November 13th marked our 23rd anniversary at TPM. During these past 23 years I’ve managed to write as much as I have because I kept to a simple approach, which was following whatever aspect of US politics and political culture interested me most. This worked because it combined the exertion and mental energy most put toward ‘work’ with the off-hours hobbies, life, downtime and, if possible, fun we do outside of work. One might also call this obsession. But it worked in terms of productivity, focus and drive. Indeed, for those who enjoy the Editors’ Blog one of the things that makes it compelling is following the idiosyncrasies of my interests and particular storylines I latch on to. Or, so many are saying …

But over the last couple months that pattern has shifted for me in that my mind has been heavily preoccupied by something that isn’t US politics. The Israel-Hamas war has a clear bearing on US politics. Some people think it could turn the 2024 presidential election, though I suspect its salience will decrease dramatically over the coming months, as most big news stories do. At the moment it’s the dominant national news story in the US and has been for weeks. But it’s not really a US story. More importantly my interest in it goes far beyond its bearings on US politics. So I’ve been aware that my focus has shifted from things at the heart of US politics toward subject matter that is, in many ways parochial, communal and personal. And that’s not what TPM is about, at least not in its current iteration.

And it’s not like we’re in a slow period in American politics. But there we are.

In a few recent posts we’ve discussed the question of whether one state or two states is the most logical or possible resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (You can see my argument here.) A few days ago TPM Reader RC sent me this April Foreign Affairs article, Israel’s One-State Reality. It was written by three scholars at GW and another at the University of Maryland. The piece was interesting to me because it illustrates a lot of what the one state argument is really about. As the title suggests, the article is not so much an argument that one state in Israel-Palestine is a solution to anything but an assertion that it is the current reality.

In other words, Israel’s not a country that functions as a democracy while controlling occupied territories whose final status will be decided at some point in the future. It’s a single country in which all Jews have political and civil rights and most Palestinians have limited civil rights and no political rights. Given that the post-67 occupation has persisted for 56 years, this argument has many merits to it. But what is the import of that assertion? In itself it’s simply a definitional claim. That part comes next. It’s an argument for the withdrawal of US support and some escalating framework of sanctions to compel Israel to come up to international standards in which one ethnic group or most of it facing systemic legal discrimination just isn’t okay.

I recognize that this post is somewhat preaching to the choir. But I wanted to discuss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters for America. If you haven’t followed this closely a brief recap: Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has been in a battle both to make the platform a free-fire zone for racists, Nazis and other violent and bad actors and keep advertisers, who don’t want to be associated with those people, on the platform. He has made the matter more coherent by, incrementally over the last year, himself becoming the most prominent of those racists and Nazis. This is not hyperbole. He now routinely promotes and explicitly agrees with the most ghastly and dangerous forms of antisemitism and racism.

The pattern is consistent and clear: 1) Musk either promotes or parrots racist or anti-semitic speech. 2) Activist groups catalogue the prevalence of such speech on the platform and in some cases records advertisements appearing immediately adjacent to those posts and speech. 3) Advertisers get upset and pull their ads. 4) Elon Musk gets upset and sues (or threatens to sue) the activist group. It has the fixed pattern and regularity of cellular respiration, only with money and bad people.

Over the weekend I had an exchange with TPM Reader AB that I’d like to share with you. AB is a dedicated listener to our podcast (and you should be too!) as well as a reader and he flagged an exchange in which my cohost Kate Riga discussed Donald Trump’s recent “vermin” comments, which mapped quite closely to a lot of Nazi rhetoric from the 1920s and 1930s. The comments would have gotten more attention, she said, had they happened in the heat of the campaign instead of 9 months or a year prior. AB insisted that we need to be vigilant. We need to be sounding Red Alerts. We can’t be complacent thinking the actual election is a year off and everything will change for be better.

To be clear, this was an aside from Kate in part of a longer discussion. And AB himself seemed to recognize this. So I raise this not to disagree with anyone or call anyone out. I note it because it illustrates an impulse and dynamic I think countless Democrats (and others who simply oppose Donald Trump) are finding themselves caught up in. I won’t belabor the foundational point. Trump 1.0 was really bad. Trump 2.0 promises to be much worse. A year out, polls suggest Trump and Biden are tied or with Trump slightly ahead in the popular vote. That makes something really unthinkable seem like a very real possibility.

That’s bad. Really bad. So get to sounding the Red Alerts. Break the glass and pull the alarm. Pick your metaphor. These are all very understandable and logical responses, not so much — in my mind at least — because of the percentage chances of one candidate winning over the other but because of the consequences of a bad outcome.