DOGE worker says he was radicalized by reading writer who denied Holocaust

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—an infamous figure who has written about race science; donated money to the white nationalist website VDare, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a hate group; and has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League of “hardcore antisemitism,” including Holocaust denial.

The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger.

Kliger has already been in hot water. He also reportedly reposted white nationalist Nick Fuentes disparaging a Black child on his now-private X account. (On the account, Kliger called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a slur and demanded military tribunals and executions of undocumented migrants who commit crimes, according to Rolling Stone.)

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.)

Unz is a writer, former (failed) gubernatorial and Senate candidate from California, and one-time publisher of The American Conservative. He has crusaded against everything from bilingual education (his 2016 Senate campaign slogan was: “Keep English. Vote Ron Unz!”) to media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The essay that Kliger cited, “Our American Pravada,” was widely discussed on the right in 2013. It was also part of an eventual wider series—”American Pravada,” published on Unz’s website, The Uniz Review—that includes striking comments denying the Holocaust, questioning 9/11, and engaging in anti-Black racism.

In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravada” 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 Pravada” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)

Kliger did not respond, as of publication, to a follow-up question about whether he finds it worrying that his radicalization was shaped by Unz given the views the writer later espoused about the Holocaust and Black people.

A recurring part of Unz’s “American Pravda” blogs is antisemitism and what the ADL has described as Holocaust denial. In a more than 17,000-word 2018 post, for example, Unz wrote:

Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble.

In another blog, published last January, Unz doubles down, writing that he “concluded that the Holocaust was largely, perhaps almost entirely a hoax” and “a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda.”

Unz has also questioned the 9/11 attacks that killed more than 2,900 people and injured thousands more. He boosted conspiracy theories implying that Israeli Mossad agents were behind the attacks. In a 2018 post, Unz writes:

Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown extremely long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the official narrative that so many of us have believed for so long.

As we wrote in 2017, Unz has also been a pathway for the alt-right. He has recruited contributors to The Unz Review to write about so-called human biodiversity, which includes posts blaming Black mothers for facing higher rates of maternal mortality and headlines like “Can nations have IQs?”

One regular contributor, John Derbyshire, was fired from the National Review in 2012 after penning a racist column in Taki magazine that urges his children to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally,” “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods,” and “before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white,” among other exhortations.

Unz’s characterizations of Black people do not fare much better. In a 2016 article discussing killings by the Ku Klux Klan—in which Unz claims the KKK’s murders are overcovered by media—he paints a picture of the mainstream press as misunderstanding violence in the era of Black Lives Matter. Unz writes:

For example, Trayvon Martin seems to have been a violent young thug and his antagonist, George Zimmerman, a half-Hispanic Dudley-Do-Right, whose main offense was attempting to defend himself while at risk of being beaten to death after he was attacked late at night without provocation in his own community. Similarly, Michael Brown of Ferguson fame was a gigantic, thuggish criminal, who casually committed the strong-arm robbery of a convenience store at night, then suddenly attacked the local police officer who attempted to stop and question him soon afterward.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Kliger and Unz.

Kliger’s deleted Substack posts recount a series of events and grievances that he says slowly eroded his faith in government and media: Warped polling that wrongly predicted Clinton would beat Trump in the 2016 election; reportedly violent 2017 protests led by members of antifa at Berkeley, where his LinkedIn says he completed his undergraduate studies in 2020; regulations on firearms; and COVID-era lockdowns and restrictions, including vaccine mandates.

But DOGE, Kliger promises, offers an alternative to the institutions that led to those aforementioned disappointments.

“For the first time in my lifetime, we have a genuine attempt to reform the federal government from within,” he writes of DOGE. “Not another blue-ribbon parade or congressional committee, but a focused effort to streamline bureaucracy, eliminate redundant agencies, and return power to the states.”

Kliger’s post ends with a recruitment attempt: “DOGE needs people with both technical expertise and the backbone to challenge bureaucracy. If you have those skills, don’t sit on the sidelines. Reach out. Apply.”