Yes! You There in the Front, in the Red Hat!

While veteran national security reporters can’t get their calls answered, members of the new, MAGA-friendly press corps have a hotline to the Department of War.

Pentagon public affairs officers were conspicuously absent from the Military Reporters and Editors conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month, one more manifestation of the historic breakup that culminated in the departure of every major news outlet from the Pentagon press room in October.

“When official voices retreat behind locked doors, when our inquiries are met with ignored emails, the democracy that we serve is weakened,” Jen Judson, a defense reporter for Bloomberg News and the president of MRE, told conference attendees.

Things look different to some members of the Pentagon’s handpicked new press corps. “What I’ve seen so far, the Department of War has been forthcoming,” R.C. Maxwell, a reporter for RedState, a Salem Media–owned online outlet, told me. “They have a hotline, which you can immediately call, and someone will answer right now. I’ve dealt with the federal government for years. As the press secretary for Project Veritas, it was my responsibility to reach out to the government when we needed a comment on a story. Do you know how rare it was to actually receive an answer from an actual public affairs person? Are you aware that you can now actually call on the Pentagon [and] someone will answer?”