According to Carmack’s bio in the Mandate for Leadership, “he served in the Intelligence Community as Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence.” Before that, he worked as “Chief of Staff to Congressman John Ratcliffe…and Congressman Ron DeSantis.” According to the New York Post and other sources, Carmack left a position at the Heritage Foundation to join the presidential campaign of DeSantis, serving as policy director and senior advisor (with an emphasis on national security). His views on national security, cybersecurity, and China have been described as “hawkish.” After DeSantis dropped out of the race, Carmack took a job with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The Mandate for Leadership describes Carmack’s contribution in this way: “Carmack writes…that the U.S. Intelligence Community is too inclined to look in the rearview mirror, engage in ‘groupthink,’ and employ an ‘overly cautious’ approach aimed at personal approval rather than at offering the most accurate, unvarnished intelligence for the benefit of the country.”
Considering how ideologically driven Project 2025 is, one may wonder if “too inclined to look in the rearview mirror” means “willing to admit to past mistakes and seek not to repeat them,” if “groupthink” means “consensus,” if “overly cautious” means “not reckless,” and if “accurate, unvarnished intelligence” means “what the conservative boss wants to hear.”
To be fair, Carmack can be the voice of reason. For example, regarding Senator Rand Paul’s attempt to gin up a conspiracy theory about a lab leak of the coronavirus, which involved a drive to declassify any intelligence that the government might have about the origin of the virus, Carmack offered the advice that “a disadvantage of declassifying this information is that it may jeopardize intelligence sources from China that are very hard to get,” and that therefore anything declassified should be scrubbed of any details that would offer clues as to how the intelligence was obtained.
Carmack has paid considerable attention to what he sees as the threat that China poses to the national security of the United States. For example, he has repeatedly referred on his Twitter account to the issue of whether the popular social media app TikTok should be made to divest itself of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. CNN reports that American lawmakers “worry that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, could share data with the Chinese government or manipulate content displayed on its platform. So far, there’s little evidence to support these concerns.”
It may be helpful to remember at this point the controversial role that Cambridge Analytica played in the 2016 election.
Another tweet from Carmack, who at the time of this writing works for a corporation with a market cap of $562.19 billion, is a repost of a tweet by Ron DeSantis that takes a dig at the “the…corporate GOP.”
Another concern that Carmack has about China is its surveillance technologies, which reportedly include cameras, an alleged social credit system, and facial recognition. Regarding reports of the alleged Chinese social credit system, the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics) has this to say: “The idea that China gives every citizen a ‘social credit score’ continues to capture the horrified imagination of many. But it is more bogeyman than reality. Instead, we should be worrying about other, more invasive surveillance practices–and not just in China.” Merics goes on to point out that, for example, the United States has financial credit ratings. Regarding “invasive surveillance practices,” Merics does not bother to explain that, for example, a very large number of people in the United States now carry smartphones, which typically keep track of a user’s location, have microphones and cameras, and are sources of many other types of data, such as financial transactions, images, social media use, and messages. As the Brennan Center points out, all such data may be bought and sold by data brokers.
Carmack is evidently aware of this reality, but he has a partisan viewpoint on it in at least one instance. In one talk, he reportedly “slams Biden over Patriot Act renewal while continuing to approve Chinese tech licenses,” calling such policy “schizophrenic.” When it comes to surveillance in the United States, the picture is more complicated than just “Biden bad.” For example, as of this writing, the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act of 2023, introduced by archconservative congressmember Andy Biggs and supported by the liberal ACLU, has not made it to the floor for a vote. In contrast, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, which was introduced by a Republican, became law in April 2024, having received 60 votes in the Senate. Republicans and Democrats alike voted both yea and nay. Biden signed the bill into law, a move that was not without controversy, as it reportedly preserved “Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” The section “permits the collection of communications data on U.S. persons linked to foreign targets.” In short, while there are pro-privacy advocates on both the left and right, surveillance also has bipartisan support.
As for the charge regarding Chinese tech licenses, the reality is complicated. As a Reuters article points out, the Biden administration was reassessing a “Trump-era policy that allows China’s blacklisted telecommunications equipment maker Huawei to receive some U.S. technology.” Further, “Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks cautioned against reading too much into the licensing numbers, noting that the approval and denial data provides no information about the transactions.”
President Trump made what was described as a U-turn regarding Huawei, allowing the company to “resume buying from US businesses so long as it does not present a national security concern.” In a news story that may not be completely unrelated, a “lobbyist donated $15,000…and another $15,000…to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee that splits its haul between the Trump reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee.” That lobbyist reportedly received “almost $1.7 million” from Huawei.
Carmack’s approach to dealing with the threat of Chinese data gathering seems to include prayer. On the prayerhub website, which describes itself as “a Social Media Platform for Prayer,” Carmack’s name appears in a paragraph that appears to be a call for prayer. The paragraph warns of “a digital dictatorship [that] would not only allow China’s communist government to control huge volumes of data on its own citizens but also of those around the world.” One may wonder if, should Project 2025 become policy, prayer would be utilized to help in obtaining, interpreting, or acting upon “accurate, unvarnished intelligence.”
