Not With a Bang, but a Fucking Signal Ping (Erik Veland)
3/27/25
Erik Veland: The Hegseth Signal Scandal is not just a mistake. It’s a sign that the fascist coup is sloppy, dangerous, and fully operational. This wasn’t “oops, wrong text.” It was Project 2025 protocol in action.
Here’s why this has intelligence vets raging and democracies trembling: The U.S. government—yes, the one run by Trump’s handpicked fascists—accidentally added a journalist to a group Signal chat where they were actively planning strikes in Yemen. The chat included the Secretary of Defense, CIA, State Department, and a guy in Moscow. They literally texted a live operation over an app not authorised for classified material, and one of them was geolocated in Russia at the time.
You couldn’t write this into an episode of Veep. No one would believe it.
To intelligence professionals, this wasn’t just a scandal. It was an extinction-level event for national security norms.
OPSEC? Dead. Chain of command? Who? Accountability? Deleted faster than a disappearing message.
People are joking because it’s absurd—but this is deadly serious. Project 2025 explicitly calls for government officials to use comms systems outside FOIA and subpoena reach. This is not incompetence. It’s the plan.
What we saw was proof of concept: A rogue administration testing how far they can go before anyone stops them. Unsecured apps. No oversight. No paper trail. Just war plans in a group chat.
Chat, we okay?
Mil and intel vets certainly are not. These are people who spent decades sweating bullets not to leak the day of an exercise. They’ve been court-martialed for less than what Hegseth just did from his hotel bed.
“I’d have been in Leavenworth.” “I got chewed out for OPSEC on a train.” “I spent 6 years guarding what this moron blew in 2 months.”
That’s the tone from the people who actually protected that country. Now they’re watching it burn. The person who shouldn’t have been trusted with the minibar just leaked a live operation to the editor of The Atlantic—and he’ll still be employed tomorrow.
No hearings. No resignations. No charges. Welcome to the Banana Republic of Signalstan.
This isn’t a bug. This is exactly how the fascist movement avoids consequences:
- Undermine institutions
- Use backchannels
- Move fast, break OPSEC
- DARVO like a DV bf when questioned
Think about what happens next time. Now every hostile foreign intel agency has learned one thing: You don’t need to hack the U.S. government. Just wait for them to text each other the war plans like idiots.
And if you think this was a one-off mistake, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s all part of a system designed to erase oversight and do whatever the hell they want—without trace, without shame, and without accountability.
The terrifying truth? The U.S. is no longer a country with rules. It’s a failed, lawless state being run by group chat. And instead of a court-martial, they’ll get a Fox News hit and a campaign donation.
If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention. And if you still think this is politics as usual—you’re already in the new regime.
This is how a government collapses: Not with a bang, but a fucking Signal ping.