I would be fired for giving company details to the press.

At the financial tech company I work for, we have a very robust risk and security department that makes sure we’re only able to do work through VPNs on approved devices that have transparency for the company. I can get away with a little Slack here and there on my phone, but it’s a closed network that I’m unable to invite anyone else to. So, even on Slack, the only people I can converse with are my co-workers. If I were to somehow find a way to add a journalist to one of our product channels where we are discussing the launch of a new product, I would be fired as soon as the company discovered the breach.

And it’s just banking. If I leaked info to the media, then maybe some obscure financial journalist would write a blurb about a new tax preparation program we’re about to release and the public would know about our plans a few months in advance. I would be fired for that though, immediately and without negotiation.

In general, I have long passed the point of being upset about every little piece of news related to the Trump administration, so I’m actually shocked to be sitting here enraged at the news of senior officials on Signal discussing plans to bomb Yemen with a journalist from The Atlantic accidentally added to the chat.

There are a lot of places where I could’ve grabbed that screenshot, but I chose Hillary Clinton specifically because what a mindfuck it must be for her to just exist in the same timeline with all the shit going on. The dumbest person you’ve ever met was screaming “but her emails!” for six straight months because the most evil group of people you’ll never meet were pushing it on Fox News and down the throats of anyone who convinced themselves they needed an excuse not to vote for a woman. For anyone who didn’t have the inner fortitude to simply admit “I want a man as President,” they could fall back on “but her emails!” and pretend it was another chapter in the volume of Treacherous Clintons that has been imagined, inflated, and created out of thin air since the late 1980s.

So here we are. We have a President who was on trial for keeping boxes of classified documents in the shitter, and his new cabinet is texting war plans back and forth on Signal. Hillary Clinton built a secure server in her home — which means not a danger to national security — and read some emails on it, which is cause for complete and utter apoplectic rage from every white person who uses “the murder rate in Chicago” as a debate tactic. Trump’s Cabinet of Unimaginable Wonders and Idiots is on a group chat on an unapproved platform discussing their plans to murder a bunch of brown people in another sandy country, and not only that, but they accidentally added a journalist and nothing will happen. None of these people who purport to be super concerned with America and National Security thought to ask “hey — who is this other person in the chat?” and nothing will happen. I would be fired if I told a journalist we were planning to waive ATM fees for all transactions, but The Round Table of DEI, DUI, and WTF told a journalist the precise moment we were planning to drop bombs, and nothing will happen.

Keith Boykin posted a gift link to The Atlantic article which should let you read the entire thing for free if you’d like to (I’m not 100% sure if it works, because I have a subscription). I’ll highlight this part though:

If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

(cont. The Atlantic)

Y’all. This pissed me off so bad. This is the highest convergence of hypocrisy and helplessness. I, as I sit here on my couch, am physically warm at the recognition of how these officials can do no wrong in the eyes of every stupid person I don’t want to share a country with, but Kamala laughed too much. The levels of incompetence cannot accurately be described in words, and if someone had told me this 15 years ago, I would assume you were lying….but Hillary’s emails were a threat to national security.

So now I am releasing it. There’s nothing for me to do here. Holding on to this feeling of basic unfairness does nothing for me because life itself is unfair. If life was fair, bad people would be suffering and good people would be thriving. Actually, if life was truly fair, everyone would be thriving and bad people would not be able to inflict suffering on anyone else. That is not the real world and that is not a world I believe is possible so I am not holding on to this particular act of political theater for any longer than it took to release these feelings into the void.

What I will do is file it away in my little Sofa Bank. Everyone needs a Sofa Bank, which is your treasure trove of information to convince the Sofa People to get up and actually vote. This is your answer to the very boring “the parties are both the same, sofa-king what?” arguments. Reach into your Sofa Bank and remind people that regardless of what you know about politics, current events, or the world, you do know what competence and decency look like. If you vote for the most competent and decent person of the choices available to you, that will always lead the country away from this result where a group of the dumbest, most powerful people in the world are sending emojis in the group chat about dropping bombs.