Stephen Miller’s Wife Has Some Explaining to Do

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1:28Fascinating, unimportant podcasters in the Maga space. She has this show, it's the Katie Miller show, it does not seem to have an incredibly large audience, but it does have quite a bit of reach in no small part thanks to Katie Miller's many personal connections. She worked for Elon Musk at Doge. Her husband is Stephen Miller, one of President Trump's most important advisors. She has had this interesting path, this interesting level of access, all of these sorts of things. There is this report in the Washington Post today, specifically about her connection with Elon, and specifically about her connection with Elon's XAI, the company that I guess is now the social media slash artificial intelligence project of Elon. It's basically X, the social media platform, plus GROC, plus some other things. Katie Miller has been on a bit of a posting tear for the last better part of a year, I

2:29would say. I've seen her routinely weighing in to put dirt in the eye, of open AI, put dirt in the eye of anthropic, and boost GROC as really the only choice for true patriots. For whatever your artificial needs may be, if you're a right-thinking, maga type, a right-thinking, free-thinker, GROC is the AI for you. This has been a running theme in her posting. Come to find out, per the Washington Post today, that might not be entirely for a team-spirit related reasons. There were some financial disclosures released last week by the White House that showed that Katie Miller actually owns, perhaps about a million dollars in stock for XAI, which is a nice little perk if you can get it. Elon seems to think she did good work for him, rather, while she was there. She's sitting on a nice little nest egg there. This has never been disclosed. She has never brought this forward herself.

3:29Obviously, it's been disclosed now. This was just in their financial forms of her and her husband, Stephen Miller. It is alleged by these forms that Stephen Miller himself has recused himself from any policy-related discussions in the White House that would touch on this stuff because of this financial entanglement. This nice little nest egg that they're sitting on. Of course, by the same token, Katie Miller, in her role as an influencer, in her role as a quote-unquote public intellectual of the Maga movement, has never mentioned this, has never brought it up. She has never told her audience such as it is that there might be other reasons than just pure analytical rigor that she is so emphatically pro-Groc. This is the story that was reported, and it's an interesting little insight into the way this ecosystem works today. This is a pet project of mine, as conservative influencers, and what their secret agenda may be, why they suddenly embrace certain topics, whether they need being paid or if there's

4:32financial interests, otherwise. This is an interesting one because we knew Katie Miller had this business relationship with Elon Musk. They were tight when he was running Doge. She left the Trump administration, I believe, to work for him. There was a lot of, obviously, Steven Miller's marriage is a frequent topic on liberal Twitter, so there was a lot of insinuations about, you know, she's running off with Elon or whatever. But now that she's in this phase where she's like styling herself as kind of like a conservative mom influencer, and you know, she has cabinet secretaries and their wives on her podcast. And so it's a very, I guess what's interesting here is that, I mean, like she's working this angle where it's like, Claude is not safe for your family. Chat GPT is not safe for your family. Trust your kids with GROC. The AI run by the way it's the premise is billionaire. Like that's the safe one. And so I think it's so interesting here that this came out. Let me read this article. And this came out in Steven Miller's financial disclosures.

5:33So this kind of runs down how many times she's attacked these various companies. In the nearly nine months since she got this stock in December, she has shared posts about chat GPT open AI or a Sam Altman more than 400 times with almost all the posts being negative, a post analysis found. Similarly with Anthropic 64 times Google's Gemini AI 33 times negative. At the same time, she's posted mostly positive messages about X AI and GROC 161 times. And she frequently encourages people on X to try GROC and highlights the company's growth. Huh. I wonder what was going on there. A million dollars. That's a lot of money. Yeah, and those numbers, I mean, they're big numbers just as raw numbers. Katie Miller is also not the kind of person who is posting on X 800 times a day. I mean, this is truly, just as a person who follows her, I can pretty confidently say, this is one of her main topics of posting. It's, and it has been sort of strange for quite some time.

6:34It's been sort of one of these unanswered questions like, well, okay, she did work for Elonat Doge. Then she left the government, as you said, to go work for her, work for him in a private capacity. It had seemed like she had stopped doing that to then go full time on her podcast. This ad is brought to you by ZockDock. So there are certain things that are incredibly easy to put off and making a doctor's appointment is pretty high up on that list for me, at least. You know, you need to do it, but then you think about making that phone call and getting put on hold and figuring out whether they'll even take your insurance. Then you got to figure out if they can even have an opening for you. And suddenly you decide, well, you know what? This is not a problem for tomorrow. Let's just kick it down the road. That's what I want to tell you about today's sponsor, ZockDock. ZockDock lets you search and compare local and network doctors. You can see actual appointment openings right there. So instead of calling around and playing phone tag, you can just find a time that works and instantly book your visit online. And there are more than 150,000 providers across more than 200 specialties in all 50 states.

7:34So whether you've moved or changed insurance, or you've just been putting off an appointment for way too long, you can see the options available to you and you can choose the doctor who fits what you're looking for. Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be too complicated. Find and book the right doctor with ZockDock. Head to ZockDock.com slash borr-takes to get started and check that appointment off here to do this. That's zoc. D-o-c dot com slash borr-takes. One of the pieces of reporting in this Washington Post piece and other kind of piece of the puzzle here is that seemingly that she never truly stopped working for Elon. She continues in this sort of consulting role, even as she is doing her supposedly independent new media empire, her influencer gig, until we got these disclosures and this reporting from the Washington Post. We had not really been able to put meat on the bones of what's going on here other than, okay, this is a person who has this preexisting relationship with Elon and seems to at the very least be an enthusiast of the future growth of his companies.

8:38Now we can see there's a little more to it than that. And just to follow up, I mean, to drive that point home, this is so damning this part. In the nine months before she obtained the XAI stock, Miller almost never mentioned any of these companies. She had two posts about OpenAI in December just before and the transaction. She posted six times about GROC mostly in December. So it's not as though she's holding forth, I love GROC, I hate ClawD, you know, beforehand. So I think it's a bit telling what's going on now. The post raises the question of whether this violates FTC rules, this idea that influencers, endorsers, you can't be saying, geez, I really love this product without explaining that it's a paid endorsement or you have some kind of financial stake in it. What do you make about it? Yeah, so this is perhaps a greater area than the stuff we've been talking about so far, right? I mean, and I should caution, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an expert on these things. My understanding, based on reading up about all of this today, is that she's basically in noncompliance with the sort of voluntary asks that the FTC makes of influencers to say,

9:44hey, you know, like if you want to stay safely on the fair side of the law, you should always air on the side of disclosure, you should always make it very clear whenever you have a financial relationship with products that you're putting out there into the world. The current chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, took great umbridge with the suggestion that Katie Miller was not in keeping with these laws. But, and I should say, the Washington Post does not accuse her of necessarily breaking laws here either. They're just saying the FTC has these guidelines, the FTC plainly asks these influencers to, you know, make it clear when they have financial entanglements with products that they're talking about. But here is what he has to say. This article is riddled with factual errors and also wrong on the law. Nothing alleged in here violates any law, the FTC enforces, but law in fact don't matter to the partisan Democrats who will stop at nothing to attack your family. They hate you and they think it's funny. The so-called reporter behind this piece, Kat Zakruzki gave my office just 45 minutes

10:48to respond to her inquiry. When we asked why we were given so little time, she said, and I'm not kidding, President Trump's administration is not entitled to basic journalistic standards, despicable stuff that's only tolerated in quote unquote journalism. So Andrew Ferguson has really planted a flag here that he sees the Washington Post coming after Katie Miller by just noting the fact that government documents disclose that she has AI stock. They think this is despicable. They think it's interesting they say stop at nothing to attack your family. I mean, obviously the subtext here is that this is supposed to be a bank shot against Stephen Miller himself. But Katie Miller is a public figure by her own lights, right? I mean, this is the career she has chosen to do to be an influencer and it's in her capacity as an influencer, is in her capacity as a podcast host that she would in theory be running a foul of FTC regulations and guidelines here. So the whole thing is very silly. The whole thing is very transparently the chair of the FTC trying to score some court intrigue points in the court of public opinion of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller here.

11:52You know what blew my mind about this tweet was this came across my timeline. And I saw this kind of very typical kind of like LLM. I'm not saying, you know, this guy probably wrote it himself, but it has the language of the classic Trump administration. You know, you gutter journalist, whatever response. And I thought like, is this guy like a deputy for Stephen Chung? Is this guy like some representative of Stephen Miller or Katie Miller? And then when we say, I said, oh, FTC, oh, the chair of it of the FTC. I mean, typically, you know, I think you would say, hey, we don't comment on investigations or, you know, here's the complaint for him if you got an issue. But instead, he's actively saying like to be clear, she can do whatever she wants. Okay, folks, we're not going to look into it. It's, and you know, I think on another note that the larger picture here, Katie Miller, look, we love talking about the Katie Miller podcast or burgeon media empire, whatever. But also the, this is also a sort of influence fight over what is possibly the most important

12:52human issue right now, which is how the US government handles AI. And so, you know, as we record this on Thursday, this is happening amid, you know, people resigning to someone resigning from anthropic claiming, you know, AI is going to destroy humanity. Andthropic say, yeah, maybe we will reports that claw being used to generate biological weapons and anthropic having to step in to stop that. And so amid this, this very kind of potent issue, you could hit secretly hire a Whitehouse Advisors wife and influencer as a, you know, as kind of a secret spokesperson or someone to promote you. So it's very sleazy stuff, but I also think the stakes are high. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we have spent so much time this week focusing on these sort of really big picture questions about what AI as a technology might be capable of. And, you know, how risky its future development is going to be. But there's this whole other set of sort of internal to the technology questions about, well, you know, how do these various labs and these various products stack up against

13:57one another? And while I think, you know, part of the news of this week is that none of them seem like they're necessarily absolutely going to be really safe, I think you and I would agree, probably many people in our audience would agree that of the leading AI labs, perhaps the one that we want least to be very close to the federal government, very close to two positions of power is Elon Musk's bot that sort of occasionally spasms into calling itself mecca Hitler on X and starting to, you know, spiral off and do race science. And anytime, anytime anybody finds a way to sort of get Grock to spit out just sort of like normy liberal sounding talking points on any issue, he gets in under the hood and starts tinkering with the weights in his models because he really wants Grock to be the right wing flash bot a version of these of these products that are currently on the market. And these are not just kind of like meaningless future looking conversations either.

14:57I mean, we have had big fights just in the past year over which which AI companies are allowed to contract with the federal government and Thropic got in a big slap fight with the Department of Defense over digging in its heels about the DoD wanting to be able to use its models in the future to create autonomous weapon systems without a human in the loop. Elon and Grock and XAICs to that fight to swoop in and ink a new contract with the Department of Defense because they're like, we'll do it. You know, no problems here. Again, these are not the same sort of like will these things cause the extinction of humanity a little ways down the line conversations. They're not necessarily those same conversations. But this is a gigantic industry with trillions of dollars sloshing around all over the place. It does seem like part of Elon's strategy and XAIC strategy for keeping the Trump administration on board is to funnel money into the pockets of various people who are close to the administration.

16:02Of course, everybody's doing this to some extent. But this is particularly shameless, a particularly open way. It seems for XAIC to be doing that. Yeah, I mean, this is an administration that's very swayed by social media. And so if you can say, you know, and we've seen this where the stakes are much lower. I wrote about a campaign apparently from a motorcycle company to say that Harley Davidson was gay and all of these conservative influencers were saying, you know, they're DEI, they're woke, whatever. But it's much more potent, you know, or much more significant if you could have someone saying, open AI is woke. You know,thropic is DEI, you know, kind of hitting that nail. And then, you know, the contracts go one way rather than another. Okay, great. Andrew, do you think we've had all the beats here? Yeah, no, just to underscore that point that you just made, I mean, again, just to go back to this DOD fight, that was explicitly the language of Pete Hegseth while he was in that slap fight with anthropic. A slap fight that is ongoing, by the way, is that these are woke California leftists at the woke AI company, anthropic, who are, you know, power hungry, determined to make

17:05these decisions about what their models will and won't do rather than having the government make those decisions. I mean, it's sort of crazy on one level to have these gigantic decisions about which of these incredibly powerful AI models and companies will and won't have access to various sorts of government work going forward and to have that conversation and that debate be so tied to just the lunatic ludicrous discourse that happens on x.com at any given time. But that is 100% what we're seeing that discourse does have a gigantic effect on the decision making processes of various people inside of the administration and as we can see, there are institutional advantages and institutional incentives for these companies and in particular, it seems for XAI to try to put a thumb on the scale in that way. In conclusion, Katie Miller, if you have a million dollars stake in Mecha Hitler, you got

18:06to let people know, you can't just be doing these things, you know, in the shadows. We've been joined today by Andrew Egger, co-writer of the Morning Shots newsletter, kind of becoming our tech policy guy. He's getting a lot of big ideas, he's grappling with the fate of humanity. Andrew, thank you so much for joining that and folks, check out the bulwark.com, sign up for our newsletter, sign up for Morning Shots, hit the subscribe button on here. Thanks a lot. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Trumpfaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Trumpfaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Trumpfaya, proper training is required. Trumpfaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them

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