Just a quick note to say this week’s episode of “The Beautiful and Banned” will be late because last week I was in Yosemite for spring break with my family and Christine is celebrating her BIRTHDAY, which is today. We’re committed to leading healthy, restful lives, so we’re a little behind this week, but it’s coming. The episode is part 1 about The Satanic Verses, and whew, was there a lot to say! Stay tuned!
In a world of constantly churning news, it’s rare to find a story that captures the attention of the country like The Atlantic’s bombshell yesterday. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, reported that Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, added Goldberg (mistakenly?) to a Signal group chat with many of the highest ranked officials in the Trump administration in which they shared sensitive, classified information. Goldberg was still in the group chat when Pete Hegseth posted military details about upcoming attacks on Yemen.
Up until that point, Goldberg wasn’t sure whether the texts were real or an elaborate hoax. He was sitting in a parking lot on Saturday, March 15 and, as he wrote, “At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.” That’s how he knew what he’d received was in fact, real time classified war plans.
The whole article is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a gift link and I hope you’ll share it because this is critical information every US citizen should know.
But as I was reading, I was struck by one part in particular. After the attacks were carried out, Goldberg wrote, “The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.” And then he shared a screenshot of the responses in the Signal group chat.
“Excellent,” JD Vance said. From Stephen Miller: “Great work all. Powerful start.” And from National Security Advisor Michael Waltz: Fist bump emoji. US flag emoji. Fire emoji.
This is how you respond in the corporate Slack channel to a team powerpoint presentation, not to the news that civilians had been killed by US weapons.
The focus of social media and the news has been on the security breach—and don’t get me wrong, it was stunning. But I want to make sure we don’t miss two things.
First, the calloused nature of the response reveals something critical at the heart not just of this administration but US policy over the last several decades and the calculations that are made about whose lives are valued, and whose deaths are celebrated.
Second, this line—“a number that has not been independently verified”—has more ramifications than we might think as we face the rise of authoritarianism in the US. A democracy without a free press cannot stand.
I’ve spent most of the last decade writing about the US response to war, displacement, and genocide. When I look back at the early days of writing about refugees—my first article came out with the Washington Post days before Trump was elected the first time—I was naive. I genuinely believed that if people only knew what was being said, that people’s real lives were at risk, we could change minds.
It took researching for my first book, After the Last Border, about two families and the history of refugee resettlement in the US, and then my second, We Were Illegal, about my own family’s migration to Texas and the intertwined histories of slavery and immigration in this state, to realize how wrong and naive I was. These weren’t new views, even if they felt new in my life; the dehumanizing views of some people as less than others were part of the fabric of this country.
It says a lot about my own upbringing that this was an epiphany I arrived at and not something I knew in my bones. I understood it intellectually at some level, of course, and I could tell you about white privilege and depictions of slavery and Orientalism and historical racist policies. But I still harbored some hope that these were ideas that would go away, that we could shift back…well, that there was a back to go back to.
I don’t think that any more. These views are rampant and have always been here. And they are not isolated to one political party. That doesn’t mean I don’t have hope, however—a lot of us hate those views. We think that people’s lives are not more or less valuable based on their citizenship or the color of their skin or whether they’re queer or straight or who they worship. We still believe—perhaps naively—in the ideas of equality that are at the core of the early Americans’ rhetoric. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. And I agree with that—even as I wrote about Jefferson enslaving hundreds of people, including his own children. Both/and. Higher values and truth to power.
One of my deepest held political values will always be pretty clear: children should have the chance to live and thrive. That means that I’m a bipartisan critic of Obama ignoring his red line in Syria, Trump’s Muslim Ban, Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, Putin’s war on Ukraine, Min Aung Hlaing’s attacks on civilians in Myanmar, Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons on children—the list goes on and on. It’s why I, and so many others, will never forget Madeleine Albright saying in 1996 on CBS 60 Minutes that the death of half a million Iraqi children was justified: “I think that is a very hard choice…but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
The goal of journalists in a democracy is to hold leaders accountable for their actions. It’s Lesley Stahl getting Albright to admit she holds some lives more valuable than others.
In this case, Goldberg didn’t have to do much at all to get the story—it was sharing it that took courage.
One of the hardest things about reporting on war and displacement was revealed in that line—“a number that has not been independently verified”—in The Atlantic article. When I was writing about the war in Syria, I saw firsthand how difficult it is to write about what is happening in a country without an independent press. As I fact-checked the witness accounts, I relied on a hodgepodge of sources to piece together some semblance of the truth—grainy videos uploaded on Youtube, Reddit threads I stumbled through with Google translate, Twitter threads with location markers (at the time when it was a more reasonable place). None of them were verifiable, so what I often had was a narrative that was as close as I could get to the truth. The gaps and absences became almost as important as the story itself.
It’s easy to talk about biased news in our country, and difficult for Americans—who have always had robust journalism and freedom of speech as core values in our country—to recognize the slippery slope we’re on. No, I don’t think we’re about to turn into Yemen right now. But attacks on a free press are very, very concerning.
When asked about the story, both Trump and Peter Hegseth attacked Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic—Trump said The Atlantic is “not much of a magazine.” Hegseth said, “You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called 'journalist' who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
These responses aren’t new; the Trump team has targeted journalists and news publications for years. There are too many instances to count, ranging from suing several news outlets to banning the Associated Press from presidential briefings because the AP refuses to change the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”
But in this story that is about war but is also about journalism and political incompetence, that one line about the inability of verifying the truth struck me. The key to justice in a democracy is having a free press that will reveal what is really happening. There are a number of reasons journalism is not doing well in the US right now—including attacks by this administration. We’re not in the same place as Yemen and Syria and Myanmar and other repressive regimes, but the tactics that are being used against journalists ultimately lead down this road. Authoritarianism thrives when independent journalism is suppressed.
Thankfully, Jeffrey Goldberg showed true journalistic chops—he didn’t wait for the book to come out in two years, he wrote a compelling story about what happened just days after it occurred. In many places in the story (and in subsequent interviews), he chose not to reveal classified details—showing more restraint than administration officials; he even left the group chat on his own. Despite the fact that this story puts him squarely in the crosshairs of a notoriously litigious administration whose critics often face violence and death threats, he wrote about it anyway. He has demonstrated clear thinking and real courage.
That’s what we need in this country now more than ever. The courage to say the hard things—like children being killed in war is always wrong. Or that this administration’s chaotic policies and calloused responses have and will continue to lead to the deaths of many more innocent people.
At the very least, I want more thoughtful adults in charge—you know, the kind of people who won’t send fist bump emojis when they hear their bombs killed kids.
Thanks for saying this, Jessica.
Thank you for your thoughtful and courageous response.