The Chat That Waged a War
What SignalGate reveals about the illusion of accountability, and the real consequences hidden behind political theater.
By Daniel Millsap | March 27, 2025
You weren’t supposed to see it.
Not the plan. Not the names. Not the exchange of digital high-fives between men who can, with a tap of their thumbs, hurl missiles into a sovereign nation. You weren’t supposed to witness the backstage of empire. But for once, the curtain slipped. And through that narrow crack, something revealing became visible: power has become theater, war a mobile game, and the public—a passive audience to decisions made far from accountability.
The event has been named, as scandals now are, with the suffix that signals containment: SignalGate. A national security advisor accidentally added a journalist to a private Signal group chat. Inside it: active war plans against the Houthis in Yemen. Vice President. Secretary of Defense. CIA Director. Their conversation unfolded casually—deadly serious content rendered in the easy cadence of group text.
They called it a mistake. A glitch. A slip. But the deeper truth is more disturbing: this was not just a communications error. It was a symptom. A reflection. A fragment of the real that momentarily surfaced.
Ritual Sacrifice: The System’s Self-Cleansing Myth
Long before modern politics, civilizations understood the stabilizing power of ritual. When the center could not hold, a scapegoat was offered up—cast out, symbolically punished, and the system reborn. It was never about justice. It was about restoring the appearance of order.
René Girard argued that the scapegoat absorbs society’s anxieties, its contradictions, its guilt. And once the victim is purged, the crowd feels whole again. The collective tension dissolves—not through truth, but through performance.
Today, the stage is digital. The ritual is mediated. But the script is the same.
Already, we hear the predictable chorus: Who authorized the chat? Will someone resign? How can we ensure this never happens again?
The questions aren’t wrong. They’re just incomplete. Because they point us toward an answer that preserves the very system responsible. Resignation is not reform. Investigation is not reckoning. These are gestures in a ceremonial cycle meant to reassure the public that something is being done.
But nothing is being undone.
The War Simulation They Play—And You Pay For
There’s a particular horror in this detail: that war—arguably the gravest act a state can initiate—was being discussed over an app. Not in a secured briefing room. Not with the full weight of law or public scrutiny. But in an ephemeral thread of messages, among officials who have internalized the simulation of consequence-free command.
Picture it clearly: a group chat of high-ranking men thumbing out the logistics of a bombing campaign while thousands of miles away, a child clutches her mother’s body, still warm. A father buries his son. A U.S. service member suits up, unknowingly placed in harm’s way by decisions made between coffee orders and calendar invites.
This is not just casual negligence. It is the gamification of state violence. The interface has become the ideology: simplified, intuitive, instant. And once exposed, the system reacts not with humility, but with optics. Damage control. Press briefings. Noise.
This isn’t governance. It’s choreography.
The Illusion That Manages Us
Once the leak occurred, the script kicked in: containment. Apologies. Assurances. But none of this is new. We’ve seen the pattern before—scandal, outrage, the sacrificial firing, and a return to business as usual. The simulation resets. The show goes on.
As Jean Baudrillard warned, modern power survives not by hiding its failures, but by dramatizing them. It stages them. It aestheticizes them. So long as we are watching the performance, we are not disrupting the system. The scandal becomes the firewall, not the virus.
And we, the audience, become accustomed to it. Conditioned. Scroll-fatigued. Outrage-drunk. The next crisis becomes another swipe, another story to consume, until reality is indistinguishable from narrative—and indistinct from distraction.
The Winding Down: What Now?
You’ve seen behind the curtain. The question is: what will you do with the view?
This is the moment where a lesser story would offer platitudes. Demand resignations. Call for accountability. As if the crisis was merely procedural. As if the rot could be patched with better rules.
But what if the real change isn’t procedural?
What if it begins inside you?
You, the reader. The citizen. The digital subject. The one trained by a thousand micro-scandals to feel momentary outrage and then forget. To scroll on. To look away. To mistake catharsis for clarity.
What if the most radical act is simply to remain awake?
To resist the urge to process this scandal as entertainment. To dwell with the discomfort. To trace its implications not just in policy, but in culture—in our habits, our incentives, our tools, our appetites.
Because if we don’t, we become the simulation too.
We become spectators to a world being constructed without us, but in our name. In our image. We become the interface through which power justifies itself. The willing participants in our own containment.
A Final Reflection
SignalGate is not just a crisis of communication. It is a mirror. And what it reflects is not simply incompetence, but a society hypnotized by the spectacle of its own unraveling.
This isn’t a glitch.
It is the system showing you how it survives.
Let that knowledge do more than outrage you.
Let it change what you expect.
Not just from those in power.
But from yourself.