The spell is completely broken. The Democrat-media noise machine has lost its power to compel Republican action simply by calling for heads and telling people how bad things are. This is a manifestly good thing.
The “scandal” du jour earlier in the week was the revelation that someone added The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a chat on Signal (a messaging app) about plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Democrats and their media adjuncts predictably attempted to use their usual wizardry of coming up with a name that invokes Richard Nixon—“Signalgate”—to demand that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and others whom they very much do not like, be fired.
That Goldberg was added to the chat was a bad thing, no doubt. You never want hostile journalists (remember that Goldberg was the journalist behind the “suckers and losers” hoax, among other shady dealings) in on any private conversations the Trump administration (or any other Republican group) is having. And you don’t want any military plans to be made known publicly, but three points are relevant.
The first is that we don’t actually know (yet) how Goldberg got on this Signal chat. It could have been the work of a holdover from the Biden era working to sabotage the Trump administration. It could have been a mistake involving a confusion with another “JG,” namely U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Until we know who is responsible, it would be irresponsible to start rolling heads.
Second, it’s not as if the information Goldberg got was top secret, as the media has been suggesting. As Tony Kinnett of The Daily Signal observed on X/Twitter, after reading through all the texts, the only “strategic” point in them is a note that “we’d strike the Houthis two hours early.” What Goldberg saw “aren’t war plans” or “even school board notes.” As Kinnett concludes, “Watergate this is not. It’s a final, informal check-in after things are already planned/assigned.”
Third, attempts to play this as a disaster of the first order and take scalps have played out exactly as most Democrat/media ops have these days—not so well. Other people looking at the facts have also noticed that this was not Watergate.
In the old days, the stranglehold on print and film, and later social media sites, meant that a narrative could be worked out immediately and foisted on the public without serious hope of contradiction until after the news cycle shifts and often long afterward. But this power has been broken. With X/Twitter now a place where inconvenient truths (to channel Al Gore) can be seen, and with a public now acclimated to the reality that the mainstream media is not an objective purveyor of objective truth but a player in the information wars, establishing a national narrative is no longer possible. That did not stop them from trying.
Senator Elizabeth Warren went on the warpath, issuing a video call to fire Hegseth, then begin a criminal investigation and hearings to deal with the “amateurs” who are currently in charge and endangering our “national security.” Talking-head shows were filled with people echoing these calls. Funniest among the attempts were those, such as the New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s rhetorical question on CNN on what we ought to think “if a person has behaved in a way that put American lives at risk.”
As usual, Scott Jennings, the most interesting man on cable television, was ready for it, noting that nobody died as a result of this mistake. Further, Jennings pointed out that questioning how the media “might” react to a Democrat administration “putting American lives at risk” was absurd.
“You don’t have to make up hypotheticals, Lulu, about if this happened in a Democratic administration,” Jennings said. “Let me take you back in time in a Democratic administration. The secretary of defense oversaw a disastrous military operation in which 13 servicemen died in Afghanistan. Then to try to make up for it, they vaporized like seven children in a drone strike. Then later, the secretary of defense went AWOL and didn’t even tell the commander.”
Does anyone remember Senator Warren or anyone at The New York Times demanding firings, criminal charges, public hearings, or any kind of “accountability” for any of the events listed by Jennings? Events with very bad consequences, which really put national security and lives at risk – and indeed cost brave American lives. In addition to the 13 lives lost in the Afghanistan debacle, there were hundreds of Americans stranded in the country for weeks and about $80 billion (that’s “billion” with a “b”) worth of military hardware abandoned there.
Does anyone remember the media voices now demanding “accountability” calling for criminal charges for Hillary Clinton for using a private server to transmit government messages—and then deleting them?
True, polls have now appeared showing Americans think that the mistake is worrisome. But the harsh reality for Democrats is that producing a poll and playing the “How dare you!” card is no longer viable as a strategy to get concrete action that they want.
The mission was itself a success. Nobody was killed or even hurt by this small disturbance. True, the Defense Department needs to tighten up the ship a bit – something no one involved in the incident has denied. But Secretary Hegseth is doing well. Dumping him or even a lower-level figure just to appease the Democrat/media thirst for blood would have been an even bigger mistake.
President Trump was elected because he promised not to simply give in every time Democrats decide they really want something. And he knows not to bow to the demands of Elizabeth Warren, Hakeem Jeffries, and CNN panels to fire Hegseth or Waltz or anybody else.
As conservative lawyer and columnist Kurt Schlichter so aptly summed up the situation, “The best part about Signalgate is how no one rolled over… in the face of Democrats, the regime media, and the spineless on our side.”
The great part about the media spell is that all you need to do to break it is to say the magic word: No!
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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