We are currently at exactly 400 408 420 429 440 sign ups in our annual TPM membership drive. 100 92 80 71 60 to go. We think we’re going to make it.

Here’s a new article from the Post on Jack Teixeira which contains a series of assumptions I can only call disturbing. The headline reads, “He’s from a patriotic family — and allegedly leaked U.S. secrets.” In the vein of that headline, the article presents Teixeira as a bundle of contradictions. He didn’t want to hurt America. He was a patriotic guy from a patriotic, military family, etc.

Late yesterday evening, The Washington Post published the first detailed look at just how the currently unfolding and massive leak of classified U.S. intelligence happened. It’s an almost literally incredible story and some of it does strain credulity. The gist of the story is that an early-to-mid 20s member of the U.S. military with wide-ranging access to highly classified intelligence set up a Discord chat group made up of pandemic-bored gamers in which he operated as something between a guru and a cult leader. The group was a few dozen men, many of them teens and some from abroad. The Post describes him as a “young, charismatic gun enthusiast.”

He sketched out a quasi-paranoid anti-statist worldview, and mixed garden variety far-right and racist memes with emotional support and guidance. Gun worship was also central. He claimed to be able to foretell events and in some cases appeared able to do so. At the center of his enterprise was sharing classified material, which, over the last month, started spreading from the original Discord server and shaking up international relations around the world. The classified documents were the validator of his inside status, his role at the center of the overbearing American state. In a sense he was running his own private Q cult, with a small group of bored-depressed gamer teens. Only in this case, “OG,” as he was called in this tiny community, really did have access to some of the U.S. government’s most closely guarded secrets.

If this sounds unreal, you’ve got it about right. One surreal passage in the Post story describes getting the permission of the parents of one of its sources since the source is still a minor and apparently came into “OG’s” orbit as a young teen.

There’s an ugly political spectacle playing out in press reports and on social media tonight about Sen. Dianne Feinstein who has appeared frail and sometimes confused in recent public appearances and has been absent from the Senate since February suffering from shingles. Feinstein agreed under pressure last year to announce that she would retire at the end of her present term in January 2025. Now there is another round of media pressing her to resign sooner. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) became the first high-ranking Democrat today to call for Feinstein to step down.

This is an undignified and unkind spectacle that shouldn’t be playing out on Twitter or in press stories. Feinstein should simply step down. There is no issue she espouses that wouldn’t be advocated for by an appointed successor in 2023–24 and an elected one in 2025. The idea that it is acceptable to be absent from the Senate for months at a time with no clear prospect of return is absurd.

I said on Twitter this afternoon that rather than allowing the current spectacle to play out publicly, it is incumbent on Gov. Newsom and Sen. Schumer to go to Sen. Feinstein and/or her family and/or her staff and say she needs to step down. A number of people responded that those conversations have probably already taken place but to no avail.

Is that true? Maybe. Probably. But clearly not directly enough or clearly enough.

Our annual membership drive is off to a solid start. And now we’re in sight of meeting our goal. More is great. But 500 new members is the minimum we truly need. We’ve now signed up 363 new subscribers. So we need just 137 more. No one likes subscription pitches. I’d rather be writing new stuff. But these brass tacks numbers are what allow this organization to operate, keep us flourishing and focused. If you’ve not yet become a member please take a moment right now to join us. I know myself that there are plenty of things I plan in some vague sense to do but just don’t get around to. So take this moment, literally right now, and take the plunge. Click right here. Thank you.

Democrats are rightly hitting Republicans for voting to “defund” the police in the form of federal law enforcement, and scheduling test votes like the one Majority Leader Chuck Schumer just announced. (This follows Trump’s demand that Republicans vote to cut off funding for the DOJ and FBI to force the end of the various prosecutions that await him.) This comes after Democrats have voted several times since the beginning of the pandemic to increase funding for law enforcement and Republicans have voted no. But there’s a broader and more sinister process unfolding that needs to be at the center of national conversation.

We’ve got two important looks at the travesty of the Kacsmaryk decision both as a matter of legal reasoning and for its potential impact far beyond pharmaceutical abortions. But I wanted to focus briefly on a dimension of the political and electoral impact for the GOP. As we know from years of polling and a year of elections, abortion bans are really unpopular. But Republicans now have to deal with something beyond simple unpopularity. They have a corrupted branch of government — the federal judiciary — which they created but do not directly control, and which keeps upping the ante.

I’ve alluded a few times to the fact that TPM Publisher Joe Ragazzo and I went into this year’s Annual TPM Membership drive with no little trepidation. But the response has been pleasantly surprising and gratifying. We’re more than half way toward our goal for the drive after one week. If you’d considered joining please take a moment to do so today. Like, if you’re considering it, literally take a moment right now, take out your wallet and click here. It’s easy, will take you a couple minutes tops and you’ll be glad you did.

Today is the anniversary of a raid you may not know about. If you do, the date likely doesn’t ring a bell. What you almost certainly do know is that members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and eventually killed all of them. This led to a massive and wide-ranging campaign of retaliation by Israel (Operation Wrath of God) targeting everyone directly involved in the attack as well as those who had ordered it. The initial Munich attack and the campaign of retaliation have subsequently been chronicled in various books and even big-budget Hollywood movies.

One of those attacks came on April 10, 1973, when members of Israel’s elite commando unit — known by an acronym, Sayeret Matkal — led a raid into Beirut. Some details of the raid are set forth in an AP article published today. The head of the unit and head of the raid was Ehud Barak, who would later become the head of the IDF, the first prime minister to drive Benjamin Netanyahu from office in 1999 and finally erstwhile defense minister in later Netanyahu governments.

There are few better examples of the right-wing corruption of the federal judiciary than what happened yesterday down in Amarillo, Texas, when federal trial court “stayed” FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. The ruling applies nationwide and on its face will ban the drug when it goes into effect in seven days.

I put “stayed” in scare quotes because the ordinary meaning of a stay is to put an action on hold, to prevent it while its validity or legality is evaluated. It’s to prevent some irreversible harm. But mifepristone was approved for use in the U.S. 20 years ago. There’s no serious or substantial question whether mifepristone is safe and effective for the purpose of inducing an abortion. And that is what the FDA evaluates. It’s something federal judges don’t normally evaluate and really aren’t in any position to.

This is simply yet another backdoor way to ban another legal method to abort a pregnancy in red states and blue.