly advocates the death of people who disagree with her politics, that is a pretty good sign that she should be removed from any medical position where she might have any influence on their health or well-being. That is a lot different than if she had merely said, “I think Trump is an awful president,” “the Supreme Court is making bad decisions,” or “I completely disagree with the Republican Party’s platform.” If that had been what she was up to and some right-winger tried to get her fired, then that would certainly be a hypocritical employment of cancel culture by the right after they had criticized it on the part of the left. But the repeated advocacy of violence in her tweets puts them in a whole different ballpark than merely a strong disagreement with certain policies. 

So what about Elez? Here, I am inclined to disagree with Musk (and J. D. Vance, who also defended his re-hire). The tech industry happens to be chock full of Indians. How are they supposed to work comfortably with a man who wants to “normalize hate” against them? Note how different Elez’s remarks were from if he had merely said, “I think we are importing too many Indian programmers; let’s find Americans for those jobs.” That would be more akin to Eich’s situation: a disagreement about policy. The left is partially guilty here for creating a situation in which actual, clear expressions of hatred towards some groups get a pass. By falsely calling almost any disagreement with leftist policies as stemming from hatred, it has prompted an overreaction in the other direction. 

Now perhaps Elez has expressed sincere regret for those remarks. Musk is obviously more aware of the actual situation with this young man than I am, which is why I say I am only “inclined” to disagree. In any case, complaints about cancel culture are often on target. People far too often have been turning legitimate disagreements about political policies into a reason to destroy a person’s career. But that in no way means that absolutely nothing someone does or says outside of work can be a reason for his dismissal. And, unfortunately for those who dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, it is only our prudential judgment that can separate the sheep from the goats in this regard.