Doxxing

Marko Elez. If that name means anything, you might spend a little too much time on the internet. Elez is a whizz kid at DoGE, the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently taking a flamethrower/bazooka/heavy weapon of your choice to whole departments of the federal government. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from politicians, journalists and common-garden liberals everywhere. On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal article uncovered some embarrassing tweets Elez had made on an anonymous account, and he was forced to resign his post. What Elez said was no doubt offensive to some — “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” “normalize Indian hate” — but isn’t that always the way?

I was in my hotel room in London when the second wave of riots in Ferguson broke out. The clashes began on November 24, 2014 after a grand jury decided, rightly, not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown, a black man who, according to black eyewitnesses, was shot to death by Wilson after charging at him. As a filmmaker who often travels to hotspots around the world to document the absurdity of the human condition, I wrestled with whether I should cut short my London trip, fly directly to the St Louis suburb and risk myself and my crew by documenting the chaos breaking out there. Arriving in Ferguson, I witnessed heart-wrenching scenes of an American city in flames.