A senior White House official accidentally disclosed that the Trump administration was considering deploying an elite army strike force into Portland by using Signal in a public place.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday that Anthony Salisbury, one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, was observed discussing the plans via Signal in view of members of the public while traveling in Minnesota. The newspaper was then contacted by one member of the public who was troubled to see sensitive military plans discussed so openly.
In the messages, senior White House officials discussed the potential deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, an elite unit that specializes in parachuting into hostile territory. The division has been deployed in both world wars, including the Battle of the Bulge, as well as Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Anthony Salisbury, one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, discussed plans for military intervention in Portland in full view of members of the public.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Across several conversations, the Star Tribune reports, Salisbury spoke about a range of matters with Pete Hegseth adviser Patrick Weaver as well as other officials.
In one of the messages, Weaver revealed that Hegseth wanted Trump to explicitly instruct him to send soldiers to Portland.
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver reportedly said.
Noting the potentially disastrous optics around sending an elite division into an American city, Weaver told Salisbury, “82nd is like our top tier [quick reaction force] for abroad. So it will cause a lot of headlines. Probably why he wants potus to tell him to do it.”
In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaked confidential battle plans on Signal.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, told the Daily Beast, “Tony recently traveled to Minnesota to serve as a pallbearer in his uncle’s funeral who passed away from cancer. Despite dealing with grief from the loss of a family member, Tony continued his important work on behalf of the American people.“
“Nothing in these private conversations, that are shamefully being reported on by morally bankrupt reporters, is new or classified information,” Jackson continued. “Frankly, this story just shows the entire Trump Administration is working around the clock—and even through funerals—to make America safe again.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday told top generals that dangerous U.S. cities should be used as military training grounds.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The incident marks the second time in six months that the Trump administration has experienced issues as a result of insecure lines of communication.
Earlier this year, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal chat where several high-ranking government officials discussed the logistics of a strike on Yemen’s Houthis.
The fiasco was quickly dubbed “Signalgate” and ultimately led to national security adviser Mike Waltz, who was responsible for adding Goldberg to the chat, leaving his role at the National Security Council. President Trump later appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations.
National security adviser Mike Waltz left his role at the National Security Council after accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal chat.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Trump has consistently asserted that sending soldiers into cities is the only way to address rampant crime. Meanwhile, the White House has admitted to “reconfiguring” crime statistics to suit Trump’s agenda after claiming that other official statistics are “phony.”
The president’s crime crackdown, which has been concentrated entirely on blue cities, is proving more and more unpopular with the American public. After looking at recent polling on Monday, CNN data guru Harry Enten told viewers, “If Donald Trump thinks that potentially sending in the National Guard into cities like Portland is a winning political issue, the polling says you’re wrong, Mr. President!”
Trump also faced a significant blow after a federal judge ruled that his deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal, with Judge Charles Breyer finding that the president had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by requiring armed soldiers to carry out domestic law enforcement activities.
“I think there’s two things that are happening at once: one, there absolutely is an unprecedented abuse of power, destruction of norms, erosion of our government and our democracy in order to prop up an authoritarian style of governance however, they are weaker than they look, and it is important that we remember that because what they rely on is the impression of power, the perception of inevitability in us giving up in advance. Donald Trump is at record levels of unpopularity in his tenure. the Republican house is at record levels of unpopularity. they are underwater across the board and they know it. and that is causing them to double down in public. but it is backfiring. that is why whether it’s a shutdown, whether it’s all of this, they want us to blink first and we have too much to save.”
An important report on how the tRump bigots and trans people haters are targeting trans people. It shows how clearly they are lying and spreading disinformation so they can erase trans people from society. They flood the media at the first sign of violence yet never correct the misinformation when they are found to be wrong. The goal is to make the US a straight cis only society. They will be coming for the rest of the LGBTQ+ community as soon as they feel they win erasing the trans people. Remember they have made the pride flag political and forbidden to be displayed but the southern confederate battle flag is still allowed. Hugs
Investigative journalist, Ken Klippenstein joins the show to discuss the Trump administration’s manipulation of recent shootings to bolster their war on trans people. Live-streamed on September 25, 2025
As the guest host says, running into an ICE group is terrifying. They are untrained and are extremely abusive to people. The video show how the ICE guy drew his gun while laying on top of the person then put it into his belt. Later he lost both his gun and his ammo clip. Yet there are no controls on these masked people. So many kidnappings are going to happen by every group of sexual traffickers, and how is the public to know who is real official or not. This is pure Stephen Miller. I was a trained auxiliary deputy sheriff. Had I done anything like this I would have been in court and regardless I would have been fired. Hugs
This is a doctor who served in Gaz and explains how horrible it is with Israeli soldiers shooting children as sport. He talks of dealing with children with their intestines hanging out and they have to operate with out pain killers. Please watch to see how horrific Israel is being at this point.
Sorry I have not been posting much. Really struggling right now. Hugs
Dr. Mohammed Mustafa joins us to discuss the horrors he has witnessed while volunteering at hospitals in Gaza. Here is a link to the fundraiser for a children’s hospital in Gaza. Live-streamed on September 23, 2025.
Combat, the underground paper edited by Albert Camus during the French Resistance
Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air on Tuesday and delivered a 28-minute monologue that set the record straight and sharply criticized the Trump administration. Sinclair and Nexstar, two TV networks whose affiliate stations collectively represent 25% of ABC’s broadcast audience, refused to transmit the show, pre-empting it with extended news programming instead. Trump, who is only increasing his authoritarianism, took to Truth Social to threaten ABC with new legal action for bringing it back.
If you believe that public service journalism is a load-bearing prerequisite for democracy, as I do, these are scary changes. These changes are particularly alarming because they’re happening just as the news industry overall has been contracting for decades, leaving fewer resources to fill the gaps. Other, larger, newsrooms could theoretically help fill the content and funding gaps, but there are fewer and fewer resources to share around.
The irony is that local news is the one place where this erosion of trust hasn’t been happening: local newsrooms know how to build community and are disproportionately trusted as a result. It’s also the one place where the broadcast medium is still important; in an emergency, or in a broadband desert, a radio signal can be the last source of real information. You can’t, yet, take a closed rural station and move it to YouTube without losing a large proportion of its audience. Around 90% of Americans have access to broadband internet, but that last 10% really matters.
Of course, if all the shuttered public media stations did move to YouTube, the government would go after that, too. As a service owned by a single corporation, it’s a central point of failure. Publishing on the open web would remove that risk, but the internet itself has been repeatedly under attack. In some areas, legislation has passed that effectively bans certain kinds of content (Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippifor this reason) and net neutrality has been decimated nationwide, making it far easier for an ISP to cut access to a particular service, perhaps in response to pressure from the government. With the government flexing severe restrictions to broadcast media, and nothing stopping severe restrictions to streaming media, there’s nowhere left for information to go.
In Cuba, the internet was legalized in 2019, although you need a permit to have a home connection, and connection quality is still intermittent. Starting long before that, people with access would download content to flash drives and then distribute them through a vast, illicit network called El Paquete Semanal, or The Weekly Package. You could think of it as a magazine: every week there would be a new issue of media that couldn’t be obtained any other way. It became so popular that the government tried to release its own competing USB drop containing approved media; unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch on.
We’ve become very reliant on the internet, but we may need to prepare for a post-broadcast, post-open-internet era. Ironically, newspapers, long the poster-child of media’s death throes, are semi-distributed and would be more resilient to this more restrictive media landscape, as the French resistance example demonstrates. (Of course, a newspaper that relies on a centralized printing press can always be shut down.) These are things that might happen, not things that definitely will, but it doesn’t hurt to consider this as a potential future that we might need to react to.
In a world where we succumb to truly authoritarian control over the media, I think there may be something to learn from El Paquete. A discrete bundle of digital media can be transmitted in multiple forms. It can be accessed via the web; consumed via an app that downloads the new bundle every week; transmitted over peer-to-peer networks; stored on resilient alternative file systems like IPFS; and even through sneakernet networks like Cuba’s. The bundle could contain archives of entire websites in the Internet Archive’s WARC format, downloads of video podcasts, and so on, linked with a web-based interface that would be somewhat akin to a DVD menu.
Such a bundle would probably not be collated inside the US. Instead, a group might be established in safe third-party countries like Switzerland, who could communicate securely with journalists on the ground in the US and elsewhere. They would bundle the release, publish it to various networks (the open social web, IPFS, p2p networks), publish a checksum hash, and publicize it in Signal channels.
It would be paid for in various ways. The central newsroom would need to be funded by international non-profits oriented towards re-establishing media freedom in the US (for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders). Individual journalists and creators in the US would need to be supported by communities more local to them and would likely take the form of mutual aid as much as direct support. Because traditional payment and crypto networks are both highly traceable, direct donations or subscriptions might not be feasible or safe.
I think it’s important to establish this ahead of time. By the time the internet is locked down and major restrictions have been applied to broadcast media, it’s too late. The good news is that it’s kind of cool in itself: the form of an online magazine that carries submissions from multiple news and media creators has a lot of scope for experimentation at every level, from content to design. It’s offline-first, which means you can interact with it on a plane and in other situations where internet is not an option. That’s neat in itself!
It also solves the problem of how this would be found by new readers to begin with. After a democratic collapse, discovery would need to be through word of mouth; before it, though, such a product could be promoted through more traditional channels (emphasizing the innovative nature of its issue-based format rather than its resiliency to authoritarian control). Early adopters who are attracted to the initial product would form the backbone of the word-of-mouth network later on. Just as newsrooms today thrive if they successfully build community, building trusted networks of people becomes vital for distributing underground material in an authoritarian environment. Historical underground media networks took years to establish, as all communities do; building community would need to begin immediately.
Our entire software stack — our content management systems in particular — are designed to be accessed through a functioning internet. Luckily, thanks to tools created by organizations like the Internet Archive, we can simply build websites locally on our own devices and create an archived version to distribute. The tools are there; the work to be done is all at the human level.
This is incredibly disgusting and horrific. The Israeli media is pushing garbage, lies, and misinformation on the Israeli public. They don’t believe what other news sources say about starving children or women. One Israeli man said he was going into the military in two months and hoped to be sent to Gaza to kill the Palestinians. When asked about the women and children he claimed there were no innocents, that they were all Hamas. He was asked about kids, little kids and babies his answer were they were either Hamas or terrorists or future terrorists. Better to kill the babies now rather than them growing up to hurt an Israeli. Only one couple called for an end to the war. The others demand Hamas release the hostages. The surrounding crowd did not believe them when they said that Hamas was willing to return the hostages in exchange for stopping the war but Netanyahu killed the negotiations. They are as brained washed as Fox viewers and when the truth comes out they will be living in Palestinian land claiming innocence because they willfully did not know of what the military was doing. Oh well water under the bridge they will claim. I am seriously anti-Israel’s government and military. I think they are equal to Hitlers government and supporters. They need to suffer the same fate. Following orders doesn’t cut it. Being Jewish is not a pass for committing genocide. Never again is for all people or it is not for any people. Best wishes for all and hugs for those that want them.
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