How Not To Be a Patriot

Why Your Favorite President Does Not Need your Blind Allegiance

I recently wrote an essay titled “The Sack of Rome,” about my deep concerns about how Elon Musk and his team of young engineers — including one who had earlier released private data — were handling their investigations at the Department of Government Efficiency. My argument was that DOGE can obtain for President Trump all of the riveting headlines that many Americans are cheering, related to ferreting out fraud and waste, without taking the crazy risks with our data or causing the potentially terminal damage to our cybersecurity, that they appear to be taking.

Since I raised these questions about the nature of the DOGE NDAs (non-disclosure agreements, which would keep our data private), “non-competes,” (which would protect the intellectual property paid for by our tax dollars), asked why there was a cloud computing guy with Musk, and asked whose AI would be let loose upon the most valuable and pristine dataset in the world — none of which questions have been answered via Mr Musk or the White House — I have been called a lot of names online, and sadly have also sustained a plethora of cancellations of subscriptions and donations, both here and at DailyClout, from former supporters who are very clear that they are upset with me for criticizing DOGE.

But no one yet has said I am wrong.

No one.

Indeed, economist Catherine Austin Fitts, from her own experience managing hundreds of billions of dollars at HUD, added dimensions to my warnings, and amplified my concerns.

In this update I warn that the issues I raised in my last essay, have become, if anything, even more serious.

I cautioned you in my last essay that “Read Only” access to our data, could mean machine reading, and that it could also mean copying. I also warned you that people bring engineers, rather than analysts or policy experts, to a context such as Musk’s review of various datasets at various government agencies, not because they want to look at evidence and bring it to the President, but because they want to change things, delete things, or build things. Engineers do not help people understand a government program, summarize it, or take notes. Engineers change, delete and build digital content. That is what engineers do. I feel like Cassandra, yet again, in trying to explain to a largely non-technical world, what a massive red flag this very basic fact of the professional makeup of Musk’s team, represents.

We, DailyClout, are a company that is doing something much like what Musk claimed he wanted to do: we review government datasets, summarize them, and lift out for scrutiny the ones to which we want the world to pay attention. We have a lot of people with various policy-related skill sets who help us do that. But literally the only time I would pick up the phone and engage coders, is when I want to change, build or delete something.

Now, predictably, after the initial mad rush of digital plunder, and the fusillade of giddy press announcements, come the retractions. The New York Times announced that “DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts it Celebrated Last Week.” Musk and team evidently misread various contracts and drew erroneous conclusions about them, in a way that inaccurately inflated the total amount they claimed that they were saving US taxpayers.

There is also fracturing away from a DOGE consensus becoming evident now, as I knew it eventually would, among the top level of President Trump’s advisors. (And that is a good thing). Surrounding President Trump now are people at least as distinguished and brilliant as Mr Musk — Kash Patel at FBI and Tulsi Gabbard as DNI. Others are joining them in resisting the DOGE demands.

Musk apparently asked all of their teams to describe in an email five things the employees had done in the past week, that they see as accomplishments. Musk also asked them to CC their manager. This may seem superficially like a bracing exercise in accountability imported from the private sector (and various Tik Tok videos are making that case).

But thankfully, there are grownups at those agencies who stepped on the brakes.

The description in the Daily Mail of this behind-the-scenes rebellion is pithy and important:

“Tulsi Gabbard became the latest Trump official to defy 'first buddy' Elon Musk after he emailed federal workers demanding they list and explain five things they accomplished last week.

Trump's newly-minted intelligence chief joined FBI director Kash Patel and a growing list of department heads who have told their employees to ignore the request from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk's email ordered workers to reply to the message with five bullets detailing all of their accomplishments at work in the past week and to cc in their manager.

Gabbard, the new Director of National Intelligence, sent a blunt message to officials in her department about DOGE's request.

'Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,' read the message from the former Hawaii congresswoman.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Department of Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem have also told employees to disregard.

The billionaire Tesla founder simply claimed on Sunday he was eager 'to see who had a pulse and two working neurons' amid claims that some government employees are barely working or checking their emails. […]

Patel made the biggest splash in defying Musk, making it clear that the FBI 'is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures.'

'When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses,' he wrote.

Patel's interference is one of his first moves as the new head of the FBI, offering a glimpse at potential rifts within the MAGA world as Musk continues tearing apart the federal government.

When he sent the original email earlier Saturday, Musk also took to his X platform to threaten any employees that do not reply to him with termination.”

People have to understand what is at stake with Elon Musk soliciting emails such as these — especially with the questions I raised about NDAs, non-competes, cloud storage and AI ownership, still unanswered.

Patel, Gabbard, Rubio, Noem and Hegseth understand what most Americans appear not to. They understand what I have been trying to warn you about — the concerns that have regrettably led me to receive abuse online and in my inbox from some of my new friends on the Right, just as I had from my old friends on the Left when I raised questions about the safety of mrna injections.

If intelligence, defense and law enforcement agencies emailed their work to Musk, this would be a massive national security breach. For Musk even to solicit these responses, is a massive national security breach — one unprecedented in our nation’s history.

Why do I say this? Let me take a deep breath and again try to explain AI.

AI is not just a cute ChatGPT functionality, though that is how the “broligarchs”, especially Musk, are seeking to represent it. It seems that whoever thinks it is a good idea to let Musk tear through all of our government’s datasets, does not understand AI in the least.

AI isn’t just something that helps you write a better high school essay while doing less work in actually understanding “Romeo and Juliet.” AI isn’t like Pac-Man, a cute digital creature that should just be let loose by a genius bazillionaire onto our nation’s records, to eat through our stodgy, boring government databases and lift out the tasty bits of fraud, waste and scandal.

I don’t know what misrepresentations and mis-statements are being told at the highest levels now about AI, but the dangers of it obviously are not being communicated adequately to the President and his advisors.

AI has specific owners. It is not owner-neutral. And we are in an arms race regarding AI.

AI liberates information in a way that can never ever be retrieved. It also liberates information in a way that creates a complete lack of human accountability.

The AI that Musk intends to use, or is using — indeed, the machine learning — does not belong to the United States government, from anything that I have seen. It is not ours.

If we don’t own it, we don’t own what is done with it.

Meaning, it is likely to be Musk’s AI and his machine learning algorithms, or those of aligned colleagues of his.

But — whose is it in fact? Whose code? Where does it live? What GitHub (the usual repository for code)? Who owns the IP? The US government? Or Musk himself?

Nothing I have read appears to answer this.

So understand how serious this is, please.

Understand that when Musk scans the emailed responses of “what I did this week” from hundreds of thousands of government employees into a database, and then sets his own machine learning algorithms onto that dataset, he is eating all of our secrets, and he is liberating them out of the secure government settings in which they had been held, and then making whatever happens next with those secrets, not humanly accountable.

Patel and Gabbard and colleagues were absolutely right to tell their teams not to respond to this request from Musk. If Musk has a database of answers from FBI employees about what they did that week, he can set his machine learning program onto the dataset and easily extract, say, all operations against Chinese terrorist sleeper cells in this country, and in theory hand these in a neat package, to China. Or, depending on where the dataset lives, Chinese operatives can in theory access it by themselves.

Or Musk, or his young engineers, one of whom already leaked secrets improperly, can do a search and extract all the undercover operations against cartels in the US that are selling Fentanyl in our most vulnerable neighborhoods, and then hand these over to — the cartels.

With machine reading applied to these emails, Musk will have cracked open all of the secrets of all of the United States of America simultaneously, at massive scale, in a way that no actual spy in history could possibly manage or has ever managed.

Undercover agents in many operations, who are actually saving our country from bad things that could happen to us, or that are happening to us, will die.

It is very easy to hate government opacity. Far too many things are classified. Everything that is not needed for actual national security, should be exposed to sunlight, of course.

But there really are American men and women, in this country and around the world, who put their lives on the line every day to embed themselves domestically in drug-running gangs, or in human trafficking rings; or who are stationed overseas in NOC — “non-official cover” — roles, presenting as scientists or businesspeople or aid workers, but who are actually facilitating dangerous operations to disrupt the manufacturer of nuclear weapons by our enemies — as intelligence agent Valerie Plame did, undercover, keeping nuclear weapons from Iran — or the activities of real sleeper cells of real terrorists in the United States, who really do mean to harm us.

All such secrets will be in DOGE’s machine-read database, if government workers in those roles respond to Musk’s email. And then — where will these secrets go?

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I also want to respond to the many posts and emails criticizing me for warning the President, whom I support, about these dangers.

I want to explain why in my view you are not being a good patriot, if you think you are helping the President by always cheering on everything he does, or by stifling your own, or others,’ criticisms or reservations about specific policies or decisions.

Speaking as a former political consultant to a Presidential campaign and to a vice president:

You cannot imagine the onslaught that a President or VP faces, all day, every day. As I have often written, being President or VP is like having twenty locomotives bear down at you from multiple directions, every minute of every day. It is a superhuman level of stress, distraction, and constant unrelenting demands to decide, perform, react.

Add to that stress of events, the fact that Presidents and Vice Presidents inevitably live in a toxic and problematic bubble. Everyone surrounding them has an agenda, and it is often not the “principal’s”. Every approach must be second-guessed. Any casual conversation could wind up on the front page of the Washington Post. No one can really be trusted except family, and even then there are external pressures and internal betrayals.

Add to that, the fact that everyone around a President or VP, wants to say “yes.” There is a vast, distorting pressure on the advice that any President or VP receives, because in the press of events and nonstop opposition or scrutiny, most advisors naturally tend to reflect the “principal’s” decisions positively and wish to bring a best-case reading to the meeting room. They also can be swayed by lobbyists, donors, reporters, and others whose pressure is unseen to the President.

So the President can’t easily get a good read on what is really happening in the country. The media, and even polls, can be misleading. And polls are expensive! It is too costly to run a poll for every policy or position.

In that kind of distortion and chaos, the only breath of authentic grassroots sentiment about Presidential actions, is what “ordinary” people say directly to the President, and what they say online or in emails and phone calls.

So it is not a kindness to your President to censor questions or concerns you may have about a policy or position. It is patriotic to say what your concerns are, and indeed to speak up as loudly as possible.

I’ve never understood the tendency that many people have to want to assign to their favorite political leaders or Presidents, something like divine powers, and to assume that these men or women are infallible. I actually suspect that instinct — that longing to submit completely to an authority figure and to see him or her in a good-or-evil, all-or-nothing way — is a psychological vulnerability that probably goes back to childhood, or else is the result of much propaganda.

Leaders, including our very favorite Presidents, are not superhuman; they are human beings just like the rest of us. They don’t know everything. They need information they may not already have. Like all of us, they can head off in the wrong direction, and need and value a course correction. As Catherine Austin Fitts said in our conversation for our interview, “The real campaign starts on Election Day.”

Real patriots realize that our leaders need our feedback — not just on Election Day but every single day — and so they take action to give their views to their leaders in every forum that they can.

Real patriots recognize that they themselves are supposed to inform those who represent them; that was how our Founders established our system. We are not supposed to be passive, on the sidelines, only cheering.

Real patriots realize that a democracy is not an act of submission on the part of the voter — but rather it should be a dialogue and a dialectic that never ends.

So I hope you understand that I loved my country as much when I tried to warn you about DOGE, as I did when I tried to warn you about mRNA injections.

And I hope you will love your country, by continually speaking up - both about what you like and about what you do not like in our leadership’s actions — because that is how, in fact, you truly support a President.