Reason or Treason? 🪂 🤸‍♀️ Right or Spite?

I think we're going to do a bit of a run today.

I think we're going to do a bit of a run.

There's so little going on in the world that perhaps a run is what we need to talk about.

But really interestingly was the leaks that have been coming out of the Pentagon over the last two days.

And there's two different sets of leaks that I think are notable.

The first one is a bit more trivial, but kind of just a big eye roll in the way this administration administers itself.

And that is that a bunch of very pro-Hegseth people sort of media accounts, multimedia, social media accounts, turn out to have actually been on the Pentagon's payroll as civilian employees, which is quite astonishing if you think about it, where you've got a Department of Defense or war, depending on whether you're losing your war on any particular given day.

But you've got the department in the Pentagon who are actually paying people on social media to post stuff that supports The Secretary of Defence.

It's just a very, very, very strange way of doing business.

And it's interesting, certainly, because, you know, there's also a guy called Infantry Dort, his name is Adam Dortoner, he's an actually serving officer, he's taking very very partisan positions um in a way that would be totally unacceptable under any previous administration i mean u.s servicemen are not supposed to take political public stances and yet this guy's blasting all over the internet from the pentagon during work hours so that's the first part but then the second one uh you know so sorry that got leaked i think is really interesting Can

I just comment on that really quickly? I just want to say that, and this is something we touch upon in, I think, our second discussion that we had on disinformation, because I was asking you about the ethics of disinformation or misinformation, or in this case, even if it's just information.

The fact is that this is a game that's being played by every government and every government nefarious or otherwise actor.

And I think that if you're going to partake in the information war, and at this point, nobody has the choice or the luxury not to partake in the information war, then it seems like you're shooting yourself in the foot to not employ the same tactics that everybody else and particularly our enemies are.

No, I think the point you missed is that they're using taxpayer dollars to push partisan political viewpoints through the Pentagon.

That's the scandal.

It's not that they're engaging in information war.

It's that they are using your taxpayer money to push certain political perspectives in support of Brexit.

It's a very different beast to just trying to influence through social media.

But my taxpayer money also happens to pay for NPR just as yours pays for BBC, which I will argue is extraordinarily partisan information.

No, that's not how the

BBC works.

The BBC doesn't come through tax.

It's through a license fee that you can choose not to pay if you don't want to.

Okay, so we don't.

NPR is funded partially by the government, but also Israel is struggling with the same thing with their military radio.