There’s a spectrum of dissenting ideas, some of which are good, some it’s not clear or they are a matter of indifference, and some are bad. We should avoid treating our liberty as license. Just because something is legal or socially approved of or allowed in some sense doesn’t mean we should do it or say it. In fact, there’s probably an ever growing list of such things we should avoid.

An all too familiar scenario was playing out. The media reported that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer, had posted things like “Normalize Indian hate” on X. He resigned, and his future employment prospects looked dim.

But something unprecedented happened. After a wave of pushback from online influencers, Vice President JD Vance said he should be given a second chance. Trump himself agreed. Elon Musk ran an X poll asking if Elez should be rehired and 78% voted Yes. Elez got his job back.

Nothing shows the much discussed “vibe shift” more than this incident. There’s no way that Elez would have been rehired during Trump’s first term, or been rehired into even a GOP-aligned organization say three years ago.

Democrats are of course horrified, but the Elez rehiring cannot be understood apart from two parallel situations involving leftists.

In 2018, the New York Times announced it was hiring Sarah Jeong to be a member of its editorial board. It quickly surfaced that Jeong had made hateful tweets about white people, posting, for example, “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?”

The Times stood by Jeong, going ahead and hiring her onto its editorial board.

Also in 2018, it was revealed that director James Gunn of the successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise had made inappropriate tweets suggestive of an interest in pedophilia. These comments are of such a nature that I cannot reproduce them here. Gunn said they were jokes, but acknowledged he was wrong to have posted them. Disney fired him. But they quickly reversed course and rehired him, though didn’t announce this for several months to let the heat die down.

To be clear: We shouldn’t be making negative or hostile statements about people of any race (or jokes about pedophilia). Elez should not have said what he did.

But this needs to apply to everyone, not just members of specific groups. The real vibe shift is that the double standards are going away. Or certainly declining a bit. It’s become far less tenable to argue that it’s ok to say even the most horrible things about whites, but that people should have their lives destroyed over an ill considered joke implicating minorities. Or when people on the left like Gunn can be forgiven anything, at least if it is conservatives who are the ones trying to cancel them as was the case with him.

It’s not just tweets about race. We are also seeing this in the major culture shaping institutions of society, including the Supreme Court. The court just ruled against affirmative action, saying that it is not legal to discriminate against Asians in order to benefit “BIPOCs” or whomever. In other words, no discrimination on the basis of race means exactly that.

Another pending case looks similar. Oral arguments suggest that there’s broad agreement on the Supreme Court that there cannot be a separate, higher standard that “majorities” like white people or straight people have to meet in order to prove they were discriminated against.

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