Idiocracy Predicted All of This | Group Chat

What if the first act of war didn’t come from the Oval Office or the Pentagon, but from a YouTube tutorial?

What if America’s most classified military operation—complete with live targeting, weapons packages, and international coordination—was run out of a Signal group chat made by a guy who thought “Jeff Goldberg” was just the name you use when the app tells you to add someone?

And what if that Jeff Goldberg wasn’t fake?

This is not a satire of the future. It’s a tragedy of the very recent past.

On March 14, 2025, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a private Signal group coordinating U.S. military strikes on Yemen. Not for a minute. Not for a test. He received real-time operational updates alongside Trump-era appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The group’s name—“Houthi PC small group”—referred to the Principals Committee, the highest echelon of national security coordination.

It also happened to be a Signal chat.

Not SIPRNet. Not JWICS. Not a secure comms channel of any kind. Just a disappearing-message thread on an app favored by whistleblowers, protest organizers, and people trying to dodge FOIA.

But that’s not the joke.

The joke is that this wasn’t a leak. It wasn’t a whistleblower. No one went rogue. This wasn’t deep state sabotage. This was a group of men who decided, with alarming sincerity, that it would be faster, easier, and safer to manage global conflict from their personal phones.

Because government devices were too complicated. Because burner phones required nicknames. Because they didn’t want to be “those people” with two phones and accountability. Because they’d seen too many careers go down over emails, laptops, memos, notes. Because they believed encryption was a magic word and “auto-delete” meant absolution.

Because no one wanted to ask questions. Especially not about how the group got made.

And so, one step at a time, this administration built a shadow war platform with the logic of a fantasy football league. They used real names because they didn’t want to confuse each other. They enabled disappearing messages to be “secure.” They convinced themselves they were the clever ones, having learned from the mistakes of the liberal elite—who, in their view, failed not because they were wrong, but because they kept records.

The chat wasn’t secure. The process wasn’t legal. The system wasn’t intentional. But it worked. Until it didn’t.

This piece is not the story of how a war was launched. It’s the story of how a war was texted.

It’s a five-act epic of shortcut governance, encrypted delusion, and vibes-based foreign policy. It is the true story of how the American state, so wary of documentation, convinced itself that the only safe memory was one that couldn’t be subpoenaed. It is the story of the accidental inclusion of a journalist in a national security group chat.

But most of all, it is the story of a man named Waltz, a YouTube tutorial, and a message that blinked across the screen one quiet afternoon:

Jeffrey Goldberg has joined the group.