TPM Reader OM responds to my post on the running constitutional crisis in Israel …

One question you discuss is whether the protests are trying to block an elected gov’t from doing what it was elected to do. The campaign that Netanyahu and his far-right allies ran was focused heavily on two things: (1) soaring cost of living, and (2) rising crime, especially in the Arab sector of Israeli society. They promised to crack down on crime, return a sense of security, the usual thing right-wing parties promise. They said not a word about “judicial reform” (i.e., the anti democratic regime change). 

In his subtle critique of the curriculum, the only Black Republican member of Florida’s congressional delegation gave the DeSantis administration an out.

Let’s cut to another scene from the ongoing death rattle of the DeSantis for President campaign. Yesterday, along with firing a third of the staff because it’s running out of money, the DeSantis campaign fired a staffer who made a campaign video, laced it with far right and Nazi imagery and then farmed it out to a fan site to obscure that it was produced by the campaign. Do you remember this story? Didn’t we hear about this a few days ago? About how the crazy ad supposedly made by a fan was actually cut in-house? At first I was confused too. Actually the same thing had happened all over again. A few weeks ago there was that gay and trans-bashing ad that over the weekend we learned from the Times had actually been produced in house by the DeSantis campaign. Then, over the weekend, a now-fired staffer named Nate Hochman produced an aesthetically comparable ad and farmed it out to a DeSantis supporting Twitter account called DeSantiscams so that the campaign could then amplify it.

Is Israel’s sharp turn away from even a flawed democracy leading prominent Israeli intellectuals to question political Zionism itself? That’s the conclusion I drew from reading Yuval Noah Hariri’s column in the Financial Times, entitled “Israeli Democracy Fighting for its Life.”

Donald Trump continues to wield power over the Republican Party in a way that no other 2024er has been able to penetrate quite yet. As the former president out-fundraises his competition and enjoys wide leads in early voting states like South Carolina and Iowa, the man considered to be his most serious challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running out of money. Politico reported just this afternoon that the Florida governor is letting one-third of his staff go, reportedly amid concerns over campaign coffers.

And his position of dominance over the party extends beyond the campaign circuit and into Congress.

We flagged it down in Livewire. But I just have to mention it. Following last week’s blood letting, Ron DeSantis is now canning more than a third of his campaign staff as his campaign continues to bleed out.

A couple days ago I got this email from TPM Reader PT. I was sort of delaying responding because it’s a really complex question. So I’ve decided to post the question and reply here. I preface by noting I’m not an expert on Israeli politics. I don’t live there. But I have followed it closely for many years. So I put it forward on that basis.

From PT …

It feels like this whole year I’ve been trying to understand the situation in Israel — specifically the fact that the governing coalition wants to make a fundamental change to the country’s political organization and is facing furious pushback from the citizenry. My first thought was that it had a certain “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” energy to it: Netanyahu’s overriding priority is to ensure that he isn’t prosecuted for corruption, which means that his overriding priority is to destroy the court system in Israel; hence if you elect a governing coalition that includes him and makes him PM, destruction of the court system is a given. So how do we arrive in a place where everyone knows that Netanyahu’s goal is to destroy the court system, the electorate elects a government that will make him PM, and then the electorate protests when he does what everyone knows he’s going to do.

After thinking about it some more, I have a somewhat different take:

The retired school teacher who ultimately survived an expulsion vote brought by her Republican colleagues in the Tennessee state House earlier this year — part of an effort that did ultimately expel two of her younger, Black colleagues — is reportedly planning to challenge Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) for her seat next year.

No Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006, when then-Gov. Phil Bredesen secured his reelection. But a face-off between Blackburn — who has a history of staunch opposition to tightening gun control — and state Rep. Gloria Johnson, (D) whose expulsion vote was predicated on her support for children and parents protesting lax gun laws in the state legislature, could test the energizing power of gun reform in a state recently racked by a deadly school shooting.

You’ve probably seen coverage of the firestorm over Florida’s newly updated African-American history curriculum. Most of the coverage has (understandably) focused on the quote that suggest that slaves were taught skills which they could use for their own benefit. (“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”) I read the entire updated curriculum. So I wanted to share my take. As most of you know, I have a PhD in American history, with a focus on the colonial period but covering the full sweep of American history. I haven’t been professionally engaged with the literature for about 25 years. But I generally keep up.

Overall the text isn’t as clownish as that one quote might suggest — a low bar. But there are still pretty major problems. As is usually the case with educational standards, they tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication. Along the way, there’s a decent amount of general sloppiness and a hard-to-miss affirmative action for right-wing Black intellectuals. I want to focus on three points. These are by no means exhaustive. They’re just the ones that struck me as most glaring and also illustrative. 

As we continue to watch the ignominious collapse of Ron DeSantis’s campaign (predicted many months ago by yours truly but not like I’m focusing on that or anything), there’s a curious bit of backstory I’m reminded of. But before we get to that I wanted to flag this weekend New York Times article. It’s so passively devastating I think DeSantis’s estate might have a plausible wrongful death claim against the authors.

Most of the attention to this article has focused on a scooplet about that infamous gay/trans-bashing video. The story was that it was put together by some unknown fan in the DeSantis-o-sphere. The campaign simply picked it up and amplified it. The Times reports that in fact it was produced by a campaign staffer who then gave it to a Ron fan site to release so that the campaign could then pick it up from the fan. In other words, the campaign laundered it out for some plausible deniability.

My takeaway from the piece was different: The campaign appears to be trapped in a sort of people-hating, private-jet-taking death loop. We learn from the article that Ron and wife Casey really, really like flying on private jets, which of course cost a ton of money. I confess that I’m not a huge fan of flying. But if I were, a private jet would probably be pretty cool. But it’s also not hard to see their extreme attachment to private jets as part of or at least a symbol of not liking being around regular people. Maybe not liking being around anybody at all. Some people just want the privacy to unwind with a handful of pudding.