National Review Is No Different From A Leftist Rag On ‘Signal Gate’

In the midst of the fallout from the leak of a Signal chat group, dubbed “Signal Gate” by some of the more unimaginative denizens of the left, National Review Executive Editor Mark Antonio Wright decided to write a piece titled, “Yes, Pete Hegseth Should Be Fired for What He Texted — and for Lying About It.”

Yes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faced a relentless assault of smears during his nomination process, should just be thrown away a little over two months after his confirmation, according to the once-vaunted bastion of conservative thought — National Review.

Sound familiar? Maybe because it’s the same line taken by practically every left-wing outlet.

And National Review didn’t start with that piece. It has been in lock-step with the propaganda press since the initial Atlantic story broke.

Case in point: What would you say if I asked to spot the ideological difference between these two pictures:

Picture 1:

Picture 2:

If you answered, “They’re functionally the same picture,” you’d be correct.

The top picture is a screenshot of National Review’s frontpage at around noon EST on Tuesday. The second picture depicts The New Republic’s homepage at around the same time. The New Republic was founded in 1914, and it has been steeped in leftist dogma since its inception.

Now, it should be a cause for alarm whenever a self-described conservative outlet and a far-left propaganda site have practically the same homepage. Either the issue they’re focusing on is so unifying that it has miraculously managed to bridge the almost incomprehensible gulf between left and right in this country, or something’s not quite right.

The cause of this convergence in coverage? The inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat that included Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. According to Goldberg, he was privy to highly sensitive information on proposed U.S. actions against the Houthi rebels in Yemen after he was added to the group chat.

“The Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg reported in his Monday piece.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to the story Tuesday morning, saying, “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” and “No classified material was sent to the thread.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the messages in the Signal chat did not contain classified intelligence information. CIA Director John Ratcliffe was a member of the Signal chat and said that his messages in the chat “did not include classified information.” Gabbard appears to have been a member of the chat as well. Hegseth has said multiple times that the contents of the chat did not contain classified intelligence information.

Goldberg published a follow-up story Wednesday morning purporting to show content from the Signal messages he originally left out of his first report because “we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel.” These messages in Goldberg’s latest report allegedly included operational information about the impending strike on the Houthis.

Mind you, this is the same Jeffrey Goldberg who helped hoodwink Americans into supporting the war in Iraq, spun the “suckers” and “losers” hoax out of whole cloth, and attempted to gin up an 11th-hour hit piece against Trump last October, claiming Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Goldberg’s piece also contained accusations that Trump expressed anger about paying for the funeral services of a murdered Army soldier.

There has been plenty of speculation on how exactly Goldberg managed to be added to the Signal chat, but leftist outlets have wasted no time in calling for heads to roll over this “scandal.”

That’s to be expected from a propaganda press that will pounce on anything and everything they think will harm the president. Of course they want Hegseth gone. He’s an ally of Trump and is hard at work implementing his agenda at the Pentagon. But the media really want to claim Hegseth’s scalp to reassert their perceived power to make or break an administration — a perception shattered by Trump’s victory in November.

But this hysterical reaction isn’t what one would expect from a supposedly “conservative” outlet dedicated to keeping an even head and waiting for all the facts to come out before rushing to judgment. Yet it appears that the National Review would rather jump on the condemnation bandwagon and try to score points with the leftists and Never Trumpers than actually approach this incident with any sense of political clarity.

In fact, National Review’s homepage echoed other leftist outlets like The Nation and The Atlantic. It seems like every single National Review writer jumped at the chance to chastise the Trump administration for its supposed incompetence. The usual suspects over at National Review, including Dan McLaughlin, Jeffrey Blehar, Jim Geraghty, and Noah Rothman, decided to use Goldberg’s report as ammunition to frame Trump’s second administration as amateurish and unserious.

Unfortunately, this has become a pattern with the magazine during the Trump era generally and in the past few years in particular. Criticizing the president and his administration about legitimate missteps is one thing, but immediately joining the chorus calling for Hegseth’s head is not only naive but counterproductive to the conservative movement as a whole. In fact, such behavior only provides legitimacy to the left’s unrelenting campaign to destroy the president and derail the mandate he was given by the American people.

The National Review relishes, almost fetishizes, being professional losers, as long as they can do so with an above-it-all, pretentious claim to “respectability.” They have no qualms helping to achieve the left’s goal — the ouster of Hegseth, the harming of the Trump administration’s internal cohesion, and the reestablishment of the corporate media’s position of control over the public discourse.

Their coverage of the Signal chat incident as well as their coverage of other issues makes it clear that National Review needs to be categorized with the Bulwark and the Dispatch into the category of fake conservative sites, if not bundled with the leftist propaganda sites it seems to be taking cues from.

Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel