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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

Not low. Vance's phone will be full with high profile beltway people. As will everyone else's. A nice chunk of them are journalists.

Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor added everyone to the group and he used his phone's contacts to do so. He denies having ever met or having the contact on his phone of the journalist in question.

In this interview he says the the contact he had in his phone was for someone else that should have been in the group. But that contact's name was somehow attached to the journalist's number instead. The interviewer asks if it was a rogue staffer who substituted the number, but Waltz denied it. He says there is an investigation underway with attached technical experts trying to determine how the wrong number was assigned to the legitimate persons name in his phone.

It would make sense that a motivated person would try to substitute a hostile journalist's number in this way, but how that happened is still up in the air. Still, some of the blatant smearing of the journalist in question by Waltz in this interview (and Hegseth when interviewed earlier today) in some post-hoc Poisoning the Well makes it more difficult to take everything Waltz is saying at face value.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has been suggested as the intended person. As for how the number got into his phone... I'm going to guess he just fucked up and put in the wrong J.G. from some other list at some point.

Mike Walz

Note: Waltz (Michael) ≠ Walz (Timothy)

Thanks, fixed.