Society

Signal is the fashionable place to discuss shady business – and that is probably what tempted National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a military man with a previous in at the Pentagon, into using the app to discuss American air strikes against the Yemeni Houthis with top Trump administration officials. It was Waltz who added the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the “Houthis PC small group” on March 13, two days before the strikes. To people like Waltz, Signal is the obvious place to plot such an operation. But Signal is also the app you use when you want the world to know that you have something to hide.

Bret Stephens has come a long way in his estimation of Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when Trump was first running for the presidency, Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.” As the election season progressed, Stephens mostly dropped the sewer talk, sliding into its place evocations of Trump’s “darker antipathies” and warnings that his “candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater.” A “Trump administration,” he explained,“would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics.” At one point he giddily announced that Trump’s chances of victory were “next to nil.

Washington, DC The Sesame Street crew appeared at NPR headquarters to support a “Protect My Public Media” rally to protest President Donald Trump, Congress and the FCC yesterday. Big Bird, Elmo and Count von Count stood behind those who gave their prepared addresses. Around them stood nearly two dozen protesters carrying signs in support of NPR and PBS. One woman to the left of Elmo waved a banner that read, “No one voted for Elon Musk,” which she likely recycled from a previous protest. The rally was run by Protect My Public Media, an action network that aims to “protect the federal investment in public media.” Craig Aaron of the Free Press spoke first.

“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspirational quotes you can simper out in five hours. She’s less duchess, more Instagram influencer. She doesn’t have the pissed-off husband half-arsedly holding the camera while she explains, in excruciating detail, how to make a balloon arch. Instead, she has a plentiful Netflix crew and reported $100 million budget.  I’m trying my hardest to find something nice to say and, well, the guests aren’t too awful and the food looks alright.

Monica Lewinsky, the woman at the center of the scandal that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, opened up about her journey and how America has changed in its understanding of power dynamics and owning one’s sexuality on the Call Her Daddy podcast Tuesday. Lewinsky walked through how she processed the power imbalance involved with the scandal over time. When it was happening, she didn’t think about it much. “I thought it was something it wasn’t. My feelings were real,” she told host Alex Cooper. It wasn’t until later that she was fully able to digest what she was going through at the time. “I'm very clear that this was not sexual assault. And therefore, there is a level of consensuality that was there.

Sean Hannity played the role of the coroner for traditional news outlets in an interview with Mediaite this morning. “That’s why legacy media is dead — they don’t know it yet, because they don’t tell the truth. They lied about the cognitive state, they lied about immigration, they lied about the economy,” he said before pulling out a list of other untruths that seemed more like an autopsy than anything else. The irony is clear: Hannity has been working for Fox News for the last twenty-nine years, so what separates him and Fox from the media that he declares dead? Well, he would say it’s the legacy media’s lies and weaponization against Trump, evidenced by the fact that the American public voted for him anyway.

I am not, nor ever have been, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, after I wrote a piece earlier this week commenting on Meghan Markle’s peculiar decision to change the name of her lifestyle brand America Riviera Orchard to As Ever, this was merely one of the things I was accused of being. Within hours of the story being published, I was inundated with a level of online abuse that swiftly went from the intimidating to the unintentionally hilarious, so vitriolic and overblown was its content.

CBS News put its disturbing love for censorship on display this weekend on its two premiere programs, Face the Nation and 60 Minutes. The network offered a preview of the affection the authoritarian left is likely to exercise during the next four years for just shutting up everyone they disagree with at the point of the bayonet. When J.D. Vance took the stage in Munich to offer a calculated and well-crafted critique of our European allies for their betrayal of shared Western values of free speech, he had to expect there would be a response.

Rumors of a romantic entanglement between the Texas-based conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair and Elon Musk have been buzzing around MAGA circles for some time. Yet St. Clair, a former Turning Point USA ambassador and Babylon Bee staffer, decided to go public with a Valentine’s Day statement on, where else, X, the website her child’s father owns. St. Clair wrote that she had not previously disclosed her infant’s parentage “to protect our child's privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.” One atypical aspect of St. Clair’s plea to be left alone: the inclusion of an email address for crisis PR guru Brian Glicklich.