These People Are Stupid Liars Who Think You’re Stupid Too (E317)
It is difficult to comprehend how much these people screw up, lie, lie about their screw ups, and screw up lying. But we’re going to try anyway. Travis, Jake, and Liv break down the most recent round of malice and incompetence from the Trump administration and the deceit, deflections, and conspiracy theories being deployed in defense of this bad behavior.
Firstly we cover “Signalgate,” the controversy in which a National Security Advisor accidentally added a journalist to their Signal chat about military operations. Secondly we discuss the ongoing saga of Elon Musk’s DOGE and how their efforts are clearly making the government less efficient. And thirdly we cover the Trump administration’s brutal deportation policy, which has targeted people for arbitrary reasons and for their expression of rather benign opinions. We then debunk the conspiracy theory that there is evidence of American student groups collaborating with Hamas.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
SOURCES
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
https://archive.ph/JIxF8
Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal
https://archive.ph/ZKjdg#selection-609.0-614.0
'Most scared I've been': US strikes sow panic in rebel-held Yemen
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250316-most-scared-i-ve-been-us-strikes-sow-panic-in-rebel-held-yemen
Tech issues hit DOGE's '5 things' email requirement for federal employees
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tech-issues-hit-doges-5-things-email-requirement/story?id=120189752
Court records show how many federal workers were fired and rehired at 18 agencies
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-probationary-workers-mass-firing-rehired/
The Federal Workers Who Are Not Quite Fired, Not Quite Working
https://archive.vn/8eGYG#selection-2081.0-2089.0
“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/trump-el-salvador-venezulea-deportation-prison-cecot-bukele/
Oct. 7 victims sue Columbia student groups and protest leaders, alleging Hamas support
https://forward.com/fast-forward/707269/columbia-sjp-cuad-mahmoud-khalil-lawsuit/
These people are stupid liars who think you're stupid, too.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky.
Liv Agar.
And Travis View.
I recently took some time off in a place where cell phone coverage is spotty.
You know, that's a healthy thing for me, for my own sake.
I'm a big advocate of touching grass.
I think this is not just an internet meme.
It actually is very refreshing and healthy for you to do occasionally, to touch grass and not interact with the world through digital representations, but interact with the world through actual physical things that exist.
This is true for everyone, but especially for hosts of the QAA podcast.
Yeah. Like, macro dosing all the worst parts of the internet.
Yeah, as soon as Travis came back, I had lots of bad news to tell him about what was going on in the world, and he looked excited.
He was like, you know what?
I'm ready.
You're back in the game, yeah.
He's like, bring it on.
Bring it on.
Yeah, I also think being disconnected for a couple days also has the benefit of refreshing my perspective.
So, when I started catching up on national news, I was struck anew just how bumbling, malicious, and contemptuous our political and techno overlords are.
Now, if you regularly consume the news, even if you read deeply and responsibly, it's easy to lose sight of just how fucked up these people are.
Firstly, because you're bombarded with stories that reflect their incompetence and sadism.
So normalcy bias makes you forget that, no, actually, the people that you know in your personal life are, in fact, more responsible and thoughtful than the people at the highest rungs of power.
And secondly, their status gives them this kind of, like, reality distortion feel.
People reason, like, well, those guys have, you know, basically all of the money and power, so surely they must have some sort of, like, above-average competency.
Obviously, like, the Trump administration didn't invent governmental incompetence, cruelty, and deceit, but the degree of it and the artlessness of it makes me feel, I don't know, personally insulted.
Yeah, Michael Jordan didn't invent basketball.
Yeah. So today, for this episode, I'm going to discuss three instances in which the Trump administration behaves in a way that is cartoonishly stupid, evil, or both.
And of course, the spin, lies, and conspiracy theories that are deployed in an attempt to justify or downplay how stupid and evil they are.
The first thing I'm going to discuss is SignalGate.
So this is the controversy in which a national security advisor accidentally added a journalist to their Signal Chat about military operations.
And then I'm going to talk about the ongoing saga of Elon Musk's doge, their continued fuck-ups, and their outright lies about how much government funds are supposedly being saved by their efforts.
And thirdly, I'm going to talk about the Trump administration's brutal deportation policy, which is clearly targeting people for either arbitrary reasons or for their...
All bad.
All bad.
It's so funny when I saw the screenshots from the Signal text chat.
It looked like they were LARPing, but I knew that they weren't.
It was very strange.
It was strange.
The funny thing is the journalist initially thought that he was being had.
Someone was tricking him, because surely this can't be real.
This can't be happening.
But as we all must grapple with, no, this is real and this is happening.
Signalgate. So, this one, I think, benefits from a little bit of background.
In early 2025, the newly inaugurated Trump administration was intent on responding forcefully to Houthi rebel attacks in Yemen, which had intensified since late 2023.
The Houthis, an Iran-backed group, had targeted Israel and international shipping, causing global trade disruptions.
President Trump's team vowed a tougher response than the previous administration's efforts.
Now, previously, anti-Houthi efforts mostly focused on limited strikes and allowing military contractors to supply, train and arm Saudi allies to support their operations against the Houthis.
But the Trump administration prefers a more hands-on approach for this issue.
By mid-March 2025, a military operation was in the works to strike Houthi targets in Yemen.
Didn't he run on, like, no more wars?
Yeah, Dove Trump.
Yeah. I mean...
He's like, mid-March, he's like, we'll wait two months, if then.
Trump's policies are interesting because sometimes he just contradicts himself and, like, everyone, including people who vote for him, like, expect and know him to lie.
So they just, like, choose which ones they don't like to think about him lying for.
Yeah. Like, the neocons are like, oh yeah, he's gonna lie about the...
The Dove stuff, I mean, they were right.
Everyone who wanted all the wars to be gone are like, no, he's, you know, being nice to the neocons is just a thing he has to do.
Yeah, you step into that voting booth, but you have to twist yourself into a pretzel beforehand.
That's like the prerequisite.
It's like you gotta, you go, all right, well, this is the decision I'm making, and then you, you know, bend your legs over your head and, you know, sprinkle a little bit of salt.
There you go.
This is why the libertarian free traders were upset at him actually implementing tariffs.
Because I thought, no, weren't you just saying that?
You're just a guy who says shit.
Yeah. But it's clear for all of those people, especially the ones who still support him now, they just wanted fascism.
They wanted that part of it.
That was the main selling point.
The fact that they don't have free trade, well, it's disappointing, but can we get the fascism going, please?
On the morning of Thursday, March 13th, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room, then created a signal messaging group titled Houthi.
Now, Signal, you know, this is a commercial app you can get on any phone, and we use it a lot, you know, when sort of communicating with each other or the journalists.
And, yeah, the security features are nice.
You know, the confidence that, like, some tech giant isn't sucking up all the data is nice.
The disappearing messages.
It's a cheap and easy way to do more secure messaging.
Especially for Travis.
The disappearing messages for him is a huge, huge value add because some of the things he says...
In these chats, high-level, high-level confidentiality, top-secret stuff.
I mean, we're talking about our own kind of strikes.
Talking about cabins in Montana.
Yeah. So, Houthi PC small group.
So, that term PC, I learned, is a reference to the Principals Committee.
That's the senior-most national security officials.
Waltz added over a dozen top officials to this encrypted chat, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Envoy Steve Witkoff, and others.
So, inadvertently, Waltz also added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the group.
It's amazing.
Yeah, I don't.
It's so dumb.
It does just feel like people LARPing as the top most powerful people in the world.
Because they kind of, like, it is a bit of a fake until you make it.
Where they're like, yeah, this is a cool-ass secret signal group chats about bombing the Houthis would be a thing that people do.
And they would be what these guys would be doing if they were pretending to be incredibly powerful.
Yeah, they're like, reporting for duty.
Like, here, here, present.
They do this, like, roll call at the beginning.
I will say it was nice to see the CIA playing well with everybody else.
So I know the deep state is kind of not real, is that these guys are actually making all the decisions.
Like, they would be a heart attack gun.
Over the next two days, March 13th and 14th, the Signal Group was used to discuss the impending operation.
On Friday, March 14th, Waltz messaged the group that formal instructions were in officials' classified inboxes and that agencies should prepare notifications to allies.
I'm going to talk a little bit about what unfolded in this chat because it is interesting to see how these guys operate.
So, a policy debate unfolded in the chat.
Vice President Vance's account expressed misgivings about the timing of the strikes.
Vance noted that, quote, 3% of U.S.
trade runs through the Suez Canal, 40% of European trade does.
Warning of a possible spike in oil prices and questioning whether the public would understand the need for action.
He even cautioned that the plan might be inconsistent with President Trump's current rhetoric on Europe, suggesting perhaps a delay of a month to better prepare the public and gauge economic impact.
That's how you know, like, Vance is an idiot.
He thinks that foreign policy actually has to be beholden to public opinion.
There's never been an association between public opinion and foreign policy in the American state.
You do whatever the fuck you want.
Like, don't—oh, it might look bad because Trump is saying this about Germany.
Like, no, that's never been how these people operate.
We're truly in a new world.
Yeah, these guys are talking about work like it's—you know, like they were filing a TPS report, you know, but it's like—but it's actually just about killing people with drones, probably.
Yes, there were—actually, we know the exact model of drone.
They discuss it in chat.
Oh, fantastic.
Yeah, it is interesting.
Yeah, they're talking about, like, these drone strikes, but they aren't, like, just, like, drone strikes for, like, military, I guess, goals.
They also talk about, like, economics and public relations and, like, you know, politics and image and stuff and, like, how all that folds into what they're doing.
Other officials in the chat pushed back.
An account labeled Joe Kent, this is probably a counterterrorism expert by the same name, agreed that there was no time-sensitive trigger and the same options would exist in a month.
But Defense Secretary Hegseth argued against waiting.
Hegseth wrote that while he understood Vance's concerns, quote, He outlined two risks of delay.
One that the news of the planned strikes could leak, making the US look indecisive.
And two, that Israel might take its own action first or a Gaza ceasefire could collapse.
Quote, and we don't get to start this on our own terms.
Sorry, we have to wait for Israel.
Yeah. Just messaging that.
This is like every Department of Defense guy in every single movie that I've ever seen where everybody's like, maybe we should wait.
And they're like, is there any other way besides violence?
And the military guy's like, no, we have to strike now.
We have to do it now.
We can't wait.
Just very typical.
Hegseth was confident that those risks could be managed and stated, quote, we are prepared to execute, and if I had the final go or no-go vote, I believe we should.
Now, ironically, at one point, Hegseth boasted, quote, we are currently clean on OPSEC, or operational security.
And he said this while a journalist was quietly observing due to Waltz's mistake.
They don't even check who's in the group chat.
It's insane.
Yeah, exactly.
Just double check.
Just be curious that, like, you know, who else is, like, getting these messages.
Jesus, these fucking dipshits.
Even without the leak, it's like, who is in here?
Yeah. It's like when you get out to a group chat with your friends.
You're like, who is, which one of my friends is here?
Who am I talking to?
Yeah, because you never know.
You might be talking shit on somebody.
Exactly. Hey, look, I'm not a perfect human being.
There's been times where I've had to go back and double check.
To see if I'm in the right group chat.
Is somebody in the chat who I'm talking about?
Like, this morning.
Like, this morning when we were trying to figure out this episode.
And I responded to the group chat with Liv in it.
Hold on.
Just to demonstrate.
Why not?
You say, Liv is able to make the 1pm recording, but not the 10am.
So we'll have her on premium, but you and I will rock this one solo.
Yeah, not realizing that Liv was on that chat, and I was talking about her in the third person.
Yeah. But, like, thank God we all get along, and I like Liv quite a bit, so we don't have a situation where I'm like, this fucking bitch.
Like, I know these guys fucking hate each other.
Like, what happens when J.D. Vance is like, do you guys see, like, Hegseth shit his pants yesterday because he was drinking so much?
Like, did you smell that?
I want more.
I hope this is the start of a beautiful trend.
You know, we're always searching for transparency in our government, and exposing, you know, top defense and military signal chats, I think, is a good start.
They're certainly making it easy.
Late on Saturday, March 15th, at 1144 a.m., Defense Secretary Hegseth sent a team update message to the signal group.
The message contains precise operational details of the imminent strikes.
Hegseth's text, written in all caps and bullet points, laid out the strike timeline in targets.
It noted that the weather was favorable and gave a go-ahead from U.S. Central Command.
Crucially, it listed scheduled events.
For example, it said 12.15 Eastern Time, F-18's launch first strike package, followed by times for additional drone launches and strike windows.
One line read 13.45, the time.
Trigger-based F-18, first strike window starts, target terrorists at his known location, so he should be on time.
Also, drone strikes launch MQ-9s.
MQ-9s is a model of drone.
This was indicating that a high-value target was expected to be present at that moment.
So this guy's like, oh fuck, okay, I can't be there.
He's on CNN.com being like, oh shit, they really did plan for my demise.
I guess I'm just gonna hang out at the homie's place for a little bit longer.
It sounds like they got the person who they were targeting.
Oh, so he's dead.
He's dead, yeah.
Dead. I guess maybe the Atlantic.
Did the guy from the Atlantic, like, wait for this not to...
Well, he waited for a while, because apparently he did, again, he didn't really, he reportedly wasn't even sure if he was real or if he was being pranked, so he didn't wait until, like, wait, the drone strikes that were being discussed in this chat actually happened in real life.
Oh, right, and then it's like, oh, it must have been real.
I see.
The schedule continued through the afternoon, indicating the launch of a second wave of F-18s and even the timing of Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the sea.
I just want to be clear.
So Hegseth basically texted very detailed military operations plans, like the exact takeoff times, target windows, weapons to be used over a commercially available messaging app to a group that inadvertently included a member of the press.
Incredible. He was like, it's end-to-end encryption.
It's the security issue that we need.
Yeah, it's disappearing, disappearing in one week, instead of disappearing in one hour, like the people they killed.
It's kind of crazy to me how many tools of destruction that they need to take out, you know, these targets.
It's like, okay, you've got, like, sea tomahawk missiles being launched, you've got these MQ-9 drones, and you've got F-18 Hornets.
Like, how many do you need?
Like, this is kind of overkill.
There is a hubris with relation to the Houthis especially.
Where you saw this in, like, 2023, all those, like, insufferable, like, liberals cheering on American imperialism, where they were like, the Houthis are, but to find out why we don't have free health care.
That's like, any update on that?
Like, I think they've been dealing with a campaign similar to this for at least a decade.
These text messages, like, they certainly dispel the notion that these people wield the awesomely violent capabilities of the U.S. military with any meaningful degree of seriousness or gravity.
Other participants in the chat responded to this 1144 a.m. update.
Vice President Vance replied, quote, I will say a prayer for victory.
Ugh, I'm fucking believable.
Oh, come on, Vance.
You don't fucking believe me, God.
Shut up.
Shut up.
I will say a prayer for victory.
Shut up.
It's like, yeah, God better step in and guide these F-18 Hornets, drones, and Tomahawk missiles to the right fucking place.
Jesus Christ, if you also need God on top of that, like, come on.
What are we doing?
I was thinking, like, Vance Trump is one of the first, like, atheist, atheist tickets.
In a long time.
Wow, that's crazy.
None of those, they both do not believe in God.
There's no fucking way.
Unless you also consider godless Obama.
Well, yeah, it's probably deliberate because, yeah, last time they had Pence, who was like an ultra-religious guy, and he, like, when push came to shove, he didn't deliberately overthrow the U.S. government at the last minute.
They're very mad at him for that.
Yeah, if Pence didn't say prayers before the attacks, the missiles would...
Jets would kind of fly off course.
Jets would crash.
I mean, you know, all sorts of things would fall apart if he wasn't praying.
J.D. Vance, God's not listening.
So in response to this call for prayer, two others added prayer hands emojis.
Goddamn. Amazing.
Now, true to Hegseth's timetable, a U.S. aircraft began striking Houthi targets in Yemen that afternoon.
So, according to Hegseth's message, the first bombs were expected at around 1.45 p.m. Eastern time, and by 1.55 p.m. Eastern, reports of explosions in the Yemeni capital, Sana, surfaced on social media.
Back in the Signal chat, Waltz posted at 1.48 p.m. with real-time battlefield updates.
He said, quote, This suggested that a target building was destroyed, with confirmed identities on site, likely indicating a successful hit on the intended Houthi leader.
Vance momentarily appeared confused by Waltz's update, texting, what?
Before Waltz clarified that the, quote, top missile guy from the Houthis had been spotted entering a building that was now rubble.
Vance then replied, excellent.
Can you put that in baby terms, please?
Yes, right.
Like, the bad guy who hit with the big missile, the building, it went explode.
Building of his girlfriend, he had girlfriends, her building collapsed, her life, not sure.
Yeah. Then, of course, I have a screenshot of the text here.
Michael Waltz responded with a fist emoji, American flag emoji, and fire emoji.
Oh, God.
There are so many things I would like to say.
Oh, God.
I don't want to give Corey, like, too much work bleeping, but the callousness, like, it's like, you know, like, we all kind of know in the back of our heads, like, how horrible these people must be, especially in the wake of, you know, the ease in...
Which they decide to take another human being's life.
But seeing it play out with the emojis, it feels like there's a pit in my stomach that's just not going to go away.
It's quite grim.
It is really banal.
They're just fucking lame.
It's so cliche.
That's like your patriotic uncle would send a message like that when you found out about this.
It's just they suck.
These are the kind of emojis I use when I don't give a fuck.
When I don't feel like responding and I know that culturally it's okay to go, yes, strong, fire.
You know what I mean?
It's the lack of care and the laziness to just do like, here's the flag, here's a fist, here's a fire emoji.
The fire is for the actual fire that they burned alive in.
Yeah. Fist, flag, and fire is like...
Emojis you would put under a really good Instagram photo of a friend on vacation or something.
Yeah. Watched the Super Bowl halftime show, and you're like, this was epic.
Yeah, like, if a friend, if I'm texting with a friend and they're like, yeah, I was up at, like, 7 a.m., like, grinding, was at the gym, then I went to do, then I went to work, like, just having a really productive day, it's that, yeah, it's fist emoji, it's fire emoji, I mean, but I guess these guys are going to work and having a really productive day, according to them, so I don't know, maybe it all tracks.
After this whole story broke, a Democratic representative from Florida, Maxwell Frost, claimed that this exchange is proof of a blatant war crime.
Yeah, I mean, we're back in that.
It was interesting how for a while people used war crime to just mean kind of like girl boss in government a little, like Pete Buttigieg was a war criminal.
But it's like, no, yeah, no, we're back to that.
They're doing it again.
I mean, they actually never stopped, but it's even more blatant now.
Amid the cheers, Hegseth himself posted another update noting that more strikes would continue for hours into the night, promising a full report the next day.
What was absent from the conversation was any curiosity of the effect that the attacks had on civilian innocence.
According to the Yemeni Health Ministry, 53 people had been killed, including five children and two women, I would not be surprised.
Yeah. I thought this was, like, gonna be, like, a surgical strike in, like, two or three people, maybe.
No. Oh, no, no.
Like, we're talking about, like, you know, massive, you know, ordinances.
Big fucking missiles.
You know the mission in, like, Modern Warfare 2?
The AC-130?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's one of the biggest missiles.
You know, you can revolve between them.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes the emojis feel a lot worse.
It's real grim.
They're real evil people, and it's in such a banal, boring way.
They just, like, suck.
Yeah. Yeah, that's depressing.
The news agency AFP reported testimony of one survivor of the attacks, a father of two named Ahmed.
He said this.
The house shook.
The windows shattered.
And my family and I were terrified.
I've been living in Sana'a for 10 years, hearing shelling throughout the war.
By God, I've never experienced anything like this before.
Another resident of the region named Malik, 43, who has three children, said this.
This is the most scared I've ever been since the beginning of the war.
Yesterday's shelling was absolutely terrifying.
Six strikes in a row.
My children were screaming and crying in my arms.
It's the first time I've ever said the Shahada.
So the Shahada is the testimony of faith spoken by faithful Muslims who expect to die.
Houthi leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi said his militants would target U.S. ships in the Red Sea as long as the U.S. continued its attacks on Yemen.
According to Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, he realized that the content of this group chat he was observing was real because he saw news of the foretold strikes.
Now, Goldberg could have done the cool thing here and just, like, stayed in the chat as long as possible to get more, like, inside information from these fucking morons.
But instead, he did the kind of wimpy thing and removed himself from the chat on March 15th.
I mean, I don't...
Come on, yeah.
I don't know.
I don't...
It's like, why?
I don't...
That was a bad move, I think.
That must be like, you know, when you're in the big group chat and you haven't checked who's in it and you're like, Sarah is a fucking bitch, isn't she?
And it's like, Sarah has left this conversation.
I think it's kind of like when you're at the casino and you're at the slot machines and you get kind of a nice jackpot.
The machine might be heating up and there could be more money there, but you're going to cash out and walk away with what you got, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, because it is a good story.
I'm sure it was that it was a wimpy thing.
Like, I mean, this is the only type of reporter that would ever probably be added into these convos, but a more courageous, maybe less right-wing, shitty reporter might stay in.
They could extract.
Yeah, because you come out with an article in like three months.
You're like, I have pages and pages and pages of our war plans.
You're right.
So like, yeah, when he left, they had to have gotten a notification.
Yeah, Jeffrey Goldberg left the chat, which of course would have alerted them of the fact that, you know, this journalist was in.
Goldberg later wrote that no one in the chat had appeared to notice his presence throughout the operation and, like, even after he left.
They didn't even see.
They're like, oh, that was weird.
Goldberg? I don't know who that guy...
Honestly, it's probably, like, I don't know who that guy is.
He's probably, like, a part of the White House in some way.
I don't really know.
Yeah, somebody's assistant or something.
Yeah. So Goldberg wrote this.
I received no subsequent questions about why I left or, more to the point, who I was.
Incredible. It feels more humiliating that the war criminals are stupid.
I don't know.
They're just like epic.
America is based.
Pray your hand emoji.
It's like the fact that, like, the Zuckerbergs of the world are now, like, the ruling class.
It's like fucking nerds.
Nerds and complete fucking idiots.
I wonder if, like, J.D. Vance, like, went home that night to his, like, family and he was like, 58 people.
What do you guys think?
Pretty cool, huh?
We used F-18 Hornets.
Yeah. Yeah, my dad used to play the simulator, and now I'm, you know, I'm flying them for real.
Yeah, I'm sure, like, there's an insane amount of security breach of, like, you know, your pillow talking, cheating on your wife with some, like, transsexual, like, you found unseeking or whatever.
It's like she knows everything about what's going on in the White House.
Goldberg contacted Waltz and the White House on Monday, March 17th to seek comment and presumably to alert them to his knowledge.
Over the next week, The Atlantic worked to verify the details and decide how to responsibly report on the story.
Out of concern for national security, Goldberg initially withheld the most sensitive specifics from publication.
He wanted to worry.
He's worrying about the American state and its integrity.
Of course.
Yeah. No, he plays ball.
It's probably why he was in Waltz's phone contacts in the first place because he's a journalist who plays ball.
I do wonder if they do say insane secrets and you just post them, whether you're liable?
No, a journalist can publish any state secrets he wants.
The law has been very, very clear on this.
It might be...
Well, and look, there's no rule about there not being any consequences, so, you know, report at your own risk.
I mean, not every journalist comes out unscathed.
Although this is the Trump administration, too, so who knows how the rules change?
What is that?
Is it the idiom in tweet?
I believe in free speech, but, like, I can't tell you what happens after you say it.
Like, that's probably the Trump policy broadly, as we will see later.
On Monday, March 24th, The Atlantic broke the story publicly.
Goldberg published an article titled, The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.
Now, while Goldberg's piece confirmed that he had seen information on targets weapons the U.S. would be deploying and attack sequencing, he did not publish those raw details at first.
Instead, he kind of, like, described their nature and emphasized how serious of a breach it was, calling it one of the most serious breaches of U.S. national security in recent memory.
So he's actually, I mean, it's like he's publishing this story.
He's doing the bare minimum of, like, what response we're reporting.
But he's still being very deferential and protective of, basically, the national security state.
Yeah, it's like a father who's mad at their kid, and it's like, I'm doing this because I love you.
Like, I'm protecting you here.
Within hours of the Atlantic story, reporters pressed officials for answers.
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked point-blank why he had shared war plans on Signal.
Hegseth attacked the credibility of the journalist without denying the authenticity of the messages.
He also issued this flat denial.
Nobody. DNI Tulsi Gabbard repeated this line when she was grilled about the issue by Senator Mark Warner.
Contact the defense secretary or others after this specific military planning was put out and say, hey, we should be doing this in a skiff.
There was no classified material that was shared in that signal.
So then if there was no classified material, share it with the committee.
You can't have it both ways.
These are important jobs.
This is our national security.
Bobbing and weaving and trying to, you know, filibuster your answer.
So please answer.
What's up with Tulsi Gabbard looking like Jubilee from X-Men?
She's got the strike, you know?
She does.
She does.
She's like a girl boss fascist.
She was like, I'm going to celebrate.
Getting a little quirky.
She's kind of like the Republican Kyrsten Sinema a little.
She's got something quirky going on.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess this is just going to be the rest of the administration if it does last for only four years.
Like, this reminds me a lot of, like, the Flynn-style mistake that got him kicked out.
Oh, yeah.
Talking to...
Yeah, but now it's like, everyone's a fucking idiot, so the blame is just kind of diffused around, and it's like, okay, this is our line on the subject.
You don't lose your spot in the administration now, I guess, because it's just, yeah, everyone's a fucking idiot.
There's nobody left.
It's the bottom of the barrel.
You can't lose the bottom of the barrel.
You just have to manage their incompetence.
I think it's also, this is a bit unusual, a bit of an unusual situation, in that Everyone who works for Trump knows that if they stay loyal to the line, to Trump, and they are convicted of crimes because of that loyalty, they will be pardoned.
Yeah, right.
So there's really no incentive to do anything but be loyal to Trump, which creates these sort of perverse incentives.
Even Trump himself said that no classified information was shared.
There was no classified information, as I understand it.
They used an app, if you want to call it an app, that a lot of people use, a lot of people in government use, a lot of people in the media use.
An app, if you want to call it that.
If you want to call it what it is, they used an app.
I like how he realized how bad it sounded coming out of his mouth that they used an app.
An app?
It's on the store.
It's for free.
You have to download it, but you've got to make sure that you're signed into your Apple account.
It won't let you otherwise.
I oftentimes have to hold the iPad up at a very specific angle.
It won't let me download Apple.
Apps from the store.
It makes me put in my password, but I forgot it.
And then I changed my password to something else.
And then it won't let me change it back.
I'm constantly running around in my underwear going, Baron!
Baron, what's the Apple Store iPad app password?
Because Baron knows all my passwords.
You could say he's a password protector, if you could call it that.
He's very smart, folks.
Lots of numbers and letters in his head, folks.
It's very useful.
Though I should note that, like, after the extent of the information in the Signal chat was revealed, Trump hedged on that claim.
Do you still believe nothing classified was shared?
Well, that's what I've heard.
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
You'll have to ask the various people involved.
I really don't know.
It's like a perfect summary of, like, this administration, where you ask another, like, someone does an incredibly fucking stupid thing, and you ask another member of the admin about it, and they're like, if that's true, then that's true, and, you know, you should ask him.
Trump is doing something incredible where he's really leaning to this like, I have no fucking clue.
I don't know.
You're going to have to talk to them.
I'm really not first time hearing of it.
It's kind of like a bulletproof defense in a weird way where it's like, God, when was the last time a president got up and was like, I have no fucking idea.
I don't know.
Ask the people fucking involved.
Who do you think I am?
look, man, I'm just here to fucking, I'm here to, like, sign, you know, sign executive orders, shake hands, take pictures, all of the leading the country stuff, like, you gotta talk to them about it.
Like, I don't fucking know what No, it's funny.
During the first Trump administration, whenever he was asked about something he knew nothing about, his go-to was like, no, we're actually looking very strongly into that, and then we're going to have an answer for you in two weeks.
Obviously, he didn't want to say, I have no idea what you're talking about, because that looks weak.
He hates looking weak.
But now he's a tired old man.
He doesn't find...
It's like, I don't know.
Whatever. Who gives a shit?
Maybe you have to ask the people who are involved.
I don't think he's looking too far into the future.
I think as far as Trump's brain...
It's like when you go to the DMV and you renew your registration and you're like, I don't have to think about this for another fucking year.
Like, fuck you, bitches.
Like, this is something that's out of my mind.
I think Trump is basically like, I'm president for the next two years and they can't do anything about it.
Like, I think basically he's like, I've got two years free run until maybe the midterms if, you know, and then there'll be a bunch of like impeachment hearings that probably won't go anywhere if we keep the Senate.
But at least for these two years.
Like, I don't have to do shit.
I don't have to answer to anybody.
I don't know.
I think maybe he is, like, looking forward to, like, campaign season and, like, all these, like, congressional candidates are, like, sucking up to him in order to get the Trump endorsement.
I mean, that's, I think, his favorite part of politicking is the campaigning and stuff and all that business.
You know, the actual governing shit, he hates that.
Yeah. He's not thinking about the fact that, legally speaking, that's going to be his last campaign.
Legally speaking, yes.
Yeah, who knows?
Now, what might have been behind these bizarre denials was legalistic defense, because if the information wasn't, like, formally classified, then sharing it on an unsecured platform or with a journalist by accident wouldn't necessarily be a crime.
In fact, the administration appeared to be retroactively claiming that the detailed attack plans were unclassified.
Now, this stance, however, is not really sustainable.
So, some critics pointed out that, by definition, military operational plans and details of weapons systems are exactly the kind of information, you know, that is, like, commonly classified because unauthorized disclosure could harm national security.
Others argue that the only reason these signal messages weren't marked classified is because they were never on a classified system.
This was just, you know, a technicality since the content itself was obviously sensitive.
No one disputes that.
Nevertheless, in the first sort of like 24 to 48 hours after the leak became public, the Trump administration's official line was unwavering.
Like, no real secrets were compromised, and thus, in their view, the issue was being blown out of proportion.
This wound up being a really dumb strategy.
Because senior officials like Hegseth and Gabbard and Ratcliffe and Trump himself were like publicly suggesting that the Atlantic's account was overblown or false, Goldberg and his team decided to publish the actual text messages in full.
That's funny.
He's being a bit messy.
Because it's like, I see he's concerned, right?
He's like, no, no, no, it is serious, you fucking idiots.
You see like NatSec kind of minded journalists versus these new idiots, like the Trump style.
It's funny because he was willing to be very deferential, very protective of the information he got.
And I'm sure if they had come out and said, yes, that is an accurate story and it was bad or whatever, then he wouldn't have gone on to publish the actual text messages.
journalistic honor.
Right, of course.
And so it's funny because normally their strategy for this kind of thing, just deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack.
We really are back.
We're back.
On the morning of March 26, just before Congress opened its hearings, The Atlantic released a follow-up article titled, Here are the attack plans that Trump advisors shared on Signal.
The Atlantic did redact one item at the CIA's request, the name of Ratcliffe's chief of staff, who was mentioned in the chat, but otherwise published the messages unedited.
One of the problems with the scandal is that it's easy to understand.
Like, Mike Waltz, because he's not a competent person, added the wrong contact to the signal group.
You know, we all have experience adding people to a group chat.
And information shared in this group includes sensitive information about a military strike.
You can understand that.
It's not complicated.
It's not technical.
It's just really, like, easy to grasp.
And it's so simple that they have to pretend it's more complicated in order to spin it.
For example, on Fox News, Mike Walz implied that some sort of vague, nefarious plot was involved in placing Jeffrey Goldberg in this group.
The president expressed complete confidence in you today and his entire cabinet, but how did a Trump-hating editor of The Atlantic end up on your signal chat?
You know, Laura, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but of...
All the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys, and gone to Russia hoax, gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president of the United States, and he's the one that somehow...
Gets on somebody's contact and then gets sucked into this group.
No, he doesn't get sucked in.
He gets sucked in.
It's not like a fucking whirlpool where he was circling around the edge for a little while before, you know, ultimately getting pulled deep into the ocean.
It's like, you can't add yourself to group chats.
It's just not how it works.
Yeah, they do have a problem that, like, the damning story is so much simpler and people love a simple story.
Obviously, like, the freaks and the hogs will...
We'll take this and run with it.
But at that point, you can just feed them literally anything.
More recently, Press Secretary Caroline Levitt implied that multiple independent investigations are looking into the matter, including one by Elon Musk and his team.
Previous question from Jennifer.
As for your original question about who's looking into the messaging thread, the National Security Council, the White House Counsel's Office, and also, yes, Elon Musk's team.
Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat.
Again, to take responsibility and ensure that...
Elon, he's like the fantasy IT guy where like it's like boomers who don't understand how technology works at all.
Like you could just say our guy Elon Musk is looking into like how it happened.
They'll be like, aha, a real genius is going to get to the bottom of this.
It's purely abstracted.
It's like there was some nefarious thing that added him and we're going to find, we're going to hack into the mainframe.
And see which IP address did it.
Also, why does every Trump spokesperson look like Elsa from The Last Crusade?
Like, literally every single one is, like, reaching for the grail.
It's unbelievable.
So one thing that's stopping me from going, like, fully blonde is all these bitches with, like, blonde hair and, like, brunette roots who are just, like, Trump, you know, stand-ins.
Yeah, it's the signature drip.
You can't copy them.
What really strikes me is just the incoherence of this stance, because they're saying that signal is a fine, perfectly acceptable way to talk about these sensitive matters, but also there is some sort of mysterious force that somehow added a journalist that's so strange that you don't even know how it happens.
So you don't even know how a system like this or a chat thread like this, a chat group, becomes insecure, but it's also fine to use.
I mean, there's so many things about this that really lays bare.
You know, just complete maliciousness and stupidity.
At this point, it's only appealing to, like, the people who click on that, like, your computer has 100 viruses on 123 movies.
It's like, yeah, look, it happened to me.
It makes sense if it would happen to them, too.
Yeah, they're right in that age.
They're right in that age where computer voodoo is strongest.
Yeah. But me and my brother used to make so much fun of my dad for his, like, computer voodoo sort of theories.
Like, for example, when you...
He would boot up a computer if you started.
He would be like, Jake, don't start clicking too fast.
The computer's still booting up.
You've got to let it settle.
He had all these little sort of practices to make sure that you didn't break the computer in any sort of way.
Just don't click too fast.
Don't move your mouse while it's starting up all of these little things that probably had nothing to do with anything.
I imagine that this group is sort of under some of the same beliefs.
Which, like, all of their sort of knee-jerk, the reflexive sort of need to, like, deceive and deny and deflect actually, you know, trip them up and tangled them up in more problems than they would have if they, like, were able.
To humble themselves and take responsibility and acknowledge reality.
Like, normally ignoring reality, you know, is quite beneficial to them.
But in this instance, it just, it fucked them up because the situation is so simple.
Like, this happened because Mike Waltz is a sloppy shit for brains.
He can't be expected to operate with baseline competence for the same reason you can't expect a Labrador to solve differential equations.
It's just far beyond their personal limitations.
Like, both the United States and the world generally would be a safer place, I believe, if everyone in that chat was fired and replaced with a group of Americans...
Yeah, totally.
Maybe they would fucking care about the civilians that died in that strike.
Yeah, because like your average person, like, you know, they like they understand how like the chat works on your phone.
Yeah. And they and like they they would feel bad about being responsible for killing someone.
I think the average person has more competence and empathy than the people who.
Yeah, it's like, you know...
There would be at least one person in the chat that's like, wait, wait, wait a minute.
Like, how many?
What kind of size are we looking at here?
Is this a, you know, what kind of circumference of damage?
And what are we...
But I guess if you're in this industry anyway, you know what the F-18 Hornets are going to do.
You know what the destruction is going to be like.
And you probably know how many civilians, you know, are roughly, you know, in the line of fire.
You just don't care.
It's part of the job.
Speaking of Elon Musk, you know, I want to return to his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, because it's been such a fucking farce so far.
And, you know, I talked a bit about how they're just lying about, like, how much money they're supposedly saving.
They're putting up fake numbers.
But I think also they are, I think, inarguably decreasing the efficiency of government.
One of the things that Doge did was initiate the widespread terminations of federal employees across various agencies.
So these actions were met with legal challenges, resulting in court orders mandating the reinstatement of many affected workers.
On March 13th, federal judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled that the blanket terminations violated the Reduction in Force Act.
He ordered the rehiring of employees from several departments, including Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury.
Judge also criticized the administration's use of performance claims as a gimmick to circumvent legal requirements.
Concurrently, federal judge James Breder in Maryland issued a broader order requiring the Trump administration to rehire workers from 12 departments and 6 agencies.
This decision stemmed from a lawsuit by 19 states and the District of Columbia alleging the administration failed to provide legally required advance notice of large-scale layoffs.
Judge Breder noted the lack of individualized assessments, stating, They were all just fired, collectively.
Even if, like, Dodge really had some sort of plan to reduce the workforce, you'd think they would just check into the law so that it would stick.
But no, these people, they're so fucking arrogant that they think they can just plow through.
And all these, like, technical things that, like, limit other littler people don't impact them or will never, like, halt their efforts.
And very frequently they're right, but sometimes they're wrong.
Yeah, I think this administration really is acting on the idea of, like, it's better.
Right. You see that with the other story as well, that it's like, fuck you, no, it doesn't matter.
Yeah. It's like, oh, this is pretend, and once it starts actually affecting them, they have to pretend to care.
It's very awkward for them.
Well, and you hear this with people who have worked under Elon Musk and left, is that he orders something to be done first and then finds out later if it's possible.
That's like he kind of prides himself on like that that's his methodology that that he's kind of asks for the impossible and lets reality sort of get in the way later.
But if he's gained a little bit of ground, like he'll use that to say, like, see, you pushed it to a place where, you know, you were capable of achieving something that you didn't think was possible.
So I'm sure it's just like everything else where he tells them.
You know, his hubris, I think, you know.
Knows no bounds.
And he doesn't give a fuck about the rules and systems of government.
His whole thing is that he's like, I'm going to go in and dismantle it.
So these reinstatements include approximately 6,400 employees at the IRS, 5,700 employees at the Department of Agriculture, 3,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, and 1,700 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
That's a lot of people!
It was!
So this was a message that some employees for the National Weather Service received when they were rehired.
This is to advise you that the notification of termination during probationary period sent to you on or about February 27th, 2025 is rescinded, as it regrettably was sent in error.
You must return to duty on Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, unless you request and are granted appropriate leave.
For all workdays between February 27th, 2025 and March 12th, 2025, you will be coded in an administrative leave, paid, non-duty status.
Oh god, this is the worst.
Email ever because it's like yeah You were fired in error and You gotta be back in the office on Monday So like yeah it's like Even if you're like you know you had just gotten To the point you had cracked that beer You know you had bought Assassin's Creed you were like you know what Fuck it I'll find a new job I hated this place Anyways and then they're like actually Like you still have a job and like You have to be back in on Monday it's like Oh god they're like even They're doing the right thing and it still sucks I know it's like it was
And this is the strangest, I mean, I've only worked in the private sector, but the idea that you could be fired and then told, no, actually, you're coming back to work now.
It's like, what the, I don't know, it's just a, it's got a bizarre, bizarre situation for them.
Yeah, it treats human beings and workers as less than.
That you can be fired without thought, rehired without thought, and you better be in on time, or then you might get fired for real.
And you will be paid for your time off, a coded leave of absence.
Like, oh god, so much paperwork.
So most employees who are being rehired actually are currently placed on administrative leave with full pay and benefits during the transition.
Okay. Which means that because of Doge, tens of thousands of government employees are being paid to not work.
That's like government waste.
We love it.
It's like even if you are like a real libertarian and want to shrink the government as much as possible, aren't you like a little angry at Elon Musk?
Because now they're no longer, these employees are no longer providing the services.
They are hired to do, but they're still continuing to get paid.
Isn't this inarguably making the government less efficient?
Only these idiots could go in with the idea of, like, saving people money and then end up costing them more.
It's as stupid as it could get.
Really. Another thing that Doge did, if you recall, was like make these government employees submit an email about five things they did the previous week.
Oh, they made such a big deal about it.
It's like I can't believe they would even object.
Elon Musk tweeted about it dozens of times.
It was so serious.
It was like previously like this one-off request, but it changed into a supposedly like a requirement to do every week.
I love the idea, like obviously they're not looking at them, but the idea that like how many jobs you would need to get.
Like, people to just read through these fucking letters every week.
Remember, he even suggested that employees that didn't respond to this email would be fired.
But as ABC News reported, government employees can't send emails to the address anymore to answer this question because the inbox is full.
Un-fucking-believable.
So it can get worse.
Yeah. After submitting their weekly five things Please
try resending your message later or contact the recipient directly, according to the emails.
Oh, man.
Shout out to all my anxious government workers who saw that the email box is full and they're like, well, how the fuck am I going to submit my five fucking things?
Like, am I going to get fired because these motherfuckers can't, like, read their emails?
That, like, they're supposed to...
Oh, God!
Like, oh, I can't even imagine.
I mean, this is fucking...
Especially since they made such a big deal about how important it was and how every government employee should do it.
Like, the IT guy who works at your local real estate office is competent enough to set up an email inbox that doesn't get full after a month.
But Elon Musk and his team are not.
The report goes on to explain how the five things email requirement was essentially pointless all along.
Of course.
While Musk initially threatened federal employees with termination if they did not comply, multiple sources tell ABC News that enforcement of the requirement has seemed to wane at some agencies, and some employees have simply stopped submitting their reports without consequence.
One federal employee told ABC News they set a reminder every Monday to send the same five accomplishments each week and have never been questioned about it.
Another employee said some staff members are openly mocking Doge in their submissions, I don't think anyone is reading these, they told ABC News.
Of course they weren't, because hiring people to fucking do that would be stupid.
I wonder if they're trying to do, like, AI reading of it?
Maybe. That'd be very funny.
I love that, like, Elon and his team are, like, essentially, like, the bad guys in office space.
Like, incompetent losers, and basically everybody else are the heroes of office space, because they're like, fuck this, I'm not fucking submitting it, I'm gonna submit the same shit every single week and, like, see what they do, and nothing's happening to them.
What a spectacular failure.
I know.
It's like even if you are someone who does believe in the mission of Doge and think that is something that, I don't know, should be done or could be done.
I mean, do you think it makes the government more efficient to have every governmental employee send an email to nobody every week?
Is that like, is that more bureaucracy or less bureaucracy?
Deportation. I think perhaps one of the most troubling developments of the very young second Trump administration is its summary deportation of people without due process.
The administration, of course, claims that these people are migrants who did something to deserve deportation, but without due process, you can't really know if that's true or not.
Now, if the government can detain or even ship someone overseas without so much as offering that person the opportunity to We're in a very dark place.
And it seems as though the Trump administration is targeting legal immigrants for activity that is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment.
Take, for example, the case of Ormeza Ozturk, a Tufts PhD student from Turkey who previously attended Columbia University.
Immigration agents snatched her off the street in Boston after the Trump administration terminated her student visa.
The administration justified this action over her alleged activities in support of Hamas.
Now, the administration has not offered any evidence of this.
However, Osterk previously wrote an op-ed critical of Tufts' response to anti-Israel protests and called for the university to divest from Israel.
There's also a harrowing report from Mother Jones, which says that immigration enforcement officers are disappearing Venezuelan men to a mega prison in El Salvador because of their tattoos.
Now, they're claiming that this is because they have gang-related tattoos, but there's no evidence of gang involvement, and the tattoos are of things like butterflies and, in one case, autism awareness.
Oh, God!
Yeah, it's just, you know, you find the state of exception, you find the place where people don't have rights, and you just expand it as much as possible.
And it's very clear, the Trump administration, they found it with, like, quote-unquote, illegal immigrants, with migrants.
You don't have rights until you enter the country.
They're just going to expand upon that until they can do whatever they want with anyone.
That's their goal.
Or take the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who was arrested and detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism, though the Trump administration is claiming that Khalil misrepresented information on his green card application.
Now, this is, I think, clearly hard to justify.
But one of the ways people are attempting to justify it is by claiming that there is a close working relationship between campus pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. and Hamas.
Now, this claim isn't merely that these groups advocate for Palestinian rights, and the claim isn't merely that these groups are sympathetic to Hamas, but rather they're making the much more wild claim that these groups are colluding with Hamas in order to spread pro-Hamas propaganda in the U.S. And of course, even if that was true, you would need to prove it in a court.
Yes. Right?
Due process.
You can't just say it.
And then it's like, well, OK, I guess I guess fuck the legal system.
One such accusation comes from a lawsuit that was filed by nine U.S.
and Israeli citizens who were victims of Hamas's October 7th, 2023 attack on Israel.
The lawsuit goes as far as to claim that the group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine had foreknowledge of the October 7th attacks.
So it wasn't just that SJP...
It is also that SJP, according to this lawsuit, was in full active coordination with Hamas.
According to the suit, quote, This is insane.
Three minutes before Hamas began its attack on October 7th, Columbia SJP posted on Instagram, quote, According to the filing, The group's account had been dormant for months before the October 6th posting, which was made a couple of weeks after the start of Columbia's fall 2023 semester.
Everyone is fucking queuing on now.
This is a cue proof.
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
It's just like, Ben Shapiro is such a fucking weasel because he's always done this thing of like, no, no, no, I oppose Trump, you know, they're the vulgar.
And then he just like continually completely supports him in all of the most evil things he's done.
You should just man up and embrace it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah, I'd never be friends with him.
Thank you, Jake.
I think it's like, it's like fucking like, Shapiro is like, it's like one of those, you know, he's a graduate of Harvard Law.
He's like, he is, I think, capable of interrogating this claim and really seeing whether or not it's true if he wanted to.
He just doesn't want to.
He's just going to present it.
Because he obviously knows it's bullshit, but he doesn't care.
Before we even look into evidence of this claim, I think it's worth noting that Iran has provided, like, material support to Hamas for decades.
But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in February of 2024 that, quote, Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the attack, which means to believe the claim of this lawsuit.
You would have to believe that prior to the October 7th attacks, Hamas did not tell.
They're government sponsors who provide them with millions of dollars worth of support.
But they did, for some reason, make sure to email a U.S. college club about it.
It doesn't pass the sniff test.
Yeah. It's ironic, like, the Egyptian state had awareness of some sort of attack being prepared and attempted to warn Israel because they're really important collaborators in the region, and Israel just sort of ignored them.
So it's not as if, yeah, it's very silly.
Let's take a closer look into the claim.
So the claim here is that the Instagram account for Columbia Students for Peace was dormant for months, but then, a mere three minutes before the October 7th attacks, it posted again.
And this was supposedly evidence of direct collaboration and foreknowledge.
Like, for what?
To inspire an uprising in America?
Yeah, I guess.
Like spreading propaganda.
They claim it's like coordinated propaganda for this attack, their claim.
First of all, let's start with the whole thing about the account being dormant.
So when the lawsuit says that it was dormant for months, presumably, I don't know, means that they were like laying low and that they only activated to assist this Hamas propaganda.
When they say dormant for months, they're specifically referring to the fact that the previous post, before it posted in October, was on May 16th, 2023.
Now, can you think of any reason why an Instagram account for a student would stop posting on May 16th?
So, I actually, I googled Columbia academic year 2023, and I learned that the university's commencement ceremony for that year took place on May 17th.
So, obviously, they didn't stop posting for a nefarious reason.
It's because it's a university club, and they took a break for the summer after the school year ended.
Now, what about the other claim?
That the Instagram account started posting just three minutes before the October 7th attacks.
Now, the lawsuit doesn't provide any timestamps to verify this claim.
That Instagram account has since been taken down.
However, I did find an older, actually, it was a pro-Israel account that posted a screenshot of the timestamp for that particular post on Instagram.
Because this actually has been kind of a conspiracy theory that's been circulating among pro-Israel groups for the past year.
So according to that, the post in question was actually posted at 1.26 a.m. on October 5th, so a couple days before the attacks.
So the lawsuit and Ben Shapiro are simply incorrect.
The post was not closely timed with the attacks, and obviously there's nothing suspicious about a student group, you know, taking a break for the summer.
And further, like all that post said, the one that they think is the fairy said, we are back.
First general body meeting to be announced soon.
Stay tuned.
You could argue, maybe, I mean, you can't argue this, but, like, it's like a code word.
Fuck, I mean...
You know, like, that's the only possible...
Otherwise, it's just an obvious post about them resuming activities on campus.
I'd like to know when Columbia's school year starts.
I would imagine it's a couple weeks before this.
Yeah, no, it's a couple weeks after.
Yeah, it starts in September, and this was, I think, like three or four weeks, obviously.
So they're just preparing for the fact that students are probably returning to campus early, and they're letting them know that they're still active and give members of this group some information about how they can continue to participate.
It was so, so...
It's not an exaggeration to say that this is QAnon-level banking.
Totally. It's a really important, I think, moment, especially within the American right, because there have been some, even like, you know, NatSec, right-wing, who have opposed this, but it's clear now, if you're on board for this, that you're on board for full-on fascism.
Like, there's no stopping.
If you have a propaganda machine and you're putting out a positive spin on this for the Trump administration...
Like, you are C. Kyling, functionally.
Like, you are a member of the Blackshirts.
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Liv, where can people find more of your stuff?
I have a newsletter at livehagar.com and I stream sometime on Twitch at twitch.tv slash livehagar.
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For everything else, we've got a website.
That's qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the signal chat add you and keep you.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Oh, oh, oh.
We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences.
I take full responsibility.
I built the group.
My job is to make sure everything's coordinated.
I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number...
Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number there?
Oh, I never make those mistakes.
Right? You've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact.
So, of course, I didn't see this loser in the group.
It looked like someone else.
Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out.
So your staffer did not put his contact information?
No, no, no.
But how did it end up in your phone?
That's what we're trying to figure out.
But that's a pretty big problem.
We've got the best technical minds, right?
That's disturbing.
And that's where, I mean...
I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone?
I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious.
How's the number on your phone?
Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then somehow it gets sucked in.
Oh, someone sent you that contact.
It gets sucked in.
Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn't on the chat that you thought was on the chat?
So the person that I thought was on there was never on there.
Who was that person supposed to be?
Well, look, Laura, I take...
I take responsibility.
I built the group.
But look, that's the part that we have to figure out.
