I’ve written several posts about Twitter and new boss Elon Musk recently. I’ll probably be writing more. I realize that for those of you who aren’t on Twitter this might seem like an odd or perhaps even annoying focus. This is a political news site, Josh. Why are you going on about Twitter? At one level, I’ve always followed the rule of letting my interests drive my writing focus at TPM. But I don’t write about my ideas about medieval history or my estimation of the new Charlie Watts biography. Here I write about things in the broadly political domain. And Musk’s absurd but consequential Twitter adventure is right at the center of the bigger political issues that animate our age.

One simple note about the polls, especially if you’re a poll obsessive. There’s little question that trends have moved in a GOP direction since mid-October. But there is an important caveat to this. In key Senate races around the country, the polling zone has been absolutely flooded over the last couple weeks with partisan GOP polls. In some cases, I mean literally polls fielded by GOP committees or organizations. In other cases I mean polls like Rasmussen or Trafalgar which may be nominally independent but are clearly partisan and routinely have poll results more friendly to Republican candidates.

“ELON MUSK (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.” That’s the lede in Jon Schwarz’s piece on the Elon Musk era on Twitter. I think he is right on target. And that was before Musk went full Alex Jones this morning.

So to give you a sense of how this is going, Elon Musk started the day by replying to Hillary Clinton’s condemnation of the Pelosi attack with a link to an article containing an anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. I don’t want to get into the details. But let your imagination go wild and it’s that bad. Now he’s deleted the tweet and is getting attacked by his alt-right fans for giving into the left wing mob. Twitter has always been a marginal proposition in business terms. I suspect that the advertiser exodus had already started. Whatever its other shortcomings, Facebook in its day was a killer app when it came to ad targeting. Advertisers found it impossible not to be there. The post-2016 climate has taken a toll regardless. Its market cap has now collapsed. Twitter is a far more marginal buy for advertisers.

After yesterday’s Proud Boys rally in Hialeah, Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon appeared at a GOP event in Miami Springs today during which he gave a fiery speech with numerous new details about the allegedly politically motivated attack he suffered a week ago. Remember that in the initial report to police he didn’t mention any political remarks at all. Now they said “F**k Marco Rubio,” along with threatening to kill Monzon for being a Republican.

The Herald also has more details about the father of one of the attackers who apparently tried to break up the fight. According to the Herald he also introduced a limp today that he didn’t have yesterday.

Basically every eyewitness or contemporaneous police report makes it fairly clear that this was a street fight of some sort that Monzon and Rubio are now making into a kind of GOP martyrdom story.

It is a relatively minor part of the overall story. But one lingering question is just how the police got to the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as quickly as they did. Was it a call to 911 or a triggered house alarm? According to this article from The San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Pelosi called 911 and then left the call open, allowing the dispatcher to hear at least part of what was transpiring in the home after David DePape had broken in.

There’s more with the Rubio canvasser attack story.

Sunday night two men assaulted Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon. Rubio went on Twitter the next day claiming it was a politically motivated attack. But Monzon did not say anything like that in the police report of the incident and only began making the claim after Rubio did. Attention has also focused on the fact that Monzon has a long history with racist and antisemitic extremist groups, including being one of the alt-righters at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally in 2017.

Today Rubio angrily attacked the press for “smearing” Monzon’s past, claiming that Monzon had “rejected” his past extremism. But today he was the guest of honor at a Proud Boys rally organized to support him.

“I’m going to clear my name,” Monzon told The Miami Herald in a brief impromptu interview at the rally.

As we go into the weekend, a few updates on the overnight attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco.

Just to bring us all up to speed, rapidly emerging details appear to show that the overnight attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was politically motivated and targeted Speaker Pelosi herself, who was not at home at the time of the attack. According to reporters briefed on the investigation, the hammer-wielding intruder shouted “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”

We will take this story one step at a time and update you as we learn more. But the general outlines of what did happen and could have happened look more and more clear.

Faced with calls to share the oil industry’s 2022 windfall with the American people, Exxon CEO Darren Woods says he’s doing just that — in the form of a big dividend payout to shareholders. No really. I’m not kidding. “There has been discussion in the U.S. about our industry returning some of our profits directly to the American people,” says Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the form of our quarterly dividend.”