What is it about NewsGuard's name popping up every time the deep state needs a favor?
A few days ago, Wired magazine's Vittoria Elliott, who until recently worked at NewsGuard, reported this:
Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk, and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.
WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.
The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.
Should it surprise anyone that a former NewsGuard contributor has taken to harassing young DOGE engineers seeking to find ways to cut the waste, fraud and inefficiency of the U.S. government?
NewsGuard, recall, is the censorship outfit that seeks to deplatform news and commentary outlets to advertisers by creating blacklists for clients as to which sites are reliable and which sites are not. By the wildest of coincidences, conservative outlets overwhelmingly dominate the blacklists, while mainstream media sites which reported COVID falsehoods, phony Russia collusion claims about Trump, and other shibboleths of the deep state, come out with flying colors. Newsguard takes government contracts, and has always been fast to push the deep state narrative as its axis of truth.
In Elliott's story, she made a list of the Musk team and googled, or more likely used a leftist AI program, to lay out everything that was known about these young engineers to Make Them Famous.
Here are a few examples:
Bobba has attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir. He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs, where he talked about those experiences last June.
... and ...
Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.
Or this one:
Farritor, who per sources has a working GSA email address, is a former intern at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and currently a Thiel Fellow after, according to his LinkedIn, dropping out of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. While in school, he was part of an award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll.
Some have called that doxxing, but I think she's too smart for that. The Wired 'platform and power' writer didn't reveal anyone's address, phone number or email addresses. She didn't go to anyone's home and take photographs, nor did she didn't publish any information about relatives, the way former Washington Post 'tech and online culture' columnist Taylor Lorenz crudely did.
But she didn't have to. Her report opened the door to the anonymous crazed leftists on the Bluesky platform, and other outlets, to doxx the young men, and they did.
Including this stupid one:
Reddit, too:
They had their roadmap from her article (and reportedly another by a leftist editor at Mashable) and they got to work doxxing apparently right after it was published. That raises questions as to whether that was the plan.
The natural effect of doxxing, which is threats, came next:
And then what looks like the Paris mob:
It prompted this warning from an attorney general.
It all seemed to be about intimidating the DOGE workers from doing their jobs and thus, chasing them away.
It was a pretty skeezy story given that these people aren't public figures and her only argument for doing this is that they don't know anything because of their ages.
She cited their ages as proof, missing the important detail that they were hired precisely for their outside perspective and absence of conflicts of interest. Musk has since stated that they are in fact primo talent, hand picked by him for their competence, but she didn't address that.
She makes the point repeatedly in her interview with Al Jazeera here:
Which is odd coming from a Wired reporter, who would surely know that math and tech talent peaks early in life and if these guys were working six-figure jobs at elite places like Meta or any hedge fund, or at brain science company like Neuralink, they probably contributed something of very high value, doubly so for the guy who dropped out of college, which again, in tech, is not uncommon. In that field, the best ones hire based on whether one's code looks good, not what their degrees claim.
So while we are on the topic of publishing everyone's bio, here's her bio from the Wired site:
Vittoria Elliott is a reporter for WIRED, covering platforms and power. She was previously a reporter at Rest of World, where she covered disinformation and labor in markets outside the US and Western Europe. She has worked with The New Humanitarian, Al Jazeera, and ProPublica. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and, before transitioning to journalism, worked with startups in Kenya and India.
Here's the part she left out, from NewsGuard itself:
Vittoria Elliott was a Contributing Analyst for NewsGuard. In addition to her work at NewsGuard, she is a freelance Deputy News Editor at Al Jazeera English. She has conducted investigative research for ProPublica and worked as a fact-checker for Washingtonian Magazine. She was part of ProPublica’s inaugural Electionland project, monitoring the 2016 election and verifying social media posts and information in real time.
Prior to entering journalism, Elliott worked in international development and social enterprise in India, Kenya, and Ghana.
Elliott has a B.A. in Psychology and International Relations from Tufts University and a Masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The tone of the report is problematic, too, big on using loaded words -- like coterie, nebulous, Musk's lackeys, "experts," etc. which tells us the young engineers used good judgment in avoiding contact with her.
Her line about Peter Thiel being against 'democracy,' taken from a 2009 essay he wrote for Cato Unbound, distorts what Thiel said about being disillusioned with politics and being inclined to work on big projects to forget about it. That's hardly the work of a "democracy" hater as she claimed.
Musk is fair game as the top decisionmaker and as a public figure.
But the little guys? Why focus on the little guys when it's Musk making the decisions? What news value does that impart?
It calls to mind that at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where her bio says she went, and where I went, an important lesson drilled into us in the classes, that we must put ourselves in the shoes of the person being targeted, being interviewed, and act with some kind of decency and empathy for that as we report stories. Maybe that lesson isn't taught anymore, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't.
What isn't in the story is what the engineers were actually doing -- were they pushing buttons, reading through code, or making actual decisions about which government programs are full of waste, fraud and inefficiency and worth cutting?
Missing also is that maybe the purpose of DOGE is to put outside eyes into the innards of government, given its inability to control its costs or maintain its civil service neutrality; outsiders that are free of potential conflicts of interest.
All we hear is that the engineers are 'inexperienced' with government, so shiver, they might break it.
The underlying message of that is that government belongs to the deep state and knowledge of its workings is an inner sanctum imperceptible to the eyes of any outsider. Which is what makes me think of her NewsGuard past and its propensity to defend deep state narratives might just have had something to do with why this hit piece was written.
