On the Signal Chat Affair
The Left wants you to think that the Trump administration is failing. The first nine weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been a non-stop MAGA blitzkrieg against a parasitic global oligarchy that has wormed its way into the halls of American political power over the past half century. President Trump has signed almost a hundred executive orders already, ICE has ramped up its deportations, border crossings have plummeted, DOGE has been exposing rampant waste and abuse by inside grifters, and the Democratic lawfare machine has been targeted for extinction.
The long-established regime, or “the swamp” as it is called, has seemed stunned and paralyzed. Few thought Republicans were capable of wielding political power so effectively and ruthlessly. Yet, finally, the opposition has gathered its forces and struck back. Or at least it tried to.
Last week, the feckless Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, published an over-dramatized and incendiary puff piece revealing the reporter’s inside knowledge of a top-level Signal chat among administration officials and their decision and timing of the U.S. bombing of the Houthis. Goldberg breathlessly relates the way he was suddenly and mysteriously added to the chat, believing that it might be a set-up to trap mainstream media. But then high-profile figures like J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and Stephen Miller began an earnest discussion about the wisdom of bombing the Houthis over their terrorist harassment of U.S. and European shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Along the way, Goldberg learned through the chat of the administration’s decision to proceed with the attack and the timing and location of the targeted strikes.
The Power of the Gaze
Goldberg wants us to know that all this is very concerning. According to him, protocols have been broken by these Trump officials in discussing “classified” information in a group chat on a public platform. The Espionage Act and federal records laws might have been broken. Classified information was being carelessly shared with “shocking recklessness.” This is a breach of the highest order and demonstrates that the Trump administration is either incompetent or malicious.
All of this is a fabricated crisis by Goldberg. The very fact that the best he and his cronies could do was to expose a routine chat among Trump officials reveals not their incompetence or lawlessness, but the desperation of the entrenched regime. For decades the Left has employed the military-surveillance state to spy on, harass, and silence dissident Americans; they have bludgeoned the public with a Pravda-like mainstream media; they have fully hollowed out Hollywood and the entertainment business, forcefully injecting their ideology into every show that is streamed into millions of American homes; and they have long perfected the weaponization of the judiciary to prosecute political opponents while yet being ostensibly protected by the “rule of law.” Despite these overwhelming advantages, however, the Left’s grasp on American politics and culture is waning. What the Left still has—or thinks they have—is a censorious and disapproving gaze. The only reason any supporter of Trump would be worried about this incident is that they have become accustomed to living under the gaze of the Left.
In America, the Left has been in control of public opinion and fashion for a long time—my entire life, virtually (since the mid-80s and early 90s). They have publicly declared what is good and what is evil, what behaviors are acceptable in polite society, which ones are not, what thoughts, ideas, and speech are permissible and laudable, and those opinions that are anti-racist, anti-democratic, and contravene the sprawling dictates of social justice. The Left’s gaze is a form of soft power that has been extremely effective at not only shaping the beliefs, behaviors, and expectations of ordinary Americans but also in punishing those who break ranks without having to resort to traditional institutions of civil controls, like the police and judicial system. Name-calling, doxing, cancellations, being fired from one’s job, and the threat of a tarnished (if not destroyed) reputation have been sufficient to create a pliant and passive population.
However, the real power of the Left’s control over public opinion, fashion, and honor and shame is that its influence is hidden, and it requires self-censorship in order to work. In a hundred ways every day, left-controlled inputs nudge Americans to conceive of themselves and the world in a particular way. Did you see on the news a crying undocumented immigrant mother separated from her children and about to be deported? The only right conclusion is that ICE and Homan are cruel, and that basic human emotion like empathy requires reuniting her with her family and granting her American citizenship. Did you hear that Trump cut off funding and military aid to Ukraine? Sensible people know this is anti-democratic, an abandonment of our allies, and aiding and abetting power-hungry dictators. Such messaging and conditioning are non-stop, and unless you know this is happening and have conditioned yourself to expect and actively ignore it, you will likely get suckered.
Notice how Goldberg’s article softens the reader to accept his alarm through the manipulation of language. Hegseth’s comments in the chat were “classified or sensitive,” even though these are legally distinct; yet, Goldberg is planting the idea that “sensitive” government information in a group chat is actually classified material that could be legally actionable. Goldberg insists that Hegseth shared “war plans,” but no one knows what the heck that means. It sounds scary and serious; surely it is sensitive—and probably classified. Goldberg pounds the reader over the head with assertions that the conversion was a “breach,” that what was discussed was “reckless,” and that “violations” have occurred. None of this is proven, none of it is accurate. The whole exposé is a charade intended to dupe the mindless consumer of sensational news with rhetorical flair and gravitas.
The Left’s gaze is especially fruitful with principled conservatives. Democrats and progressives know that if they can trigger conservatives to believe that the rule of law has been infringed or that a sacred moral or political principle has been transgressed, then conservatives will do the heavy lifting by themselves. They will police their own ranks, excoriate those who defy “constitutional” precedent, morally scold those who can’t envision the shoe on the other foot, and rebuke dissident right thinkers for supposedly adopting Alinsky-style pragmatic approaches to solving social problems via political power. The hectoring MAGA conservatives have received from establishment GOP rags like Reason Magazine or National Review over the past decade proves this point a thousand times over.
The New Right will lose if we allow the Left to dictate the terms of engagement, choose the battleground, or predetermine what the fight is about. Part of the solution is embodying the J.D. Vance “I don’t really care, Margaret” meme. No conservative should care about the lame l’affaire Signal chat considering what we have just witnessed over the past eight years: a government-sponsored immigrant invasion on our southern border where illegal migrants were given social security numbers, welfare benefits, American jobs, and allowed to vote; a rigged (and possibly stolen) 2020 election and the illegal prosecution of J6 protestors vilified as domestic terrorists and insurrectionists; unprecedented lawfare and multiple assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the legal prosecution and jailing of internet memers; the rape and murder of American women by violent, illegal aliens; botched military withdrawals overseas and criminal and illegal prosecutions of proxy wars against the will of the American people. On and on the list of grievances goes. Yet Jeffrey Goldberg wants you to believe that the Trump administration has committed a grave sin with this chat group; heads must roll, and legal steps must be taken to prevent this from ever happening again. Only dupes would be taken in so easily.
Conclusion
Overcoming the Left’s gaze requires significant effort. It means cancelling mainstream media and finding alternative sources of information. It means seeking and getting an education outside of the bastions of the liberal university. It means unshackling oneself from the twentieth-century conservative movement. It means rethinking the relationship between the individual and society, the real meaning and purpose of the Constitution, the role of religion and morality in law, and the necessity of force and exclusion to protect and preserve an independent people against the assaults of global elitism. It means reenvisioning America: who she once was and what she could be again. Most of all, it means developing self-confident agency, cultivating new networks of high-trust societies, and mustering the political will to act decisively without elite approval and despite its menacing gaze of disappointment.
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