Founder & reigning monarch at TPM. Lapsed historian. Polk Award winner. ✡️ (Sign up for my newsletter The Backchannel https://t.co/GpsQ8cC6vk)
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Apr 1 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Truth Social just released their 8-K, so the SEC mandated disclosures where you can't lie without commiting a crime. Lots of focus on the dollars, which are hilarious: Just over $4.1 M in revenue, $58M in costs. ... app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadF…
I've mentioned before that this is only barely more than TPM brings in each year and since we're a real business we have costs well under $58m. But these aren't the important data points in this filing. In theory a social platform can be losing a lot of money and still ...
Mar 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One thing to consider here is that if the RNC is being fused with the Trump campaign and a big chunk of the staff is being fired, what’s the point exactly? That sounds awesome but it just leaves you with a single entity. The president/nominee controls the party apparatus…
2/ you don’t need to do this stuff to have control. It’s also helpful to have an allied group to handle other responsibilities. Gotv operations, working with allied campaigns and a million other things. The only real point of doing this is that you get the money.
Mar 7 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Since this post is getting some attn I wanted to add some details abt WHY this collapse happened. The biggest driver is the evolution, consolidation and growing monopoly power of the big platforms, Google, Meta, et al. But there are some secondary parts of the story that ...
2/ are interesting and worth understanding. Back at the end of 2012 I hired @JRagazzo and one of his core responsibilities was to help me manage and plan our programmatic strategies. One of the ways I built TPM was by being really creative abt maximizing programmatic ...
Feb 21 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Don’t think most people get the magnitude of the Hunter Biden/Smirnov revelations. One big ongoing Russian operation from 2015 until today. Basically confirms what was always obvious, “Hunter Biden laptop” was part of the same operation. via @TPMtalkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-bigge…2/ And in this case, certainly with the “laptop”, basically every reporter and editorialist and commentator fell for it. All of official Washington. Every last one of them. Hilarious. And after all these years we learn the same spies are still leading around official DC …
Feb 16 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
An example of how not to do journalism, more below >>>> Trump Privately Expresses Support for a 16-Week Abortion Ban nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/…2/ Does Trump really "privately favor" a 16 week abortion ban? Privately, we know, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about abortion. What position he'll adopt in the 2024 election cycle has some relevance. But adopt means adopt, as in publicly. What we have hear is just ...
Dec 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@djrothkopf @AlonPinkas Alon's piece is spot on. There is one touchpoint he doesn't address. It's a significant driver of this fracture. For a generation of democrats under 40, certainly under 30 their main experience of Israel through the prism of a longserving Prime Minister who went out of his ...
@djrothkopf @AlonPinkas 2/ to humiliate and publicly disrespect the country's first black President, someone who was genuinely beloved by a lot of these people and symbolized a kind of America they wanted to see in the future. BN also increasingly made Israel (as most Americans would see it) as a ...
Dec 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Spinning off from the carnage in Israel and Gaza I see we’re now debating which regional foods are owned by what national group, what’s cultural appropriation and what’s not. This is an example of how the rhetoric of cultural appropriation can quickly jump the rails …
2/ into a clumsy and misguided essentialism, as though national groups are rigid and fixed, uninfluenced and primordial. The discourse of appropriation can go on some quite unexpected directions. What is the oldest and most foundational cultural appropriation in the …
Nov 1, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I want to share a few thoughts on this thread. First, it contains A LOT of minor and not so minor historical errors. But one central argument is unquestionably true and that is that the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language was a central part of the Zionist project almost ...
2/ from the very beginning. And that "almost" is mainly a factor of what you call the beginning. This is both central to Zionist ideology and, if you think about it, virtually inescapable if you're trying to create a new community or nation-state. Is each national group ...
Oct 18, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I have no ability to evaluate grainy videos and what different blast patterns look like. But I’ve spent several years developing lists of open source intelligence and forensic analysts who are consistently credible. That doesn’t mean they’re always right. But by credible …
2/ in this case I mean analysts who are highly knowledgeable in one of the relevant domains and use an empirical framework for analyzing videos, open source data etc. A lot of these come out of the Bellingcat world, others have grown out of the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts.
Aug 11, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Let’s admit that every reporter in DC knows but most won’t say for fear of falling out of favor with the bothsides rules of official DC: there is a two-tiered Justice System. One for Democrats, in which the most exacting focus on conflicts of interest are followed, often going …
2/ well beyond not only what the law or established norms require but sometimes even basic logic. Meanwhile for Republicans most of these rules simply don’t apply. Ever. Does anyone think that a newly installed President Trump in 2025 would leave in place US Attorneys …
Jul 22, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Lots of discussion of Floridas new African-American history curriculum, especially that line about slavery helping slaves develop skills which they might be able to use for their own benefit. Is that like representative? How is the curriculum as a whole? Well, I’ve read …
2/ the entire updated AAH curriculum just updated. By way of background, I have a PhD in American history w a focus on the colonial period but covering all of Am history. I havent been professionally engaged in the literature as a working historian for abt 25 years. But I …
Jun 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It’s helpful Bill telling us who he is with this taunt. This isn’t an effort to fund a debate. It’s simply an attack. Below this tweet Mark Cuban post a video take down of RFK jr junior that’s actually fairly glorious.
2/ Just one RFK jr bullshit line after another shot to smithereens. Watch it. It’s hilarious. I don’t know who broke RFK jr. I do remember all the way back in 2004 he led a lot of desperate people down the garden path with his supposed numerical analysis showing …
Jun 17, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A friend asked me my take on this thread. So I’m seeing it a bit late. As someone who knows A LOT about Democratic politics, this is all true. If you were asking my own take I’d probably focus less on the anger abt getting exiled, though that is definitely part of it.
2/ In Star Wars terms, these two were on the dark side before they got the boot. Many on the left say yeah they were always triangulators and centrists and all that. They suck. And they may suck because of that. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, the dark side.
Jun 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’m not that familiar with this particular degenerate. But two thoughts. One, every founder of the country wld hear this and say their version of fuck you, gimbus. Second it wld be hilarious to acquaint this freak with how things worked in 1220.
One of the fun “socially conservative”things that could happen in much of Europe was that the local manor lord could stop by & fuck your daughter. And also you weren’t allowed to move. You might take lord to court. Unfortunately the lord had his own private court you had to use.
Jun 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I’ve only read the lead of the CNN Alberta piece, going to dive in shortly. But the gist is pretty clear. Also seeing people asking why did they agree to the access? I think the answer to that question is clear. PR folks literally and figuratively work for their boss. And the …
2/ boss thought his plan would and was working. I’ve seldom seen a plan for a major media property so fundamentally misunderstand the environment in which the brand operates. It’s not that anyone botched anything. The whole theory of what cnn is and what cable news is …
Jun 1, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
"The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out ...
2/ We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults." - Meyer Lansky, recalling breaking up Nazi German-American Bund rallies in the 1930s, this one in Yorkville on the Upper Eastside.
May 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The deal seems broadly as billed. Can Mccarthy sell it and keep the speakership. Broadly they got jack. This is abt the agreement you’d expect if there were just a normal budget negotiation - i.e., the non parliamentary terrorism approach. What they hope for is Freedom Caucus …
2/ votes no but majority of GOPs yes and Biden can bring along a few dozen Dems to make up the difference. Even though no Dem like the details there are plenty who will see that Biden cut a much better deal than expected. So he can get those votes. But here’s where the …
May 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Okay, here's my take. Obviously the tech snafu at the beginning is going to be the irresistible headline. A major fail. The announcement he read was a mess. Once they actually got down to talking, DeSantis is fairly good at talking about the issues that matter to ...
2/ him. But the issue is what matters to him. This is a way way WAY online minded campaign. And really lives within the keyboard warrior world of the right. What are the issues a winning GOP presidential campaign is going to run on? Border, Inflation, weakness abroad, etc.
May 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Another good example of blue check as the symbol of eagerness to fluff Elon Musk. This is a complicated situation for every internet company. And many have decided to block certain content in the face of govt demands. But seldom as automatically as Musk seems to. They've often...
2/ put up much more of fight and they've sometimes prevailed. These guys make it like it's the same as complying with a warrant. It's not. Also Musk bought Twitter as Mr Free Speech absolutist. So no, it's really not the same at all. Let's also remember that Musk ...
The history of this region and Russia/Us relations going back thirty years is complicated. I've shifted my own opinion on over the last six or seven years. There is a quite reasonable though I think increasingly flawed argument that US/NATO set the stage for this by ...
May 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
lol. I don’t know if this is a glitch or not but a short time after we got an email from twitter saying hey you’d be a great candidate for our $100 a month api access plan the share buttons on our articles appear to have switched to automatically logging the user …
2/ out of Twitter. Given the state of the code base it’s entirely possible this is an unrelated glitch. But seems quite a coincidence. Login also seemed not to be working on the web app, so after a few attempts to log back in my account was locked. Happily I still have …
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