Well, well, well... It didn’t take long for U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and several of the country’s top defense officials to be caught in a lie after a journalist was added to a group chat full of active military war plans. And like always, Black folks had more than enough to say about what has appropriately been named “Signal Gate.”
Early Wednesday (March 26), The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped a bombshell publishing of the sensitive context he was granted access. This came less than one day after Hegseth and the other group chatters flat out denied they were sharing any classified war plans via a group chat on Signal... right.
Goldberg dropped the full transcript of the supposedly confidential chat. On X, @AJ_Indiana responded to The Atlantic’s bombshell exposé with a gif declaring “I got receipts.”
If you’ve been living under a rock, The Root previously reported Goldberg was accidentally added to a group chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. In the Signal chat, Waltz, Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and more important officials detailed a covert operation to bomb the Houthis in Yemen— which Goldberg, or any other U.S. civilians, was never supposed to have details about. Everyone and their momma, including X user @VIRG0VNUS, was scrambling to read the chat’s transcript.
@talleyberrybaby called the whole thing “so so so so so so surreal.” At the same time, many Black Americans noted how our top officials seemed to be unfazed with the taking of innocent lives in addition to the Houthi targets. “So unsettling and evil to just kill an apartment full of people and talk about it in a group chat like it was just nothing,” @_Zeets tweeted. “Human lives made so completely abstract that they’re even less than numbers.”
Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost shared a similar sentiment saying. “Another disgusting part of all of this is the proof a blatant war crime to which the Vice President of the United States responded: Excellent.”
When Goldberg first said he was added to the chat, Hegseth came out saying, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.” Now, many folks like @acnewsitics are calling out the Signal group chatters saying “Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe and Waltz all lied to congress. Each should resign.”
In fact, it seems Hegseth has a name nickname, as some people online have started calling him “WHISKILEAKS.”
@WUTangKids said “Jeffrey Goldberg out there after dropping the entire Signal thread that Trump and the White House said wasn’t classified and Hegseth said weren’t war plans.” Talk about gangster! Another user, @AyoTristan, wrote “Reporters do not play about being called liars, that shit like a slur to them.”
Many users say Signal Gate is “terrifying.” In fact, @216barb added “this is the world we live in.. war plans being discussed in the gc like they’re just weekend plans, yea I’m never having kids lol.” Comedian @KevOnStage joked that the officials were chatting on Signal “like it was a trip to Cancun.”