Only in Washington could an encrypted messaging app spark a media firestorm. The Left’s latest manufactured crisis? A Signal group chat. Not federal waste, fraud and abuse. Not intelligence failures. Not even a classified data breach. Just a thread—possibly real, definitely overblown—where Trump officials allegedly coordinated discussions on Iranian proxies in Yemen, and somehow, gasp, a journalist got looped in.
Now the outrage industry is at full tilt. The same people who shrugged off unsecured servers, ghost email aliases, and classified documents in suburban garages are clutching their pearls because someone might have used Signal to discuss military issues. The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. It’s institutional.
Let’s get something straight: using Signal isn’t a scandal. It’s modern warfare logistics. Encrypted, fast, direct. Sloppy? Maybe. But anyone who’s worked national security knows that secure systems aren’t always available in real time. SCIFs don’t travel. Bureaucracies don’t move fast. Signal, for better or worse, does. And ironically, its very informality means fewer people see it—reducing the risk of leaks, not increasing it. Until, of course, someone screws up and adds a known antagonist like Jeffrey Goldberg to the thread.
That’s the story. Not that Trump’s national security team used Signal. Not that they debated military actions on an app. It’s not a constitutional crisis. It’s a screw-up. And frankly, a minor one—because the operation succeeded, U.S. personnel weren’t compromised, and allies weren’t blindsided.
Compare that to the radio silence when Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, used personal email for Pentagon business. Or when Hillary Clinton transmitted classified intel over an unclassified server in her basement. Or when Vice President Biden used private accounts with names like “Robert L. Peters” to conduct official business. No alarms. No breathless media specials. Just gentle shoulder shrugs and talking points about “context” and “nuance.”
Funny how that works.
The truth is, this entire Signal story is less about security and more about symbolism. The media and political class on the Left don’t care about protocols. They care about power—and about controlling the narrative that Donald Trump and anyone who works with him is, by default, dangerous. It’s lazy storytelling. And it ignores the plain reality that much of what the Signal thread revealed—if it’s even authentic—was thoughtful debate among senior officials. Debating timing, escalation, and comms strategy isn’t reckless. It’s governance.
The selective outrage over this story isn’t rooted in principle. It’s rooted in politics. And it shows. Loudly.
So let the pundits pretend this is Watergate in your pocket. Let the op-ed pages hyperventilate about the end of civilian control of the military because someone used an app instead of a classified server. Meanwhile, the rest of us will remember the difference between an actual breach—and an inconvenient narrative.
This wasn’t treason. It was a typo.
And the Left’s moral panic is as transparent as it is performative.
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