Featherweight Moral Fiber

SignalGate, &tc.

Dear Friends,

The other morning my daughter asked, “Dad, what is integrity?”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been put on the spot to define a word, but it isn’t as easy as it might seem (although James Murray made it look like no big deal). The usual thing people do is give examples of how a word is used, which is certainly a part of defining. But I thought about it for a minute and came up with: “soundness.” Then I went on a bit of stream-of-consciousness. “Solidity,” internal strength and harmony, not easily fragmented or pulled apart, immovable. What do engineers mean by structural integrity? It means the airplane or vehicle isn’t going to easily disintegrate when it meets an obstacle. Integrity is weighty, not light or frivolous or fleeting. It has tightly woven fiber. That’s why integrity is often called “moral fiber.” Someone with moral fiber doesn’t bend the truth; their principles don’t change with a prevailing wind; and they own up to their own failings and don’t make excuses or blame shift.

That’s integrity.

The next morning, right around the same time, somebody sent me Jeffrey Goldberg’s now infamous story in The Atlantic and I thought, now we get to see a whole bunch of people who lack integrity.

And I was right.

If you’ve been under a rock, senior Trump administration officials, including the National Security Advisor, Vice President, Secretary of State, CIA Director, and others, carried on a “working group” talking about and planning for US military attacks on the Houthis in Yemen. They did this on Signal, an encrypted messaging service akin to WhatsApp. That’s actually a no-no for government officials, particularly those discussing high level classified information. (Just last month the Pentagon sent out a warning to staff to not use Signal because of concerns that it might be compromised by foreign actors.)

But it gets worse. Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, inadvertently added the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic to the group. Jeffery Goldberg has no security clearance, and therefore no business whatsoever listening to the US leadership apparatus discuss Top Secret military plans. At first he thought he was being pranked. He alleges that Secretary Hegseth told the group specific times of attack and target locations, and when, at the appointed time, bombs started dropping in Yemen, he knew that this was not a joke. It was a colossal breach of national security. Incompetence beyond belief.

He’s right, of course.

Watching the Administration and its allies react to this story has been an exercise in watching people who lack integrity. Secretary Hegseth’s first public statement was to launch an ad hominem attack against Mr. Goldberg. Since he’s the editor of a left-leaning magazine he must be telling lies in bad faith, you see. Never mind that the government had already confirmed the authenticity of the Signal thread. Then we got from everyone a denial that classified information had been shared. That’s a bold move, because Goldberg was quite specific about the kinds of things that had been shared, and you can bet he has the receipts. Indeed, just this morning Mr. Goldberg decided to share them. Here’s one of the messages: