Editors’ Blog
Elmo Unbound, Miscellaneous Thoughts on Speech and Power 
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.
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The Ever-Receding ‘Day After’
In case you were feeling too rosy about the state of the world, it’s worth reading this new article by Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz (sub.req.) about “day after” scenarios in Gaza. You can believe, as I do, that Israel is and was justified in and in fact obligated to destroy Hamas’s de facto army in Gaza after the events of October 7th. Here Bar’el goes into some depth about the utter lack of any realistic plan about what comes after that happens, assuming it does happen.
I’ve already noted the malign role of the disgraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is of course ideologically opposed to any move toward self-rule or statehood for any of the Palestinian territories. At the moment what is equally important is that he sees leaving the military and “day after” questions unresolved being in his personal and political self-interest.
That is only the beginning of the problems.
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Not Enough Red Alerts To Go Around
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.
Read MoreA ‘faith-based’ leader of Moms for Liberty in Philly turns out to be (subscription required) a registered sex offender. But don’t worry: He says he was framed. It was part of a squabble from when he was part of the LaRouche movement back in Chicago, he claims.
AI and who runs the company-cum-non-profit OpenAI is far from much that concerns TPM. But I felt I had to return at least once to the topic of the previous post. Because it did turn out to be “quite a story” but a story of a totally different sort than I’d imagined. The abruptness of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster, the potential loss to investors of tens of billions of dollars and the apparent claims of malfeasance in the company’s announcement made it seem certain that some vast scale of wrongdoing must be at the heart of the story. But now it doesn’t seem like that was the case at all. We still don’t know quite what happened or why. But the weight of evidence now points to some kind of non-wrongdoing-based spat between Altman and certain members of the board. Within a day, the board was trying to get Altman to come back and be CEO again. They’re currently negotiating to see if they can get him to come back. But he may choose to just start his own company with another employee who was canned.
Read MoreYou’ve probably seen the news that Open AI, which created ChatGPT, has fired CEO Sam Altman because the board concluded he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Yikes. He was sacked as CEO and removed from the board. I come at this with no knowledge of the inner workings of the company or Altman. But when a board out of the blue fires a CEO at the helm of a company that has skyrocketed to around $80 billion in value and is at center of huge bets about future economic gains across the economy you have to assume that something really, really bad must have happened.
It may not get a lot of attention. In a way it doesn’t matter since I don’t think anyone cares that George Santos going to do serious time in prison. But in addition to the mistake he made not resigning soon after the original New York Times report last December, he made another big mistake staying in office until this week’s House Ethics report was released. Resignation from office is always a big chit in plea negotiations. There are both good public policy reasons for this (corrupt pols should be removed from office) and it appeals to prosecutors’ inherent desire for a ‘win’. Regardless of the motivation, it’s something a politician can agree to give up and get something in return.
Now it’s too late – even if in theory Santos cut a deal today ahead of getting expelled. It’s like he held on to a hot shot stock portfolio until it dropped down to penny stock levels. It’s now extremely likely he’ll be expelled from office at the end of this month. Prosecutors know that. Resigning in the face of near certain expulsion isn’t worth anything.
Israel’s Politics of Denial
As I’ve engaged with TPM Readers in response to yesterday’s Backchannel post and other recent posts on the same topic, I’ve been thinking again of the ‘big picture’ behind everything that is happening right now in Israel-Palestine. When I wrote about Students for Justice in Palestine a few days ago, I noted that that post was really more about North America than the Middle East. Activism frequently, although perhaps not always, tends to be more ideological at a distance than it is on the ground. People on the ground need to make practical and daily decision about living their lives. But as we watch this chaos and carnage and suffering unfolding from a distance, what remains the case is whatever Israel is trying to accomplish militarily, it will not amount to much if it isn’t followed by some political settlement. “Settlement” in this context probably sets up expectations too big and immediate, so much that it becomes self-defeating. So let’s say the beginnings of one. Because Israeli politics for the last fifteen years at least has been based on denial.
Read MoreIsrael’s Channel 12 released a new poll today. It told largely the same story every poll has told since the days just after the October 7th massacres: a big drop for the Likud, a huge jump for Benny Gantz’s National Unity party. Stepping back the current government loses about twenty of its seats while the opposition jumps to roughly 70. Again, this is broadly consistent with all the other polls over the last six weeks. I’ve noted before that while this is a rare occasion where the head of government hasn’t received any kind of rally-round-the-flag effect. Quite the contrary. But if we define rally-round-the-flag as rallying around the country, the war effect or national unity, there is overwhelming evidence of that.
But looking at this and other polls, I think we can make an additional observation.
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History, Its Importance and Irrelevance – Plus Some Books
Today I wanted to share with you a few thoughts about history — both the history of the Middle East and the story that is consuming a lot of our politics in the US in these final weeks of 2023, as well as history generally, its centrality and sometimes its irrelevance.
I’m going to cover this in two ways. I’m going to give you a list of books that are helpful to understanding the origins of all of this. They’re both very good and helpful reads. They also shed some light on where I come from in all this because I come at this grounded in a specific part of the historiography and with my own set of personal and ideological commitments. The other part is my recent email conversation with fellow community member, TPM Reader ME. I’ll start with that.
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