by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
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.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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.
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:
