April 28: Group Chat Nation

U.S. and Iran hold third meeting; Russia tells Trump to take a hike; Chabad defends itself

---

---

The Big Story

Q: What do White House crypto czar David Sacks, Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire, Bitcoin billionaire and former Olympic rower Tyler Winklevoss, and Tucker Carlson all have in common?

A: They all left the same influential, broadly pro-Trump, tech industry-adjacent Signal chat earlier this month amid an intra-chat dispute over the wisdom of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Here’s a screenshot, from a Sunday story in Semafor by Ben Smith on the centrality of private group chats to the public political discourse we see on social media:

Other notable members of the chat include the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban, right-wing tech entrepreneurs Balaji Srinivasan and Joe Lonsdale, and public intellectuals or commentators Niall Ferguson and Ben Shapiro. The central figure in Chatham House and dozens of other overlapping group chats, however, is the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who plays a godfather-like role in connecting and mediating among elites across business, politics, and media. Andreessen’s chats, in Smith’s telling, were instrumental in orchestrating a portion of the tech elite’s defection to Donald Trump in the 2024 election cycle.

Here’s how Smith describes the chats (emphasis ours):

Their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.

As Smith goes on to explain, the internal machinery of the chats is generally invisible to the public but is “made visible through a group consensus on social media,” in which seemingly unconnected public figures come to seemingly inexplicable agreement on a host of seemingly unrelated subjects, ranging from serious policy matters to which other public figures they hate.

You can read Smith’s article for more detail on the history and political trajectory of the chats in the Andreessen extended universe and for gossip on some of the minor characters—Richard Hanania, Thomas Chatterton Williams—who have flitted in and out of them over time. As one anonymous member of Chatham House told The Scroll, “What you heard Sunday night was the sound of hundreds of hearts breaking, as loads of people realized they aren’t special to Marc Andreessen.”

The key point you should understand as a consumer of the news, however, is that Sriram Krishnan is correct: Private chats are where the action happens, so to speak. With some exceptions, public-facing social media is a discursive wasteland dominated by pay-for-play influencers, bots, AI slop, engagement-farming scams, and propaganda warfare among politically interested factions, which can include foreign state and non-state actors as well as factions defined more loosely, by shared membership in a chat. “Debate,” such as it is, happens privately, within the chat’s circle of trust, where members can develop a “party line” that is then retailed to the public. Public pronouncements, by extension, should not be taken at face value, but rather should be read as clues about the interests of, or consensus among, the faction to which a person belongs or is allied with—which is also not always clear.

In effect, social media is recapitulating the “Arabization” of the traditional media, which Lee Smith (no relation) described for Tablet in 2018:

Arab papers are widely known as platforms for the views or goals of a particular regime, political figure, or intelligence service. It’s not a free press in any meaningful sense. But taking these many outlets as a whole, it’s possible to piece together a relatively accurate picture of the political game board. …

In other words, you don’t read the [Arab] press for news as such. Rather, it’s a kind of bulletin board where significant political actors, working through operatives with bylines, hint at their next moves, test the waters, warn rivals, issue threats, etc.

The Arabization of the press was enabled by the collapse of journalism’s traditional business model, which made what remained of the media vulnerable to capture by savvy political actors who could recognize that the crown was lying in the gutter, so to speak. As trust in the press collapsed, the locus of political discourse moved to social media—which never had a business model for the production of “news” to begin with.

In the media, as in life, you get approximately what you pay for. So while the current media environment may be a lamentable outcome, it should not necessarily be a surprising one. You pay nothing, and you get nothing—“nothing,” in this case, being the warmed-over talking points from someone else’s chat.

Read the Semafor piece here: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

And read Lee’s essay here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/american-press-middle-east

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen on how a Jew, a Muslim, and a pastor’s daughter came together—to vandalize, and maybe bomb, a Pittsburgh synagogue

---

The Rest

→U.S. and Iranian officials met in Muscat, Oman, on Saturday for a third round of nuclear talks. The U.S. delegation was again headed by Trump’s Middle East envoy and de facto top diplomat, Steve Witkoff, but this time included a technical team led by Michael Anton, the head of policy planning in the State Department and a reportedly more hawkish figure than Witkoff. Both sides praised the talks as “positive” but were tight-lipped about the details under discussion, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that one of the “major sticking points” is whether Iran will be allowed to enrich its own uranium. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian state media after the meeting that some of the two sides’ differences are “very serious” and that he is “hopeful but very cautious” that the two sides can reach a deal. Araghchi added that the negotiations “take time” and are “difficult,” which—combined with reports from last week that the Iranians are pushing for an interim deal—suggests that Tehran is looking to drag talks out past Trump’s mid-July deadline.

→In an interview with Time magazine published Friday and again in remarks to reporters on Sunday, Trump projected optimism about reaching a deal with Iran, saying Sunday that he thinks “a deal is going to be made there” without “having to start dropping bombs all over the place.” In Sunday remarks to the Jewish News Syndicate in Jerusalem, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a very different note. He warned that a “bad deal is worse than no deal” and reiterated his view that a “good deal” would entail the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities as well as a curbing of its ballistic missile program. Netanyahu said that he had been in close contact with Washington on the subject of Iran but did not say whether the Trump administration was aligned with Israel’s views on the deal. Earlier reports in the Israeli press had suggested that U.S. negotiators were not sharing information about the talks with the Israelis, but a report last week in Israel Hayom, citing Israeli officials, noted that “unlike in the past, Israel is now being updated on most aspects of the talks and is raising its concerns from its own strategic perspective.”

→In the Time interview, Trump also commented on the recent New York Times report that he had called off a planned Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Asked directly if he had “stopped Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites,” the president said, “That’s not right.” He went on to explain:

I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, because I think we can make a deal without the attack. I hope we can. It’s possible we’ll have to attack because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, but I didn’t say no. Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped.

Asked if he was “worried Netanyahu will drag you into a war,” Trump said no. “[Netanyahu] may go into a war,” he continued, “but we’re not getting dragged in.” When the reporter asked if that meant the United States would stay out of an Israeli-led war, Trump explained, “No, I didn’t say that. You asked if he’d drag me in, like I’d go in unwillingly. No, I may go in very willingly if we can’t get a deal. If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack.”

→On Witkoff’s other major diplomatic file, the Russia-Ukraine war, the White House appears to be softening its stance toward Kyiv and hardening its stance toward Moscow. The Financial Times reported Monday that the United States and Ukraine were close to signing a minerals deal after Washington dropped its demand that Ukraine pay back the hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid it has received since the start of the war in 2022. The breakthrough comes after Trump had what he described as a “beautiful meeting” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he had not seen since their February blowup in the White House, on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral in Vatican City on Saturday. Trump and his officials have also stepped up their criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent days, with Trump floating the possibility of new sanctions on Russia in a social media post on Saturday and then telling reporters Sunday that he was “very disappointed” with Russia’s recent airstrikes on Ukraine.

On Monday, in a written interview with a Brazilian newspaper, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid out Russia’s terms for reaching a deal with Ukraine, which included international recognition of Russian control over five Ukrainian regions, “demilitarizing and de-Nazifying Ukraine,” and full sanctions relief. In other words, Moscow is telling Trump to go take a hike.

→On Thursday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights Brooklyn, where he was met by far-left protesters who brawled with local Jewish men. The national media, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have condemned what they’ve called “violent counter-protesters”—i.e. Jews defending their neighborhood and neighborhood institutions—for what’s been billed as an “assault” on an innocent woman who claims she merely “wandered” into the protest. The “victim” was captured on camera wearing a mask to cover her face, and refused to identify herself to The New York Times for “fear of retribution” (from Chabad?), which is to say the safest assumption is she’s lying and was there as a protester. And who are the “protesters”? Well, one of the organizing groups was Brooklyn Palestine Solidarity Committee, which posted the following Instagram call for “Carribbean Brooklyn” to rise up and pogrom the Chabadniks:

Nice people. As for the “violence,” friend of The Scroll Kyle Shideler explains on X that this is what effective communal self-defense looks like:

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

The Price

How a Muslim National Guardsman, a pastor’s daughter, and a shomer Shabbat Jew joined together in a fantasy of redeeming inner hurts and perceived global wrongs through symbolic violence against Pittsburgh’s Jewish community—and building bombs.

by Armin Rosen

The accused arrived separately from home detention, a few minutes after their court-appointed lawyers, their judge, and their prosecutor and 15 minutes before their friends and fellow travelers, who filled two-and-a-half rows of hard wooden pews. Across the street, the blank eyes of a stone eagle peered into the seventh-floor courtroom. It was Nov. 6, 2024, the day after Election Day.

Mohamad Hamad, 23 years old, got to the courtroom first. He wore a white button-up shirt that hung loosely around his thin body and had a close-cropped haircut that curved over high-arching eyebrows. He looked dazed to the point of total blankness.

His codefendant, Talya Lubit, age 24, wore a light vintage blazer, dark blue with bright white stripes. Stress-swollen cheeks cracked through layers of makeup. Her hair was a resigned chaos of thinning tangles and zigzags.

Hamad and Lubit sat face-to-face on opposite heads of the defendants’ table. They did not speak to each other and avoided eye contact.

Two weeks earlier, the pair had been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Chabad of Squirrel Hill, a synagogue and religious center in the heart of Jewish Pittsburgh, during the early hours of July 29, 2024. The hearing, held at the federal courthouse in downtown Pittsburgh, would determine whether there was probable cause to refer an Oct. 25 criminal complaint against the pair to a grand jury, which could then decide to indict them. The federal crimes in question were “Defacing and Damaging Religious Real Property” and “Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States,” misdemeanors that carry a maximum penalty of a year each in federal prison.

Pittsburgh FBI counterterrorism task force agent David Derbish told the court that a little after midnight on July 29, surveillance cameras captured a masked individual with “a female gait” approaching the Chabad house. This person spray-painted the words JEWS 4 PALESTINE in large red letters on the facade behind the menorah on the center’s front lawn, along with a downward-pointing red triangle. As Derbish explained, this is a symbol commonly used among members and supporters of Hamas, the jihadist group and U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for the Oct. 7 slaughter in Israel. “It is a marking indicating Hamas has a target at that specific location or on that specific person,” Derbish explained.

The conspiracy charges technically referred to Hamad and Lubit’s alleged collaboration in the Chabad vandalism, but they also had a nebulous connection to more violent fantasies that established a beachhead in the real world. The original complaint claimed that in June of 2024, Hamad, a Lebanese-born American citizen and an aircraft hydraulic systems specialist in the 171st Maintenance Squadron of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, had anonymously ordered two pounds of Indian Black aluminum powder and two pounds of potassium perchlorate (KClO4) from two online retailers using an alias and a phone number purchased through a voice-over-IP service. These explosive inputs arrived at a house in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, where Hamad, his parents, and his two younger sisters lived.

In Signal messages the FBI obtained from his phone, Hamad and a 22-year-old Pittsburgh woman named Micaiah Collins, the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor who is also one of the city’s leading anti-Israel activists, appeared to discuss the construction and detonation of a homemade bomb. “I kinda just wanna test it with you as I’ve never done something that big lol and then another day very soon we can do bros ankles with Talya,” Hamad texted this alleged accomplice on June 29, 2024. Derbish, like the criminal complaint, acknowledged he did not know what “bros ankles” meant, though in context it appeared to be Hamad and his contact’s internal code for an artisanal bomb. In current basketball slang, a “bro’s ankles” are said to be broken when he is tripped-up through an especially balletic or devious crossover dribble. Derbish testified that Hamad had also purchased “cylindrical one-inch cardboard tubes” three inches in length, which could be used to contain and focus the force of an explosion.

On July 7, 2024, Collins, who appeared as an unnamed individual in the October 2024 complaint and who prosecutors only identified and indicted earlier this month, sent Hamad a video of a fireball several feet in width. The complaint includes stills from the video: The explosion expands and plumes upward and outward, the fire verging into a small burnt cloud. Collins reveled in their accomplishment. “i keep watchin the video!” she texted. “Hell yeah,” Hamad replied. Derbish told the court that the explosion could easily have been created with only a small fraction of the black powder and potassium perchlorate Hamad had ordered, materials that the FBI was now unable to locate.

An April 8 prosecution filing and an updated April 22 indictment claim that Hamad drove to State College, two and a half hours east of Pittsburgh, on July 18, 2024, with two homemade pipe bombs and “at least one other destructive device made with spray paint cans in his trunk.” In photos included in the filing, a man who prosecutors identify as Hamad lights a small metallic cylinder stuffed into the end of a long metal tube. Based on the angles of the photos, Hamad could not possibly have been alone during this second explosive test-run in 11 days, though neither the filing nor the new indictment identify who else was with him.

***

The line between fantasy and self-actualization is inherently thin and is often difficult to spot within this or any other set of facts. For instance, the criminal charges are careful not to make any overt reference to any specific plan on Lubit, Hamad, or Collins’s part to bomb anyone or anything, and prosecutors have not tried to establish any operational link between the defendants and any militant group. Nevertheless, in their search of Hamad’s devices last fall, FBI agents found an image of a man who is very likely Hamad posing in a black sweater and mask and a green Hamas headband, gripping a combination American-Israeli lawn flag while holding up an index finger in likely reference to the Tawhid salute, an assertion of the oneness of God associated with a range of violent Islamist movements.

“Imagine the terror they saw if they had cams,” Hamad told a group text, in reference to the stolen banner. “Hamas operative ripping off their flags in white suburbia.” In another photo, which appeared in the April filing, Hamad’s eyes peer out from between a balaclava and a green Hamas headband—he’s in the passenger seat of a car in broad daylight, his seatbelt dutifully buckled over a fake blue Gucci t-shirt.

Behavior like this quickly reaches a point where the intent of the individual in question, which may be ironic or playacting or dead serious, doesn’t explain very much and may even be unknowable to the person. “Hamas operative” could be Hamad’s aspiration or fantasy or a description of his physical appearance or an expression of guilt at fighting the enemy in Squirrel Hill rather than in Gaza City. It is legal to obtain Indian Black powder and potassium perchlorate, both of which can be bought online for about $20 a pound.

In the courtroom, Lubit and Hamad appeared smaller and more delusional as the sunless afternoon dragged on. They had committed boneheaded errors at every turn while creating a rich archival record of their potential crimes. “How far you from Walmart,” Lubit texted at roughly the moment Hamad purchased what the complaint described as “one can of Rust-Oleum ‘Strawberry Fields’ red, high-gloss spray paint,” an object that investigators were able to identify down to the serial number even before they found it in Hamad’s bedroom at his parents’ house. Lubit reverted her phone to factory settings on July 7, erasing its contents the day the FBI executed its search warrant on Hamad. But her lack of care won out. “Is the resistance chat still around?” Lubit texted activist friends of hers on September 11, the day before a judge authorized a search of her apartment.

In court, the two were in a shock so deep that it often seemed as if they were watching someone else’s criminal hearing and not their own. Hamad often wedged his thumbs together, and he rubbed his eyes when Derbish described the one explosive test-run then known to prosecutors. At one point Lubit seemed in danger of sobbing. She then swallowed any oncoming tears and settled back into sphinxlike impassiveness, while avoiding eye contact with Hamad.

***

A federal courtroom is an environment of merciless linguistic and emotional economy. It is objectively funny to hear an FBI agent say the words “fuck Zionits,” as Derbish had to in the course of reading other people’s text messages, but in court the humor and sadness is served flavorless and cold. Derbish elucidated Lubit and Hamad’s most private struggles in public, in the robotic legalese of a highly competent law enforcement agent.

In the run-up to the vandalism of the Chabad house on July 29, Lubit was a sympathetic listener to what Hamad said were his deepest hopes and dreams. “My ultimate goal in life is Shaheed,” Hamad texted Lubit, words that Derbish read out in court. A martyr in an Islamic holy war is called a “shaheed.” The agent continued through Hamad’s messages to Lubit: “Everything else doesn’t matter nearly as much … My goal sets are very different from the average person.” Hamad told Lubit, “I don’t see myself living long. … It’s really hard to think long term.”

In a July 4 Instagram story included in the April 8 prosecution filing, Hamad posted an image of a Hamas funeral, with masked fighters crowded around a casket draped in a green flag. “Ya Allah, I can’t take this anymore, I want to fight and die,” Hamad wrote over the image. “I don’t want to live here anymore. I’m jealous of these fighters, they got to fight in the way of Allah and have achieved the highest level of Jannah,” the Islamic concept of paradise. "I want to die fighting,” he’d texted Micaiah Collins on that same Independence Day, according to the April 22 superseding indictment. “I want it now so bad!!”

The original criminal complaint states that during one of their text exchanges, “LUBIT referenced previous conversations with HAMAD regarding marriage and having children.” Hamad told Lubit that there were times when he could “really see myself doing that life,” but that his “heart yearns for being with my brothers overseas.” Lubit ended that conversation by texting, “It’s fine you’re doing an honorable thing.”

The “honorable thing” Lubit refers to is left unclear. Maybe the “thing” was theoretical, and Hamad’s intense feelings and commitments were what Lubit admired. Perhaps Hamad was a guilt-racked fantasist, someone whose pain and envy, though real, weren’t torturous enough to inspire violence aimed at actual living people. Maybe Hamad lacked the stomach to harm total strangers, but would eventually have found it intolerable not to try.

By one plausible reading of the superseding indictment, Hamad’s honorable leap of action might have been a steadily advancing but not-yet-focused bomb plot (though Collins made that passing mention of ‘bros ankles with Talya,’ prosecutors haven’t claimed Lubit knew anything about Collins’ and Hamad’s alleged activities). “I made that big shell,” Hamad texted Collins on June 29. Hamad sent Collins a video of still unknown origin demonstrating the design and detonation of a bomb made out of five metal fuel canisters, duct-taped together around an explosive core.

Collins was excited by the possibility of building their own variants of the device. “You think . . . w that new crazy shells n 4-5 cans we can rlly take bros ankles...concrete gon blow?” “Maybe,” Hamad replied. “gotta see what she hittin for,” Collins mused a few texts later. “we gon fuck shit up.”

On July 2, while dreaming of the possibilities of their very own homemade can-bombs, Collins’ seeming lust for destruction reaches a pre-Independence Day fever pitch: “i can't wait i wana learn how to make em! n can't wait to set em off too! i been thinkin abt wft we gon use em for like allll day every dayyyy.”

In his presentation to Lubit and others—and possibly in his own mind—Hamad was a man of action, an avenging Islamic holy warrior. But the first and so-far only “honorable thing” Hamad may have executed in his war against Israel turned out to be a parodic compromise between paralysis and militancy.

It is evident from the text messages shared in court that Hamad, who by then had been involved in the construction or detonation of at least four experimental bombs, came up with the idea of having Lubit vandalize a Chabad house. “If I join you in doing graffiti on this building it matters to me that it is done in good taste,” she texted at 9:25 p.m. on July 27, the night before the spray-painting. “But any bank or anything else that’s not a religious institution I’m happy to trash.” A minute later she texted, “I wish I knew how to paint damn.” By 10:21 p.m., any concern over the application of her limited artistic skills to the façade of a Jewish religious institution was gone: “Fuck it, I’ll do it. The thing. Decorating Chabad.” Lubit continued to object that “trying to make it ugly and abnoxious [sic.] feels like borderline desecration of religious place,” especially since the Chabad Hasidic movement “usually use[s] [their] buildings for synagogues.” Thus: “the art needs to not look like it’s an attempt to vandalize.”

By 11 p.m., though, Lubit seemed in increasingly urgent need of taking out her ever-hotter-burning fury and confusion on an explicitly Jewish target, regardless of how the result might look to her or to anyone else. “[C]an literally feel myself starting to see Jews as my enemies,” she texted at 11:08. At 11:20, she hinted at how completely the situation in the Middle East had taken over even the in-between moments of her life: “Well the vandalism part is the part I’m most fearful of. I mean, I guess I can just watch a documentary about Gaza & read some stuff and wait.”

In actuality, she couldn’t wait. And like Hamad, she expressed her impatience within the context of her religious identity. At 11:40, she texted: “Scares me that I want revenge. I can feel it. Like, I’m ANGRY. I’m so tired of feeling like being Jewish means I have to second guess being anti oppression. I will not survive being Jewish if I don’t learn to get past that. I’ll just end up abandoning it.” Between 11:41 and 11:43 the following night, shortly before the vandalism at Chabad, she wrote: “I’m tired of the voice in my head, telling me that a Jew would not go with the oppressed. … Every day I think ‘I don’t want to be Jewish anymore.’”

Whatever Judaism might have meant to Lubit—and as a Hebrew speaker who observed Shabbat and kashrut, it must have meant something more to her than just standard-issue left-wing anti-oppression activism—she could not imagine leaving it behind. “This feels kinda like a last ditch attempt at staying Jewish,” she texted Hamad at 11:45. “Actually, you’ve given me hope.”

Court attendees heard these words in Derbish’s voice. Meanwhile, Lubit rested her chin on the bridge of her arching hands and cast her eyes down at the table, away from Hamad.

Read the rest of this feature here: https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/price-talya-lubit-chabad-pittsburgh