We’re at the end of the drive, folks. Three more days. Friday is the last day. We’re at $445,000. That’s 89% of the way toward our goal. We have $55,000 to go. If you’ve been waiting, if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time. We can still get there but we’ll need a big final surge to do it. Here’s the link. It’s super fast, especially if you’re already a site member. We thank you in advance.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

The Washington Post published a piece this weekend on the ways in which moderate Republicans in the House are getting sick of the far-right Freedom Caucus’ ongoing revolt as its members flex their power over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), pushing increasingly extreme and sometimes bizarre messaging bills that will harm those in swing districts in 2024. There’s an interesting nugget of reporting tucked into the piece that touches on the trend we’ve seen since Roe was overturned: Republicans are seeing the writing on the wall with abortion and it’s not looking pretty.

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.