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.

The Republican Party still has no idea how to position itself nationally on abortion after its Dobbs success. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that, electorally, it will continue to be a winning issue in driving independent voters toward Democrats.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the major abortion drug rulings, the expulsion (and return) of lawmakers in the Tennessee House and Senator Bob Casey’s (D-PA) announcement of his reelection run.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

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.

The world’s second richest man has been having a really “painful” time running Twitter, the once-handy and dare I say functional social media platform that has become completely unusable since his takeover.

Elon Musk also admitted that he only went through with the $44 billion purchase because a judge was about to force him to buy it.

In a wide-ranging interview with BBC, the billionaire addressed a number of issues that have been plaguing his image and his social media platform in recent months as he’s instituted mass layoffs and claimed he’s wiping the website of bots and fake news, while deplatforming journalists and trusted media organizations.

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.

In the wake of Idaho’s passage of a new, first-of-its-kind law that bans some interstate travel to receive abortion care, new data sheds light on just how crucial out-of-state travel has been and will continue to be in this post-Roe America.

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.