Yesterday morning TPM Reader MS asked, “Is it my imagination or has the press turned against Trump?” It may seem that way and perhaps it is effectively the case. But not precisely. What’s happened over the last week — and especially in response to the Kanye/Fuentes/Trump hoedown — illustrates a key feature of the political journalism and news ecosystems.

No, it’s not that the press has turned against Trump. It’s that Republican political elites are not defending him. That changes the tenor of press coverage in clear and immediate ways. If one party is defending something or supporting it, it trips off the framework of “bias” or rather what we might call “press bias avoidance.” So such and such happened or so and so did this. Many say it’s bad. But what do their defenders say? Their defenders say X. It’s a story with two sides. Events like the January 6th insurrection and the Big Lie have put this model under strain. But it’s persistent and robust.

It’s a fascinating thing to watch far-right radicalization unfold in real time. I’ve been watching the Elon Musk and Twitter drama with a mix of fascination and awe. He bought Twitter as part of his romance with the “free speech”/anti-“cancel culture” right and Donald Trump. Just what set him off on that path has never been adequately or convincingly explained, though there are a number of very plausible and not-mutually exclusive theories. Over the last four weeks Musk’s attachment to this crowd and that ideology have been constantly apparent. He gave an early and even for him startling taste of this when he tweeted out a rank gay-bashing conspiracy theory about the QAnon dead-ender’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi days before the November 8th election. The process has only accelerated and intensified over the subsequent four weeks.

As he virtually high-fives supporters on Twitter he’s moved on from “free speech” and ending bans on people like Donald Trump to a much more explicit insistence that old Twitter management ran the site with the express purpose of elevating the left over the right. So just two days ago, for instance, he wrote: “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely. Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field. No more thumb on the scale!”

I wanted to share TPM Reader JB’s take on the November 8th election, even though it’s not mine. As is so often the case, what can be valuable about a take isn’t whether it’s “right” or you agree with it, but whether it allows you to see a set of facts in a new way.

Here’s JB’s view followed by a short rejoinder with my own …

Interesting little detail here. Back in October when Kevin McCarthy thought he’d be presiding over a big House majority he said he had yet to see any impeachable offenses committed under the Biden administration. Now the Freedom Caucusers, who hold his fate in their hands, are holding that statement over him. As CNN reporter Melanie Zanona puts it, McCarthy’s now singing a different tune. Indeed, he’ll sing, dance, do a slapstick number. McCarthy is now begging to be Speaker. I’m with Rep. Dusty Johnson (R) of South Dakota when he tells CNN that even though it’s really not clear how McCarthy pulls this off, somehow they figure he gets it done. I agree.

It was expected but now it’s official. Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK) who was elected to Congress earlier this year in a special election to replace the late Rep. Don Young (R) has defeated former half-term governor Sarah Palin by the solid margin of 55% to 45%.

Peltola is the first Alaska Native woman to serve in Congress. Peltola came just shy of the 50% threshold in the first round of voting and shot up to 55% when second choices were sorted in Alaska ranked choice voting system.

For some time now a number of you have been asking if I can send my Editors’ Blog posts to members by email. So I’ve decided to give it a try. Each day I’ll pick what seems to me the most meaty and important post and that will go out to members by email. Never more than one a day and not every day. But that will be the general format. Along with that post, in a simple and unadorned format, I’ll include a few links to other posts and additional sources of information that are worth your time to check out. We don’t want to send you anything you don’t want to get. So, if it’s not for you, there’s a clear link at the bottom of each email that allows you to change your email preferences to not get any emails from the Editors’ Blog. Try not to do a general unsubscribe because, if you do, we can’t send you any updates about TPM events or important things going on at the site.

Coming out of the 2022 midterms, conventional wisdom pointed to one lesson for the GOP: Voters didn’t like Big Lie MAGA Republicans. The Big Lie and MAGA have become all but indistinguishable. But to the extent they are distinguishable, if you came to the game on the back of a Trump endorsement, you probably didn’t fare well in 2022. The best example are all those Big Lie secretary of state candidates in swing states. Every last one of them lost. That and related defeats are what has given rivals in the GOP at least an opening to challenge Trump for leadership of the party. After years when he could make or break anyone in the GOP, in 2022 Trump looked like an electoral loser. Conventional wisdom is usually most noteworthy for what it misses. But the signal here was so strong as to be undeniable: Trump had a stranglehold on the GOP. But in a general election his embrace was toxic, except in solidly red states.

Today we have a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of Michigan against Neil Matthew Walter who the United States government charges with making threats against the lives of Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA) and FBI Director Christopher Wray. On checking Walter’s Facebook page investigators found “numerous comments stating beliefs that half the Senators, the FBI, CIA, police, Tom Cruise, and Elon Musk are involved in a child slave rape ring, listing various locations where these rings are located, one of which identified the United States Capitol Building.”

In other words, yet another QAnon/MAGA domestic terrorist riled up by the endless parade of incitement usually centering on Democrats running pedophilia rings. Another player in the same bucket as the man who bashed in the head of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband days before the midterm election.

Walter’s interest in Cruise and Musk just adds a bit of variety to the mix.

We build stories out of the messy, contradictory realities of our lives. Rich Fierro is the hero of the mass shooting at the Club Q, the gay club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We need more heroes and fewer events that create them. Fierro is a retired Army major who appears to have had something approaching a flashback, a reflex response from the brutalizing violence he experienced in Iraq when Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire in the night club.

These are the indelible memories, psychic damage that haunt so many veterans. In interviews, Fierro has said they haunt him too and were one of the reasons he left the military. In this moment, though, they were lifesaving. Fierro rushed, tackled, disarmed and violently beat Aldrich, alongside another patron and a trans dancer in the club who helped subdue him. Numerous accounts include the evocative detail that the dancer helped subdue Aldrich by stomping him with her high heel.

Nice scoop here. Local reports, one of which I picked up last night, had it that the top official in Maricopa County, Arizona had had to go into hiding after the midterms because of threats tied to the midterms. That’s not the case, though he still has additional security provided by the Sheriff’s Dept. It turns out, as Kaila Philo reports, that this happened on election night, when Republican Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates had to be taken to an undisclosed location under armed guard because of Big Lie-themed threats.

Ironically, it is often Republican elected officials who are the top targets of MAGA-aligned terrorist groups and paramilitaries.