Whoops / Who’s getting into your genes? / Ignorant new world

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Whoops. Updating coverage: The Trump administration’s top “intelligence” officials were to face the House today—a day after embarrassing news that the president’s security team, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted advance plans for military strikes on Yemen to a supposedly “secure” group chat that included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg …
■ … who wrote in a first-person account (gift link): “I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.”
■ Politico veteran Garrett Graff says you gotta read that account: “I promise you the headline and whatever summary you’ve heard is way less weird, way less troubling, and way less eye-popping than the reality.”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich has an ironic flashback: “Remember when that commie rat-bastard Hillary Clinton ran a private email server?”
■ Hegseth blames Goldberg: “Nobody was texting war plans.”
■ Goldberg fired back on CNN: “That’s a lie.”
■ Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein appeals to The Atlantic: Publish the whole darned chat thread.
■ Wired: After the bombing began, those in the chat joined a $1-million-per-seat party at Mar-a-Lago.
■ CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf: “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.”
■ As Jimmy Kimmel put it: “Our national security is being guarded by a bunch of doofs you wouldn’t trust to throw your cousin a surprise party.”
■ Jon Stewart on The Daily Show: “Back in my day, if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources, meet them in a dark garage, earn the trust. … Now? You just wait for the national security advisor to be distracted by The White Lotus while he’s setting up his ‘Bomb Yemen’ group chat.”
■ National security adviser Mike Waltz’s job was on the bubble for what Politico calls “one of the dumbest security breaches of recent times” …
■ … but Trump sounded forgiving on NBC this morning: “Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.”
■ Grudge Report proprietor Bess Kalb offers “Other Texts with Pete Hegseth.”

Returned to sender. After five years in a job he was given by Trump, U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy has quit.
■ The Washington Post says he refused to play footsie with the DOGE bros.
■ Post veteran Gene Weingarten has crafted a letter to the paper’s owner: “Dear Jeffrey Bezos …”

‘The Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a big deal.’ Public Notice on next Tuesday’s election: “An already high-profile race will be seen as a referendum on the current administration. A win is crucial … for the country as a whole.”
■ Illinoisans (outside Chicago) vote next week, too—and the Chicago Public Square guide to voter guides is here to help.
■ Looking ahead to 2026’s Democratic primary, progressive Gen-Z social media influencer Kat Abughazaleh is challenging Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky—even though Abughazaleh doesn’t live in the district and moved to Illinois only last year.
■ Rolling Stone: “That’s kind of the point: She is a normal person—with a rental lease she can’t break before it’s up, financial pressure bearing down on her, and prescription medication that she needs to function properly and that has been challenging to obtain since Elon Musk went after her employer, and she and many of her colleagues were laid off.”

Protect your digital privacy. As the Trump administration gets intrusive with travelers to and from the U.S., Wired offers “a few steps you can take to minimize the risk of Customs and Border Protection accessing your data.”
■ Law professor Joyce Vance: “If people have no opportunity to contest the legality of actions the government takes against them, if grotesque injustice is being layered on top of grotesque injustice by our government in our name, it becomes increasingly difficult to call ourselves a democracy.”

Who’s getting into your genes? The DNA of 15 million 23andMe customers is on the line as the company files for bankruptcy.
■ 23andMe’s board chair says it’s “committed to continuing to safeguard customer data,” but that pledge may not survive new owners.

So long. The Trump administration’s closing the federal Office of Long COVID Research and Practice.
■ Chicago Public Square five years ago today: “Cellphone location data shows Illinoisans are among those leading the nation in staying home.” (2020 cartoon: The late Keith J. Taylor.)

The archdiocese strikes back. Lawyers for Chicago’s Catholic Church tell the Tribune a conversation recorded on a prison line 12 years ago shows that a group of Chicago criminals conspired to bring false charges against one of the church’s most notorious child sexual abusers.
■ Key soundbite: “They’ve got everlasting money, bro.”

Ignorant new world. Popular Information: Texas lawmakers are out to make it a crime for school librarians and teachers to give students access to books that, like Brave New World, The Odyssey and Catcher in the Rye, contain sexually explicit content.
■ Education watchdog Jan Resseger: The endangered U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has a new mission: Terminate civil rights.
■ A first-of-its-kind study finds kids with smartphones doing better than expected …
■ … as Platformer’s Casey Newton warns that chatbots could spark the next big mental health crisis.
■ Wired’s Jason Kehe says Angelina Jolie’s character in the 1995 movie Hackers was prophetic: “RISC architecture is gonna change everything.”

The best place to live in the U.S.? One ranking says it’s Naperville—again.
■ Further west: Illinois has officially returned 1,500 acres of stolen land in DeKalb County to the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.

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■ Mike Braden made this edition better.

A public service announcement from (ahem) Square

Government secrets, anyone? / ‘How We Fight Back’ / ‘My account was hacked’

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Government secrets, anyone? The Associated Press: As Donald Trump and Elon Musk force out thousands of government workers with insider knowledge, they’re creating “an unprecedented opportunity” for Russia, China and other adversaries to recruit informants.
■ Investigative journalist Russ Baker: “You could be next: Trump can seize your devices and then …
■ Law professor Joyce Vance sees an important indicator of Trump’s damage: “Tourism to the U.S. is on the decline.”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: Beware a “shadow” page that looks like something from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but that in fact carries lies about vaccines and autism and—surprise!—is the work of “a nonprofit, anti-vaxx organization started by Secretary Kennedy.”

‘We all suffer when powerful institutions yield to Trump’s bullying.’ Columnist Margaret Sullivan—who, as a Columbia University faculty member, has “had a front-row seat” to some of that—“was appalled to see the university leadership respond as it did.”
■ She writes for The Guardian: “Columbia should have said ‘See you in court,’ not ‘Yes, Mr President.’”
■ Law & Chaos: “When Trump came after Paul Weiss, another 1,000+ lawyer firm with strong Democratic ties, its managing partner Brad Karp prostrated himself in the Oval Office.”
■ Law Dork Chris Geidner: “Attn, BigLaw: There will be no law firm business to save if Trump succeeds.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama … warned American voters, over and over and with great specificity, what Trump would do if he won the presidency. And it’s all happening.”

On Wisconsin. In next week’s race for that state’s Supreme Court, columnist Dan Pfeiffer sees “a chance to show that grassroots activism can beat the world’s richest man.”
■ Musk Watch: “In Wisconsin, an Elon Musk-backed super PAC is offering registered voters $100 in exchange for their contact information and signatures on a petition condemning ‘activist judges.’”
■ Early voting’s begun for next week’s Illinois elections, and the Chicago Public Square guide to voter guides is here for you.

‘How We Fight Back.’ That’s the name of a new digital publication launched by grassroots groups including Indivisible and MoveOn, aiming to “share practical advice” for those willing to stand up to Trump and Musk.
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch: “The frog of democracy is nearly boiled. We can still jump out of the pot.”
■ Columnist Charlie Madigan: “Perhaps we should get off our asses!”
■ Economist Paul Krugman: “The attack on Social Security is something that should both inspire outrage and offer an opportunity to connect with working-class Americans.”
■ Drop Site: “Medicare Advantage plans are killing seniors and bankrupting hospitals. Now the Trump administration is preparing to make them mandatory, ending Medicare as we know it.”
■ Resistance groups are planning a host of protests across the nation April 5.
■ Indivisible Chicago chapter leader Marj Halperin* writing in the Tribune: “What, exactly, does the Democratic base want? More. More of everything. Including new leaders.”
■ Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer: “Look, I’m not stepping down.”

Immigrants’ Illinois appeal. Almost 33,000 Illinoisans without legal status—22,000 in Cook County alone—could lose their health care under Gov. Pritzker’s budget.
■ The American Prospect ranks 17 states with Democratic governors and legislative majorities by what they actually got done over the last two years—and Illinois comes in at No. 3.
■ Politico surveys the lineup of political dominoes if Sen. Dick Durbin retires.

Nice work if you can get it. The Tribune’s request for public records reveals that the Chicago Transit Authority spent more than $26,000 in 2023 and 2024 on vehicles used by its top officials—in some cases more for getting them to and from their offices than for business reasons.
■ The Sun-Times: Mayor Johnson’s been taking campaign cash from a lawyer suing City Hall.

‘The kind of thing that happens in authoritarian regimes or dystopian novels like 1984, not in a country built on free speech safeguarded by the First Amendment.’ As TV news anchors tiptoe around the name “Gulf of Mexico,” Status proprietor Oliver Darcy perceives “a glimpse at how the press starts to flinch under political pressure.”
■ The AP: The news biz faces challenges from all directions.
■ Business journalist and Rupert Murdoch biographer Claire Atkinson: CBS News has yanked a job offer from a TV producer who wrote an essay about a policy that affected her life during Trump’s first term.
■ A consequence of staff cuts at the Sun-Times: No more editorials.
■ Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed calls -30- on a 56-year run as a journalist.

‘My account was hacked and turned into a distribution hub for obscene content.’ Launching his new newsletter, veteran Chicago reporter and former Better Government Association chief Andy Shaw shares his first-person experience with “Facebook’s unfair and unreachable algorithmic tyranny.”
■ You can subscribe to Shaw’s Substack free here.
■ Semafor’s Ben Smith: “A deeply negative portrait of Facebook-then-Meta’s approach to its impact on the world … was already on shelves and bestseller lists by the time Meta got an arbitrator to gag the author.”

Sounds like a headache. Conceding that a software update gone wrong has bricked some of its soundbars, Samsung is offering a free fix …
■ … but that fix will probably require shipping the things in for physical repair.

‘If you, like me, are a member of my generation, you may believe that, because you grew up in an era before computers and calculators and smartphones, you’re still as intelligent as ever. If so, I have two words for you: Long division.’ Columnist Dave Barry: Stupidification is getting worser.

Chicago Public Square regrets the link. Reader Karl S. flagged a shady source for an item in Friday’s edition—about Postal Service layoffs: “What is Unión Rayo? Their About section is a legal disclaimer and about all I can glean is that they’re based in Spain. I cannot find any information about the author, Laura M. She also ‘wrote’ an article about all Chipotle locations closing ‘due to bankruptcy.’ I’m pretty sure that’s not true and that article reads a lot like the worst examples of AI slop. The USPS article reads like generative AI garbage. I’m thinking that if this is true, there must be a better source for it than a dodgy Spanish content/slop mill.”
■ In fact, that Chipotle article has been disproven.
■ And the content of the piece linked from Square proved several days old—witness an AP report from March 14.
■ Square aspires to bring you fresh, authoritative news and commentary. That didn’t happen here. Sorry.
■ Yesterday: Chicago postal workers—joined by Mayor Johnson—rallied against the cuts.

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