The Greater Scandal of Signalgate | Live Not by Lies Movie Is Here | The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs

By Lamb or by Lion, March Is (Almost) Outta Here

Not gonna lie: I had about enough of this week’s news cycle by Tuesday. But, a deadline’s a deadline. Sources and articles for this issue include:

• The New Yorker: The Greater Scandal of Signalgate

• Rod Dreher’s Diary: Live Not by Lies Movie Is Here

• Wall Street Journal: The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs

Comments are open after each article (come on, try it: it doesn’t hurt).

Thanks for reading Second Drafts,

Craig

PS: Thanks, too, for sparing that one click at the end of each newsletter. It’s interesting seeing how folks think about each issue’s three articles. (hint)

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The Greater Scandal of Signalgate

Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool

I was a toddler when Watergate—and the fallout from it—went down. But since those halcyon days, I’ve lived through more -gates than I can remember.

Thankfully, Wikipedia has captured in its entry, “List of -gate scandals and controversies,” the wide-ranging catalog encompassing everything from Ronald Reagan’s “Irangate” to the Super Bowl’s “Nipplegate” (with dozens and dozens of others varying in enormous extremes of seriousness and silliness in between).

My point? Americans love naming and claiming things as scandals, but some things are just screw-ups. And while this is indeed a screw-up of major proportion, people on both sides are losing their minds arguing their biases.

Take for instance this latest opinion piece from David Remnick of The New Yorker on so-called “Signalgate,” this week’s scandal du jour:

“In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled ‘Houthi PC small group.’ Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.”

On Wednesday, after several days of selling magazines with it, Goldberg and The Atlantic released the full chat to the public, but as Matt Margolis noted today,

“While the left-wing media hysteria machine kicks into overdrive, it’s worth noting that no classified information was shared in these discussions about Houthi rebel strikes. The only important question, at this point, is how Goldberg ended up in the chat in the first place, but for the Democrats and the media, that’s not what they’re worried about. They want someone to take the fall: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”

And maybe Hegseth should (especially if President Trump and his hatchet man, Musk, are trigger-happy and firing for, among other things, incompetence). But let’s understand the reason: it’s a very bad mistake—one not to be taken lightly—but it’s no scandal; it’s a screw-up.

For perspective, The Babylon Bee provided satirical insight into the double-standard concerning the leak, writing in “Hegseth Kicking Himself For Not Just Getting 13 Soldiers Killed And Giving $80 Billion In Weapons To Terrorists,”

“With Democrats demanding answers over how a journalist got added to a group text where top-secret information was shared, Hegseth wished he had provided the Taliban with Blackhawk helicopters so he could avoid uncomfortable questions.

‘I apologize for not exposing our soldiers to terrorist attacks and giving billions in high-grade weaponry to Islamists hellbent on killing us,’ said Hegseth. ‘My job wouldn’t be in jeopardy today if I had simply handed control of an entire country over to the people who perpetrated September 11th.”

The references are to Abbey Gate (the location name, not the scandal), which cost the lives of 13 American soldiers, and President Joe Biden’s gifting the Taliban a mother lode of hardware and software pulling troops out of Afghanistan in 2021. If you want to make the argument that these were screw ups as well, fine, but enough pretending that there are not massive differences in scale among the screw-ups being discussed. The fact that no General was fired—or no President impeached or censured—for what happened in Afghanistan is unbelievable to me.

Rest assured, there will be more haranguing about Signalgate. But the greater scandal may be the country growing more divided in deciding about the -gate part.

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Live Not by Lies Movie Is Here

Of the books that journalist Rod Dreher has written, his 2020 Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents is easily in my top three. In it, Dreher interviewed émigrés from the former Soviet bloc who warned him of telltale signs of “soft” totalitarianism being sown in the U.S. in the form of identity politics, civil liberties seen as a threat to “safety,” the marginalization of traditional Christians and other dissenters, technology and consumerism hastening the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. It felt very timely, to say the least.

Five years after initial publication, Dreher’s book (or a visual version of it) is finding its way to the screen in a film produced by Angel Studios. Writes Dreher:

“The film will be available on Angel Studios’ app platform starting April 1. It plays out in four episodes, with a new one dropping each week. Not sure what distribution will be like after that; I’m not in the business end of things. I’m in the US right now about to start (tomorrow) a tour of various cities doing Q&A at advance screenings. The director of the movie, Isaiah Smallman, will be with me for most of these, I think. What an incredible job he has done, as well as producers David Jacobson and R.J. Moeller.”

While I’m excited about seeing the film, it’s interesting that Angel Studios (formerly known for streaming censored edits of Hollywood movies under the name VidAngel) picked up Live Not by Lies and that Dreher okayed it. Why? Because even though Angel Studios’ most public name association is with The Chosen, the popular retelling of Jesus through the Gospel narratives, the production company was founded by Mormon brothers and is headquartered in Lehi in the heart of Utah County, with a population that is 90% Mormon.

Since Dreher writes about everything he’s doing (sometimes ad nauseum), I’m surprised I haven’t read more on his processing of that decision. This doesn’t mean they can’t work together for the sake of propagating a message about resisting lying and falsehood, but having just visited the Conference Center in Salt Lake City and listened to multiple evangelistic presentations, I do wonder about any dissonance.

The Conference Center hosts the semiannual worldwide broadcast of the general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is also the main arrival center for guests visiting Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Still, as I wrote in my review of Angel Studios-produced The Sound of Freedom two summers ago, “Yes, Mormonism is not Christianity, but surely we can come together on behalf of sex trafficked kids.” We’ll see if the same formula can work for the theological and spiritual integrity of Dreher’s work from book to film.

Do yourself a favor and watch the trailer. And, if you feel so inclined, check out the documentary in its four-week release cycle and let me know what you think.

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The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs

Mike O’Brien filled six whiteboards with colleagues’ linguistic violations. Photo: Mike O’Brien

This guy is my hero. Real literary stuff of legend right here. Seriously.

According to this Wall Street Journal feature,

“Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years…

…For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.”

Back in my corporate days as an imposter at a quantum cryogenics company, I found myself making many of the same observations about boardroom language. When engineers and executives become passionate about process and progress, we more literary types get to just sit back and enjoy the word salads.

But I didn’t have the guts—nor the track record (32 years!)—to do more than giggle internally; this guy was a Jedi Master of wielding his linguistic light saber.

“The list became so known—and feared—that one executive cursed O’Brien’s name in a meeting after tripping up on an expression. Violators could appeal their inclusion but success was rare.”

Here are just a few expressions that made the list:

• Sports/Exercise-related: “We’re really low on money right now…we’re dancing on thin ice,” and, “We need to keep running in our swim lanes.” Also, this mixed metaphor: “I know these are swing-for-the-moon opportunities, but I think we should pursue them.”

• Body parts: “We need to make sure dealers have some skin in the teeth;” and “It’s no skin on our back,” to which O’Brien appended that it sounded like “a horrible medical condition.”

• Food-related: “Too many cooks in the soup.” And: “Read between the tea leaves.”

• Animals (the largest category, with 80 entries): “I’m not trying to beat a dead horse to death.” Another: “We need to talk about the elephant in the closet,” one person said.

If you’ve never known the humor possible in the board or conference room, well, I don’t necessarily wish the experience on you. But, if you find yourself a regular worshipper of the meeting cow (“Moo”), I wish you the ears to hear this guy had.

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“The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.” George Bernard Shaw (near the end of his life)