The Republicans Making Excuses For Signalgate Should Be Sent To A Leper Colony

A very long post about the stupidest people in America.

ChatGPT’s image of “a GOP elephant using Signal in a leper colony”

There are lots of good conservatives in America. Fine, thoughtful, friendly people with whom I disagree about a lot of political stuff, but it’s a free country so who cares. One of my foundational beliefs is that my political opinions don’t make me a better person than anyone else (for the most part; I mean, if you’re in the Ku Klux Klan or Hamas, I am a better person than you).

This description applies to a lot of you! Decent folks.

I say this because I want you to know that for the rest of this post, when I say conservative or Republican, I don’t mean you. I don’t mean, well, the good ones! Lol. I mean the other ones. The bad ones.

Friend, there are bad ones. And they’ve had quite a week!

• The Trump administration deported a bunch of people to Salvadoran prisons who they said were violent gang members here illegally, and though that probably describes some of them, they also sent some other people there too, including some poor guy who had an autism awareness tattoo in solidarity with his brother, which the immigration officers thought was a gang tattoo.

• They grabbed a Turkish PhD student in Boston off the street and sent her to a deportation facility in Louisiana because she published a column in the Tufts student newspaper supporting the Palestinian protests last spring.

• It came out that in January, ICE detained a 54-year-old man who they assumed was an illegal immigrant, but hours later, when they finally got around to talking to him, they learned he was an American citizen who fortunately had his wallet on him.

While some of this could maybe be just explained as profound carelessness, it’s such gross negligence that it’s indistinguishable from malice. Particularly sending the guy to the dungeon in El Salvador, which is something they have expressed no shame or contrition over and appear to not be interested in rectifying.

But of course, you might not have even heard of some of this stuff because, speaking of gross negligence, there was a bigger story this week!

Signalgate: Day 1

On Monday, The Atlantic published a story detailing how a few weeks ago, the White House National Security Advisor accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, into a Signal chat with the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and a bunch of other top-level national security people where they were chatting about whether to bomb Yemen. It started with some banal housekeeping about setting another meeting, and then JD Vance was basically like, “I don’t even want to bomb Yemen,” and like every other group chat in history, it got totally off-track, and they all argued about the policy merits. No one realizes that there is a mystery man who happens to be one of the most famous journalists in the world sitting silently in the chat. Then after they’re done arguing about whether to bomb Yemen, Slenderman-lookalike Stephen Miller came in and was like, “The president says we bomb,” and JD Vance was like, “Fine, I’m sorry, Slenderman, I will bring children into the forest for you to feast on” (or whatever the hell the Slenderman thing was). I’m paraphrasing.

And then the next day, the Secretary of Defense was like, “Hello, Angels! The bombings will commence in two hours,” and gave a bunch of operational details. Goldberg stopped quoting from the chat at this point because he didn’t want to share sensitive national security information, but he described it and it sounded a lot like stuff you don’t want the public to know.