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.

TPM is a small company and at small companies, people have various responsibilities that at larger companies would each be handled by different people, or even entirely different departments. Some larger media outlets might have whole fundraising teams. We do not. And so, over the last three weeks, TPM’s staff has been talking about our TPM Journalism Fund drive and explaining how it fits into what we do.

Yet, the fact remains I am TPM’s publisher and so my ultimate responsibility is to make sure TPM brings in more money than it spends. So answering the question, “Why do you ask people to give you contributions?” falls, ultimately, to me. Why have memberships if you are just going to ask for money? Why don’t you sell more ads? Why don’t you have an events business? Why don’t you sell merch? Are you simply bad at being a publisher?

All fair questions, especially the last one! So here I want to explain why we have the TPM Journalism Fund. There’s a short and a long explanation. I think through other posts and through various pitches on the site, you’ve seen the short explanations: We face a particularly challenging financial year in a particularly challenging industry and rather than shrink in size, we want to keep our momentum going. In the past, we’ve said we’ll use the contributions from the TPM Journalism Fund to expand our investigative capacity and provide free memberships to readers who need them. These are good and true reasons. If this is all you need to hear, then by all means go right here and contribute. But if you are looking for a deeper explanation, stick around.

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.

There is a ballot initiative on track to go before New York voters next fall that, if approved, would codify abortion access and several other things, including LGBTQ rights, into the state constitution. While it is jarring to imagine a world in which such a protection would be necessary in very blue New York, it falls in line with efforts in other blue and purple — and even some red — states post-Dobbs, as the rogue Supreme Court signals that other privacy-related rights may also be at risk.

But New York Democrats are also taking political lessons from other states that have witnessed the energizing power of abortion for the party in elections since Roe’s overturning and are viewing the ballot measure as a tool to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House.