There is No War Plans in Ba Signal Se
The cartoonish danger of bad liars and sinister fools.
The title of this piece and accompanying graphic will be a familiar reference in need of no further explanation for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The Signal group chat fiasco is a farce beyond something that even the TV writers could have come up with. If this was an episode of VEEP, at least one of the principal characters involved would have been thrown under the bus and out of a job by now.
And yet, because we live in the dumbest timeline. Here we are.
The Trump administration expects us to simultaneously believe that nothing in the group chat was classified info, and at the same time that Jeffery Goldberg is guilty of endangering national security by publishing what they insist is not evidence of a Cabinet level fuckup for the ages.
But I would submit that the much maligned character of Joo Dee is a far more innocent spokesperson than the ones occupying our reality. At least she has the excuse of being as much the victim of the propaganda machine as a perpetrator of it. Karoline Levitt will repeat even more blatantly falsifiable lies with an equally saccharine smile on her face, but does so willingly and without coercion, all because she seems to enjoy being the leopard on the face-eating side of the equation for now.
The Farce Is the Fascism
The moment that we are living in is ripe for memes and SNL bits for certain. And being able to make fun of the incompetence of these people is an important part of breaking through to voters. A lot of folks simply don’t care to understand what is and isn’t responsible behavior from officials in the Executive Branch, but they do tend to have little patience for a bumbling clown show of the people in charge clearly having no idea what they are doing. And humor is often a more effective method for delivering that message than somber analysis.
But there is a danger to the ridiculousness of the moment as well. As Charlie Sykes is fond of saying “A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.” And at some point, people start to think that setting fire to the circus tent is part of the show, rather than heading for the exits.
And that’s when we’re in really scary territory. What happens when the authoritarianism just becomes a background part of our reality?
In January 2017, there were all the jokes about sending Sean Spicer out there to make official press statements that Trump had bigger crowd sizes at his inauguration than Obama’s, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. Late night comedy had a field day with this for weeks. By January 2021, an angry mob was storming the Capitol seeking to lynch lawmakers and the the vice president because Trump told them he got more votes than Biden, despite numerous election lawsuits and recounts to the contrary.
In September of 2024, JD Vance began circulating false rumors of Haitian immigrants (here legally as part of a refugee program) in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating people’s pets. Trump would go on to utter the infamous debate line “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” which became the instant subject of memes and TikTok remix music videos. By March of 2025, Secretary Kristi Noem was posing for video promos at an El Salvadorian prison containing “alleged” Venezuelan gang members who were sent there without presenting evidence of their crimes to any legal authority for review or explanations for why they were send to a foreign prison notorious for accusations of torture rather than detaining the supposed illegals here in the US until their crimes were proven or deporting them back to their home country of Venezuela.
In January of 2025, Trump began talking with great enthusiasm of seizing Greenland from Denmark and adding Canada as the 51st State. This has inspired countless forms of comedy over the last two months. And also, last week, Vice President JD Vance and National Security Advisor Mike Walz (of Signal group chat fame) visited the US command base in Greenland to lay the pretext for seizing the territory by military means if necessary, while this current week threatens an escalation in the trade war against Canada in an attempt to use economic pressure to break the country into surrendering to US control.
Every single one of these instances is at first an act of buffoonish stupidity that would make a cartoon villain roll their eyes. And yet, unlike a cartoon villain, whose sinister if somewhat silly plans are always exposed and thwarted by the heroes, these people not only continue to get away with what they’re doing, but double down on it - each new farce more stupid and consequential than the last, with an ever shorter timeframe between the initial coy unseriousness and the point at which their antics need to be taken both literally and seriously.
And so. While humor might be an effective means to catch people’s attention, if that attention simply ends with a laugh and an eyeroll - they haven’t really been made aware of the danger of where this country is heading. Crack a joke if you need to for breaking the ice in starting a conversation, but after the chuckles have subsided, make sure to follow it up with a “But seriously…” and a real attempt to help them understand why they should be concerned.
Movie Recommendation of the Week
If you haven’t seen it already, or perhaps only saw it when it came out in theaters back in 2017, consider the film Death of Stalin, and try watching it in the context of the current Cabinet officials, and how a comedy of errors and capricious nonsense often is a much a part of the terrors as the security forces and enemies lists themselves.