Is cancel culture over?

Seems Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long's little plan to dig up dirt on Elon Musk's DOGE team to shut them down has not worked out the way she thought it was going to work.

She did a hit piece on the young software engineer, digging up his old and deleted social media posts, found some bad ones, and the engineer was out of a job.

But he got brought back.

According to NBC News:

Elon Musk said Friday that he will bring back a DOGE staff member who resigned after it was found that he had previously made racist remarks online.

"To err is human, to forgive divine," Musk said in a repost to X of a post from Vice President JD Vance that also supported the staffer's reinstatement.

The staff member, 25-year-old Marko Elez, resigned from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Thursday after The Wall Street Journal reported that he had made comments online that included supporting racism and eugenics. The White House confirmed to NBC News that Elez had resigned.

Marko Elez was one DOGE team member of elite software engineers hired to root out waste and fraud in government who came under fire for racist posts targeting Indians under a pseudonym six months ago, which were fished up through archive searches since they had been deleted. Someone ordered him to resign, and too bad about the DOGE project, which would have to go without his elite technical skills.

There was an outcry and counter-outcry over the matter though, and Vice President J.D. Vance, who's a tech bro married to an Indian-American, stepped in, pointing out that racist tweets stunk, but cancel culture was worse:

Then he mixed it up with Rep. Ro Khanna, a Bay Area leftist who is also Indian-American, who tried to shame Vance into joining the cancel culture.

Vance went after him with a sledgehammer:

That should bring the young DOGE engineer back on the job, using his genius-level skills to root out fraud and corruption.

He was far from the only one under fire after Wired reporter Vittoria Elliott first started substituting digging up dirt on people, tabloid style, for actual journalism in her report, the better to sicc the doxxers onto the young engineering members of the team, who are not public figures.

That brings us to Big Balls, which was the screen name of another DOGE team member under fire, Edward Coristine, age 19, this time for bad behavior at his job when he was 17, which got him fired from it:

His towel-snapping, armpit-farting screen name, "Big Balls" was is exactly the kind of nickname an immature teenage boy might choose, and it drove the media bonkers:

Many of the outside commentators conflated one employee with the other, calling the one with the deleted racist tweets "Big Balls" instead of the other guy.

But the arguments against Big Balls were worthless because Democrats had already lowered the bar to who gets to see government information so far there was nothing Big Balls could do to make it worse.

So Big Balls stays on the job, too, along with Elez. Yes, they are a motley crew, not the buttoned-down conformists of government bureaucracies, but such eccentricities and foibles are common in the tech world, and Musk knew this, not exempt from being a bit of an oddball himself.

What's important here is that the left has been forced to live by its own rules, given that they have constantly been exempting other examples of racism and bad behavior from their own ranks, while howling up a wokester storm when something bad but not related to the job, appears from the other side.

The reality is, they don't like DOGE because they don't want to cut the waste and fraud in government, there's too much in it that they like for themselves and their cronies. That's what this is really about and the Trump team, to its credit, shut their ridiculous cancel-culture game straight down. That's almost as good as cutting a fat government department.

Image: X screen shot, generated by GROK