As usual my musical selection; Devo’s Secret Agent Man .

On January sixth, 2021, President 45 incited some of his followers to bum-rush the United States Capitol protesting the electoral college determination the Biden won the election. Let’s not kid ourselves; this was an insurrection. One member of the Capitol Police department died as well as four others. Later on, GOP members of congress put forward their objections to the electoral college results.

In the aftermath of the insurrection, as it turns out, some of the insurgents were using popular alternatives- Signal and Telegram -to WhatsApp. Both provide end-to-end encryption for messaging. Of course, to use these apps, you have to pony up your phone number stored on one of their servers to use. What could go wrong?

My friends and I assume others, not hell-bent on overthrowing the government (myself included), rushed off and loaded both apps onto our phones. But why? These same friends (that I know of) don’t use them often, my wife doesn’t, and you can bet your ass my seventeen-year-old daughter doesn’t. Am I missing something?

If we need to turn our phones into secret decoder rings- some of us remember getting them from boxes of Captain Crunch or Cracker Jacks -we may have bigger fish to fry; it means we have fallen asleep at the political wheel; it may have become too late. 

We need to make sure we have learned our lesson from this failed insurrection, and just in case I hear going old school and using tin cans with a string between them pulled tight turns out to be pretty damn secure.

Note all grammar and spelling authors are the fault of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy