Houthi PC Small Group

I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed anyone putting on an accent more than I have listening to British actor Daniel Craig play detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out movies. It is the most cartoonish caricature of a Southern lilt he could have possibly dreamed up, aptly described by one character in the first film as a “Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl.” Beyond the pure entertainment value of Blanc’s accent, though, these movies are also valuable in other ways — and there is one particular concept introduced in the second installment of this series that feels intensely germane to the events of the past few days. This is, of course, the “glass onion.”

If the glass onion isn’t a perfect analogy for the sequence of events now colloquially referred to as “Signalgate,” then I don’t know what is. To recap: National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg to an unsecured Signal group chat with several other key federal figures — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, among others — who all then engaged in a conversation rife with classified information about forthcoming US plans to bomb civilian buildings in Yemen.

The security concerns are obvious. While Signal is a favorite for many journalists because of its open-source end-to-end encryption, it is at the end of the day still just a consumer civilian tool competing with all of the other messaging apps you know and love — Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. What it is absolutely not is a secure government channel. In fact, the NSA warned literally last month that Signal is vulnerable to Russian hackers, which just makes the choice to use it to share classified information even more mind-boggling (the Pentagon independently confirmed these vulnerabilities yet again just days ago). It is no exaggeration to say that this liability could very well have cost human lives, and you have to at this point assume that anything being communicated via Signal is at risk of being read by any competent hacker, and not just those working for the Kremlin.

But the problem isn’t about national security alone. Screenshots of the chat also show Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth openly bitching about European “free-loading,” explicitly calling it “pathetic.” It seems obvious that this language has the capacity to seriously threaten diplomatic relationships with our strongest allies in a way not much else could, especially stacked on nonsensical tariffs, and Semafor is already reporting that the impropriety has reinforced existing intelligence-sharing concerns among global US allies. So not only did this outrageous behavior threaten an active American military operation, it further and seriously eroded our position as a leader in the international geopolitical landscape. Turns out Europeans don’t like it when you say they suck behind their back — who knew?

This is an unforced error of epic proportions. I don’t know how else you can look at it; even conservative darling Tomi Lahren has publicly told those involved to “admit the F up and move on,” and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has openly called for Waltz to step down. Piers Morgan went as far as to call the situation “a shockingly egregious f*ck-up that could have had catastrophic repercussions for US forces in combat on that operation.”

But it gets worse. Because we also have to assume that the reason these government officials are running classified conversations via Signal is to avoid those communications being retained, which would then make them subject to FOIA requests. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole — screenshots of this chat clearly show messages manually set to disappear after a few weeks, and the conversation refers to other prior conversations also held on the platform. That should piss you off as an American citizen with the power and responsibility to hold your government accountable for its actions, but it is also in clear violation of so so so many different policies and regulations (the Espionage Act and the Federal Records Act are just the tip of the iceberg).

Then there’s the human angle to consider. We apparently dropped bombs on several residential buildings, killing at least 15 civilians each time and wounding many more, just to eliminate a single target who was visiting his girlfriend. And if that wasn’t already morally questionable enough, the sheer cavalierness with which the members of this Signal group chat celebrated these actions should make your blood run cold. If it doesn’t, I encourage you to flip the script: Imagine your neighbor is dating a terrorist, without your involvement or even knowledge. Does that make your life an acceptable casualty of a military operation carried out by a foreign government? Should politicians in that foreign government sign off on your death with emojis?

It is especially egregious, if unsurprising, that there has been zero sense of accountability for this misconduct at any level. Nobody in the Signal chat has shown any sort of remorse whatsoever, and several members have instead chosen to attack Goldberg, which makes very little sense at a tactical level. Hegseth initially told the press that none of this ever happened — already patently false by the time he made his statement — and Waltz has said both that he has no idea who Goldberg is and that Goldberg must have schemed his way into the chat, rather than being added inadvertently, both statements that have since been clearly and inarguably disproven.

And the fallout continues, as members of the Signal chat have seemingly lied under oath to cover their own backs. It all just speaks to, as Blanc would call it, immeasurable idiocy. The instinct of these figures to prioritize protecting themselves over all else has led to CIA Director John Ratcliffe claiming that the names of CIA assets aren’t actually classified information, and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard making the blanket statement that nothing in that Signal chat amounted to classified information — which is sincerely insane and immediately disproven by even a cursory glance at the contents of these messages, which included all of the logistical details for this particular operation in Yemen.

Incredulity aside, I have hopes that Signalgate can matter at a real, meaningful level. It is clear-cut incompetence that also smacks of cruelty and maliciousness on a mass scale, and that combination — alongside the response from the White House, which has gone on attack and is doing its best to smear Goldberg and his wife — is the most vulnerable this administration has looked since the start of the year. If the case can be [correctly] made that this situation is just a microcosm representative of what is currently happening across all government departments and facilities, there is a real chance to whip up the American public against this executive power grab in a way we have not yet seen (however hard AOC and Bernie have already been fighting). This is an opportunity to connect with voters who care about national security and our military, even if they’re less concerned with the niche arguments around constitutionality and the nuances of our system of checks and balances.

Because ultimately, I still believe that most of us are on the same side. We still want the same things for ourselves and our country, even if we’re struggling to see eye-to-eye on the ways to get there. I hope that doesn’t sound naive — I see people online every day wondering how more Americans don’t see the manifest inhumanity and wrongness of everything the Trump administration is doing, and as I understand it, the answer is in the question. They don’t see it. Our media ecosystem has become so fragmented and hostile and subjective that if you work a long shift and come home to watch Fox News before passing out in bed, you are legitimately not learning about any number of things happening at the highest levels of our government, or what they mean for you. If you spend your time scrolling through X while listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, you’re never going to be exposed to anything other than faux-news entertainment content telling you what an amazing job Elon and the DOGE kids are doing. The problem isn’t that we’re divided on our values, the problem is that a huge chunk of the country doesn’t have a window into the issues we’re all facing. And that means it’s our job to tear the wall down and build one.

Case in point: A YouGov poll from Monday, before the full Signalgate messages were revealed, already showed that 74 percent of Americans — and 60 percent of Republicans — thought the leak was a somewhat or serious problem. There is no doubt in my mind that the White House response has not helped those numbers. It takes a huge gaffe to turn right-wing talking heads against you, and an even larger one to turn your own voter base against you, but that is the scale of what we’re talking about here. This is an opportunity to create a big-tent anti-administration movement in a really tangible way, and I’m holding out hope that there are still progressive leaders in positions of power that are politically savvy enough to make that happen.