A Thursday Free Beacon article by Joe Schoffstall purports to expose Darius Khalil Gordon, a newly hired Bernie Sanders presidential campaign employee, as having “a history of racial slurs and denigrating remarks directed at gays, Jews, and women.” Some Twitter posts attributed to Gordon are presented in the article as evidence for this conclusion.
All the Gordon tweets but one included in the article are from a period in 2010 through 2012. Do they represent Gordon’s current thinking? It has been seven to nine years since he posted those tweets. It is even worth considering to what extent these years-old tweets ever really represented Gordon’s views.
There is no mention in the Free Beacon article of how old Gordon was when he posted the tweets or what his circumstances were at the time. Gordon’s LinkedIn page fills in some of that information. It indicates that Gordon posted the old tweets around the time he was a salesman at shoe sores, his first listed jobs after spending 2007 through 2010 in college right after finishing high school. It was not until later — in 2013 — that Gordon had his first listed post-college politics-related job.
People working in politics-related jobs tend to know — especially in the last few years — their every written word may be criticized and tend to choose their words more carefully or are prepared to face the challenges that can come in response to loose talk. But, a twenty-something shoe salesman? That’s different — loose talk, exaggeration, and jokes in “bad taste” should not be surprising. Twitter for such a person will likely be more a place to blow off some steam and have some fun than a venue for expounding “profound truths.”
The Free Beacon article does include one more-recent tweet. The article relates that in that Twitter post Gordon retweeted an October of 2018 The Hill article, along with an image of a Palestine flag and the following comment:
This is my homie Lara, who just graduated from University of Florida. Please help her from being detained in Israel, for leading Palestinian-led boycotts bit.ly/LaraAlqasem #FreeLara #FreePalestine
Of course, there are neither “racial slurs” nor anything denigrating anyone in that post.
UPDATE: CNN reported Friday afternoon that Gordon is no longer employed by the Sanders campaign.
