I hadn’t planned on flagging this part of what we do with the TPM Journalism Fund today. But I just got this note from TPM Reader JC which kind of touched my heart. So I wanted to share it with you. The context is that Journalism Fund contributions are what make possible our community membership program which provides free memberships to those in financial need and registered students.

I just wanted to say thanks to TPM and my fellow TPM members. For the past few years I have not been able to work full time due to a major medical event, and I am grateful for the existence of the community membership. Talking Points Memo was part of my political awakening way back during follies of the Bush Administration and I have been a reader since. So thank you to my fellow members and to TPM for doing a little extra to make this crucial resource available for those of us going through some things. 😉 

To my semi-surprise and with immense gratitude I’m seeing that we actually have a shot at hitting our $500,000 goal for this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. It ends Friday and we’re currently at $431,000. That’s more than 85% of the way toward our goal. If you’ve considered contributing please make it today. We will be so stoked and relieved to hit the big number I can’t even tell you. Just click right here.

In this just published article Emine Yücel calls our attention to this web video the DeSantis campaign posted over the weekend which, on its face, is meant to focus GOP primary voters’ attention on the fact that ex-President Trump in the past at least professed to be supportive of the LGBTQ and trans communities. That is now an unforgivable act among many Republicans. But as she notes, it mixes garden variety gay-bashing with a flurry of hard-to-miss homoerotic imagery pushing Ron himself. As I put it in my less guarded Twitter voice: the “weird thing is the first half of this ad is pure gay/trans bashing but then shifts into a kind DeSantis Full Official Beefcake/He Man weirdness. are Ron and RFK jr gonna do some gonzo scenes together? … The ad also captures how the transition I note isn’t even that strange. Ron is going to both bring the hammer down on the sissies and also be the rough king of the leather bar.”

Besides having some fun at DeSantis’s expense, there’s a very real underlying issue here that’s worth unpacking. It’s become something of a cliché to say that DeSantis’ campaign is way too online, by which people mean that his campaign spends a lot of time pushing memes and ideas that resonate with the online right but can appear obscure or disturbing even to most Republicans, let alone the normal, loosely-affiliated people who count most in general elections.

If you didn’t catch it in The Weekender this weekend I hope you take a moment to read about how our Associate Editor Nicole Lafond has a secret backstory briefly working for a certain recently fired Fox New personality with a primetime weekday evening show.

Toward the end of last week, as David Kurtz and Joe Ragazzo took the lead on the drive, for the first time I started to think we would actually hit our goal. Not certain, mind you. But increasingly confident. We have the holiday taking up a lot of the first half of this week. And the last day of the drive is Friday. So there’s not a lot of time left. Right now as I write we’re $137 short of $430,000. So we’ll almost certainly hit that milestone tonight. That’s 86% of the way toward our goal. As Joe said on Friday, once we got past $400,000, the momentum started to build again. It will be a photo finish. But I think we’ve got a good shot.

The New Yorker has a marvelous — in both sense of the word — piece out this morning about the doomed OceanGate submersible. Reporter Ben Taub gained access to new materials. It puts to rest whatever possibility there might still be that the criticisms of the safety of the Titan craft might be some form of Monday-morning quarterbacking. Everyone with experience in submersibles who made contact with this thing was sure it was a death trap. Taub has the receipts, the contemporaneous whistleblowing documents, the lawyers tasked with gagging them. An amazing and terrible story.

A numbers of readers have written in this morning to tell us that Twitter no longer allows you to see any of the content on the platform unless you log in. Logging in is pretty simple of course. But you need an account. And many of you don’t have one and don’t want one. That is a very reasonable position. While I continue to spend an inordinate amount of time on the platform, not wanting to have any connection to it is a totally reasonable stance. Indeed, under it’s current degenerate ownership it’s probably a good stance. For myself, a mix of character defects and needing to promote TPM keeps me there.

The one thing this really impacts is those lists I sometimes flag to your attention — a couple about Ukraine, one about electoral number crunching, one about COVID. I find those immensely valuable tools for keeping abreast of key topics.

We’re on an emerging investigative story that we just learned about this morning. Ron DeSantis apparently came to Manhattan to have pizza with Tucker Carlson replacement Jesse Waters. You can see an image here from Axios.

Let me share a few brief and general thoughts on today’s decision.

First, on its internal logic, the decision can appear compelling. But step back and you see that a specific class of Americans who were enslaved for two centuries and then mostly lived under a system of legal apartheid for another century somehow still remain largely excluded from social and economic preferment. And we’re told that the constitution not only bars the government from doing anything about that but also bars private institutions from attempting to do anything about that. Judged from that more holistic perspective it’s very hard to see how that can possibly be right whatever the internal logic of “color blindness.”

My colleague Kate Riga will do a better job explaining the nuances and particulars. For myself, I can only say this is no surprise. I think it affirms the point I made yesterday which is that to the degree there is any shift on the Court it is pulling back from giving SCOTUS goodies to every rightwinger who has an ideological hobbyhorse and servicing every electoral need of the Republican Party. The blowback and backlash may have made the costs of that bust-out jurisprudence a bit too high. Rather they’ll concentrate on the core stuff they really care about. And affirmative action has been one of the core half dozen or so things the conservative judicial movement has cared about for decades. They have the power and they’re gonna do it.