Guilt by Association for Elon Musk’s DOGE
Although Google Analytics and other standard third-party utilities show how much traffic my own articles on The Unz Review regularly receive, they fail to inform me exactly who is reading my work or how much influence these pieces may have. But every now and then a burst of external illumination suggests that at least some of my writings of the last dozen years have had a significant, perhaps even transformative impact.
Along with everyone else, I’ve been reading the media accounts of Elon Musk’s DOGE project. In that controversial effort, small teams of youthful engineers had been granted access to some of the most important systems of the federal government, resulting in widespread public claims of the massive waste and corruption that they had allegedly found and prompting the prospect of huge cuts in those gigantic bureaucracies. For example, the $40 billion USAID seems likely to be almost completely gutted by the Trump Administration, with plans to cut its 10,000 person staff by 97%.
One of the more prominent DOGE investigators has been 25-year-old Gavin Kliger, a 2020 graduate of UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who has been named a senior advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. His role at that agency and the IRS has been sufficiently important that the New York Times recently published a short article describing his activities.
These public attacks on enormous government agencies naturally inspired fierce counter-attacks by the many media outlets opposed to Musk’s project, and their journalists have sifted the background of those newly super-empowered twenty-somethings for controversial material.
Last week I’d noticed a sudden unexpected burst of new readership for “Our American Pravda,” an article that I had published a dozen years ago. This piece had eventually inspired my long series of a similar name.
- Our American Pravda
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words
I soon discovered that this new attention had resulted from a wave of attacks against Kliger, including a hit-piece by Mother Jones, a prominent left-liberal investigative publication:
In a since-deleted Substack post, an engineer working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote about his radicalization, noting a key influence was an essay by Ron Unz…
The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger…
The post was published Friday and was still available online Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. ET. It was deleted on Sunday. In the post, Kliger credits Unz’s “Our American Pravda“—a 2013 essay published in The American Conservative that railed against what Unz claimed were systemic media failures—with beginning the engineer’s “political awakening.”
“Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time,” writes Kliger, whose LinkedIn says he is a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management. “The issue wasn’t just bias—it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.” (Mother Jones saved a copy of Kliger’s Substack post before it was deleted.)
“Guilt by association” is a common media tactic employed to discredit political opponents. Someone else is somehow connected to the intended victim, and the argument is made that the massive iniquities of the former individual should carry over to the latter. The Mother Jones hit piece relied upon this doubtful approach.
After reporting Kliger’s declaration that he had been heavily influenced by my April 2013 article, most of the remaining text focused on some of the controversial or ultra-controversial pieces that I had written during the dozen years that followed, suggesting that these therefore tainted the young DOGE engineer. My lengthy American Pravda series runs well over 100 articles and nearly a million words, so the writers mined it for explosive quotations although Kliger claimed that he had remained unaware of that much larger body of work:
In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravda” posts from Unz.
“I specifically referred to this 2013 article from The American Conservative, ‘Our American Pravda.’ Note the ‘Our’,” Kliger wrote. “I have neither referenced or read [the other work in the “‘American Pravda” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)
- DOGE Worker Says He Was Radicalized by Reading Writer Who Later Denied Holocaust
In a since-deleted Substack post, a member of Elon Musk’s team praised an essay by Ron Unz—who has called the Holocaust potentially a “hoax” and said Trayvon Martin was “a violent young thug.”
Julianne McShane and Jacob Rosenberg • Mother Jones • February 16, 2025 • 1,100 Words
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