Greetings and welcome to this 29th performance of the Carnival of Fools! Believe me, we have fools aplenty to deal with today — too many, in fact, to cram into one showing. I have a lot of catching up to do in any event. After last Wednesday I pretty much took the rest of the week off from writing to fly back to my old home in the D.C./Maryland area for the National Review Institute Ideas Summit. As a celebration of the 100th birthday of William F. Buckley Jr., we held a fantastic series of panel discussions and speeches: Governors Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis spoke — the latter with his wife Casey — and both were impressive. (Equally as impressive was Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who faces a tough but winnable reelection fight this year.)
But, most important, I got to meet several of you folks — our readers. All I can say is how grateful I am for the kind words, and for the fact that nobody insulted me to my face. (I am well-acquainted with the latter experience; less so with the former.) That having been said, it’s time to sit back in your seats and let the show start. We begin with grand disgrace.
Can Anybody Here Even Play This Game?
Two months into the second Trump administration, the almost daily flood of stories surrounding the president’s mad dash to sharply alter the trajectory of United States’ foreign, economic, and domestic policy threatens to drown us in a sea of “news.” Executive orders, foreign policy negotiations, tariff gyrations, DOGE antics, and social media meltdowns — it becomes more and more difficult to determine which stories matter and which are distractions. But sometimes a story comes along that is such an authentic, undeniable disgrace that no possible defense of it can be mustered.
So, let’s talk about how National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a top secret discussion among the highest-ranking principals in the Trump administration on Signal, a reasonably (but not perfectly) secure private texting platform. There, these people — including Vice President Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and others — were candidly debating one of the most classified matters imaginable: the value and timing of a strike on Yemen’s Houthi terrorists, who have been wreaking havoc on international shipping in the Red Sea for years now and recently re-escalated their efforts. After a decision was made to hit them, Secretary of Defense Hegseth then sent extremely detailed military strike plans on that channel to the rest of its participants — including the editor in chief of one of the most Trump-hostile media outlets in America. It is a shocking failure of professional duty and responsibility, almost staggering in the magnitude of its carelessness.
Read Goldberg’s piece, all of it. I suspect far too few will, because they would prefer to dismiss it as the product of an inveterate anti-Trump liar who authored the infamous claim that Trump had said American soldiers were “losers” and “suckers” for dying for their country. Don’t bother with that this time: Goldberg’s piece has already been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and the federal government. (NSC spokesman Brian Hughes: “At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”) Anybody who’s affecting disbelief reveals himself to be willing to deny reality for vulgar partisan reasons.
Two people obviously bear immediate responsibility for this massive security failure. First is Mike Waltz, who accidentally brought Goldberg into the conversation, according to the report. Second — depressingly, because he comes across well in the leaked texts — is Pete Hegseth, for publishing highly classified near-term military strike plans on a channel that, unbeknownst to him, included an outsider. To say that both need remedial work in tradecraft is the understatement of the year: A mistake like this from a lesser staffer would have resulted in the immediate revocation of security clearances, and potential prosecution as well. (And not even lesser staffers: I still remember the downfalls of John Deutch and David Petraeus, after all.)
But there is a far more important question that few are asking: Why was this conversation being conducted on Signal at all? I know the answer, and it reflects terribly on everyone involved in this conversation, simply because of their willing participation. For those unaware: The only logical reason for top-ranking government officials to conduct highly classified national security discussions on a privately owned communications platform would be to avoid later legal discovery of those discussions by investigators. By keeping these discussions to a secret, nongovernment email server, they control and, if necessary, can delete the information. The risk of accidentally exposing classified information is obviously not of primary concern in this case. It’s funny how that sort of attitude toward classified information has tended to come back to haunt politicians in recent years.
This tactic is nothing new among Washington elites. Trump fans with short memories would probably prefer not to be reminded that it was a minor variation on this debacle — the use of a private (and nonsecure) server to conduct official business, thus preventing those records from being obtained by investigators — that had fatally crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. In that case, we found out that several foreign intelligence services had likely infiltrated her server and email correspondence before she wiped them.
In this case, the Trump administration . . . well, they hacked themselves with near-lunatic incompetence. Set aside the contemptible mistreatment of classified information on a questionably secure channel. Set aside the fact that these people accidentally invited their own journalistic enemy to this channel — and they got very lucky that it was Goldberg they accidentally awarded TS/SCI clearances to; imagine these blunderers accidentally inviting Glenn Greenwald to join them, for God’s sake. The real gut punch is that the debacle reveals Trump’s people to be rank hypocrites on the very issue they justifiably crucified Hillary Clinton over. It’s hard not to conclude that it’s amoral hackery all the way down.
This scandal is not over, or at least it should not be. How many other people in the government — every part of the government — carry on similar “off-the-books” chats to keep critical information permanently undiscoverable by the American people? How do we know this exact same mistake hasn’t happened before? After all, these people sure seem to keep a lot of journalists’ names in their online Rolodexes, regardless of their public pretenses.
This scandal is not about policy. This is about competence. This is about trust. Questions are now turning to whether Waltz or Hegseth will face any consequences for this massive compromise of national security information. I doubt it. (They’re still loyal to Trump, after all — the highest and only commandment for continued service.) My prediction: Nobody will be punished at all, save for temporary loss of face.
What did we learn? I guess we learned not to do it again. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure that anyone involved in this fiasco has learned even that.
Ban Cellphones in the Classroom . . . but Not for Those Reasons
Last Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on Fox & Friends to make a heartening announcement: In keeping with his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, he is prepared as secretary of health and human services to campaign enthusiastically to get schools to institute cellphone bans during class hours. (He cannot mandate this himself.)
I can’t emphasize enough how strongly I agree with Kennedy’s fundamental position on this issue: Smartphones have probably done more to warp (and at times sunder) the organic, natural threads of childhood development than any other technological advance in history. Regardless of their conveniences, we are worse off as a species for them. They have made all of us — but particularly Gen Z and beyond, who have only ever known smartphone culture their entire lives — less intelligent, less able to maintain focus, more isolated, and more depressed. I will not waste time rehearsing all of the (very well-documented) arguments supporting this contention. Suffice it to say I would love to see a national consensus emerge that smartphones’ perpetual availability to our children is deeply harming entire generations.
So, I really wish RFK Jr. hadn’t immediately — in the very same interview — shot himself in the foot by mentioning his partial reasoning: He thinks radiation from smartphones melts children’s brains. “Cell phones produce electric magnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it’s around them all day.” This is a surprisingly popular medical conspiracy theory, as many are no doubt aware; I well remember madmen attacking 5G cell towers during the Covid era because they were convinced these were the true cause of their health problems.
For one thing: no, that’s not true at all. It’s paranoid crackpottery. But I’m not here to argue about that. I am here to say that the worst possible way to build a national movement is by leaning into conspiratorial health fears rather than the enormously persuasive and frightening argument that smartphones are ruining our children’s minds. It is a needless misstep that will repel more than it attracts, especially when Kennedy is essentially correct in his conclusions about phones. And addressing this problem is of the utmost importance to our future.
The King Stays the King
Good news! For the 13th year running, the City of Chicago has managed to hold onto the crown: We remain the homicide capital of America. We scored 573 murders in 2024, which to be fair was a bit of a down year for us; in 2023 we were untouchable, with 617 bodybaggers.
That said, we still tripled the murder rate of lowly Los Angeles and quintupled that of New York City. It’s a tough town, for sure. (Snake Plissken probably thought he was pretty tough, but I never saw him escape from Chicago.) Worst of all, I have little doubt that we can post even higher numbers in 2025, what with anti-police Mayor Brandon Johnson plumbing new lows of popularity and civic competence. We are held captive to events until he is replaced in 2027 — quite possibly by someone even worse.
Until next week.