As a Mainer, I have been waiting (and waiting and waiting:-) for you to weigh in on Platner, since I respect your opinion so much and this whole thing has been crazy. I have been amazed at the over the top reactions and use of new info to verify black and white priors from so many in the media and on socials. Most of that is from people outside Maine. In my little corner here:
1. Mainers REALLY respect the hard work Platner is putting in. Quiet hard work is highly valued here. It’s not just 80 town halls. He goes anywhere and everywhere to talk with any group that invites him, walks any picket line he’s invited to. It’s probably hundreds of meetings, town halls, and just showing up for a cause at this point in the campaign. He appears with other candidates to boost their visibility, and has helped the three best candidates (in my opinion) form a ranked choice coalition in the tight governor’s race.
There are a few local data points your Platner piece doesn’t mention that may become important.
1. Mills is still on the ballot, and she’s been making a point of saying so since the first article about the sexts came out. Her lawn signs, which had largely disappeared, are springing back up all over town with reminders about that. She sees an opening, she’s trying to exploit it, and she has a receptive audience.
A big week ahead for the “anti-weaponization” slush fund that President Trump and his Justice Department insist is dead.
In similar filings on Friday in two of the cases challenging the “anti-weaponization” slush fund, the Trump DOJ finally put in writing what acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had refused to do: commit that the slush fund is now dead.
But in the same breath it was assuring federal judges there’s nothing to see here, it took an aggressive stance against court involvement in the matter that only further muddied the waters: “This is a rare case that is simultaneously moot and premature,” DOJ said in the filing.
The DOJ staked out its position ahead of court hearings this week in the two cases, one in D.C., the other in the Eastern District of Virginia, arguing that: (i) the slush fund does not now and has not ever existed so there is nothing to litigate; and (ii) the plaintiffs lacks standing to sue; and (iii) in any event, their claims are not ripe.
A third case in D.C. challenging the fund is lagging behind the other two; but the original Trump lawsuit against the IRS which produced the “settlement agreement” that created the slush fund has effectively been reopened by the judge overseeing it to hear claims that the lawsuit was a fraud upon the court. Trump has a deadline of this coming Friday to answer those claims.
Stay tuned.
The Purges: DNI Edition
President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he wants acting DNI Bill Pulte to get started on firing Obama and Biden holdovers in the intelligence community.
Trump framed the scheme to make Pulte the acting DNI as a way to get the purges rolling without the permanent DNI having to take the heat for it:
“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Trump told the WSJ. “Because, if he [Pulte] reduced the size, in conjunction with me…and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in…he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.”
The Purges: FBI Edition
FBI Director Kash Patel has fired as many as five analysts in its Richmond office who were involved in a rescinded 2023 internal intelligence memo about “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” that the political right seized on as anti-Catholic.
A investigation under the Biden administration found no anti-Catholic bias, but then-Director Chris Wray apologized repeatedly for it not meeting bureau standards.
In a victory lap on X shortly after the firings, Patel wrote: “This FBI will never infringe on religious freedom.”
Trump DOJ Watch
U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island referred Justice Department lawyers for disciplinary proceedings over their conduct in a closely watched case involving the administration’s anti-trans subpoenas to hospitals.
After President Trump criticized California’s slow counting of ballots in last week’s primary election and said it was under investigation, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angles confirmed multiples probe are active: “Without commenting on any specific investigation, my office has multiple election fraud investigations underway in coordination with @FBILosAngeles. We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent.”
Blanche deputy Aakash Singh, who had a major role in the vindictive prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, keeps popping up, most recently in a NYT account of the origins of the “grand conspiracy” against Trump investigation that threatens to sweep in former CIA Director John Brennan and other Trump political foes.
Only the Best People
Ryan D. Nelson, a Trump-appointed judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, faces misdemeanor charges of battery and malicious injury to property after an April 2 parking-lot confrontation that was captured on video. He has pleaded not guilty.
MAGA Nullification?
At least nine county prosecutors in red areas of Virginia are openly declaring that they won’t enforce Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s new assault weapons ban, Greg Sargent reports.
RIP 60 Minutes
Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley had intimated that Bari Weiss had interfered in one of his stories so late in the process that that week’s entire episode of the storied news magazine barely made it on air. But it wasn’t until an interview last week with the NYT that Pelley divulged what happened.
The story in question was a segment Pelley did in February on the Minnesota protests against Operation Metro Surge. By his account, Pelley bent over backwards to, as he put it, “identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations,” including instructing producers “to to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.”
That wasn’t enough for Weiss, Pelley says:
We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.
Pelley ignored Weiss’ notes and the segment ran without any changes. CBS did not deny Pelley’s account of Weiss’ notes, except to say they “had no political motivation.”
Judge Patricia A. Millett: “If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?”
On Friday, the Pentagon announced a sweeping new policy that reduces the number of religious faiths it recognizes from 211 to 31 — 22 of which are Christian.
The biggest source of backlash to the move came from the conspicuous failure not to explicitly designate The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as “Christian” on the new list it distributed (LDS is tucked in there after a long list of “Christian” denominations):
Utah Republican Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis spent the weekend pushing back publicly and privately, but it was Lee — who has so ostentatiously hitched his wagon to MAGA — who had the most to lose, and it showed in his feverish posting blitz on X. Just after midnight, Lee posted that he’d spoken with President Trump about the issue: “I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading.”
Sign of the Times: Higher Ed Edition
Inside Higher Ed: “The Auburn University Board of Trustees on Friday gave itself complete control over course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials while eliminating shared governance at the Alabama land-grant university.”
Having a Normal One
WOW – Trump crashes out & cuts his interview w/ Welker short as she presses him on his lack of evidence for claiming elections are rigged"You're either crooked or you're stupid. I've had enough. Thank you darling," he tells her""I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview," she pleads
When President Donald Trump’s administration began its shakeup of the federal government, purging online data sets and demonizing previous federal policy, Laura Pegram saw that her organization could be in danger. She, along with others at the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, or NASTAD, moved to restructure their website.
Like other drug user health organizations, NASTAD scrubbed staff member bios and online resources, Pegram said.
“I still have them, of course. Just like I have all of the CDC and SAMHSA pages that used to affirm the evidence base behind syringe services programs, harm reduction programs.”
Pegram is the director of drug user health at NASTAD. The membership-based organization serves state, local, and U.S. territory public health officials who administer state and federal funding for HIV/AIDS and other public health programs.
In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order that took aim at her work and established a turning point for federal drug policy: grants from the the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, could no longer be used to fund harm reduction programs. In the months since, the administration has enacted a series of confusing and contradictory policy measures that’ve left substance use treatment providers and advocates reeling, searching for creative ways to keep their work afloat, and worrying about the potentially fatal consequences of unstable federal guidance about overdose prevention.
Experts told TPM the administration’s targeting of the term “harm reduction” specifically risks obscuring lifesaving substance abuse treatment programs. Fear over losing federal grants has already driven some programs to reevaluate their offerings, or at least the language they use to talk about it.
President Reagan entered to a standing ovation. It was the last year of his presidency, and he was feeling, as he often did, nostalgic. “I’m not joking when I say that every one of the eight times I’ve met with you these eight years, I’ve wished more like you were in our Congress,” the president said to his audience of state lawmakers from each state in the country. They were part of a group most Americans had never heard of, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC for short.
Kate and I discussed the ongoing Graham Platner controversies on last week’s episode of the podcast. As I explained, having never fallen hard for Platner as so many did, I come at the matter from a different perspective. I was basically a soft skeptic. Not against him, but also not wowed. Because of that, I wasn’t really let down by any of the scandals because I wasn’t up in the first place. As I half-jokingly put it, as long as he agrees not to be a Nazi going forward and stays off any dating apps until November, I’m basically fine with this candidacy.
Every election cycle, a certain type of argument makes the rounds on what exactly Democrats need to do to win in November. The advice typically includes some variation of: move to the right. Ignore your base, and aim for the center. Triangulate until you have no discernable policy positions or personality of your own.
Much of this advice comes from centrist or Republican pundits — what the podcast Citations Needed called “the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend,” always on hand to offer guidance to their political opponents. (As co-host Adam Johnson put it, it’s like someone saying, “I’m an ice cream man and I think the solution is to buy more ice cream.”) This week, we got a special new case in The Atlantic courtesy of Nathaniel Frum (son of Atlantic editor and former George W. Bush speechwriter David), who argued that Dems just need to learn how to talk about sports. Below, we run through some classics of the genre.
Be More Relatable to the Common Man
By learning how to talk about sports
Per Frum, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico could “prove that he’s a regular guy” and get positive attention by dunking on Arch Manning, scion of the uber popular Manning football family.
By going on more bro-y podcasts
There was clearly one simple diagnosis for Kamala Harris’ crushing defeat to Trump in 2024: Democrats had to find a “Joe Rogan of the left” and win back young (white) men.
Stop Supporting Things You Don’t Support
Like defunding the police
Democrats are often accused of being weak on crime and anti-police — stances that purportedly cost them votes in the 2022 and 2024 elections. But a vanishingly small number of elected Democrats ever argued for defunding the police (it’s worth noting that those who did also made the case for reallocating that money towards public safety initiatives). Famously, Joe Biden earned loud applause at the 2022 State of the Union with his call to “fund the police.”
Like being so dang woke
Self-professed liberal Bill Maher is among the many voices often calling for Democrats to ditch their “woke” obsession with allowing trans women to play women’s sports and “put[ting] race at the front of everything.” In reality, Democrats rarely campaign on promoting trans rights, and prominent figures in the party from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) to California Gov. Gavin Newsom have adapted GOP talking points when speaking out against trans women and girls being allowed to play women’s sports.
Promote Republican Policies and Politicians
Like anti-abortion candidates
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein thinks being a big tent party means running and supporting anti-abortion candidates, in a post-Roe era when reproductive healthcare is all but inaccessible in large swaths of the country. Klein made this case last fall, even after ballot measures protecting or expanding access to the procedure passed and drove massive voter turnout in states across the country. As Jessica Valenti put it, “To single out abortion, of all things, as the place for compromise is to ignore the political reality of the last three years.”
[Essay]
False Positive
This week, I finally installed the AI detection software Pangram in my browser. For months, I’d been intrigued by social media users who’d post about analyses they’d done on suspected AI text. Then there were the AI scandals that made headline news: Hatchett’s cancelled publication of the novel Shy Girl after Pangram showed it was likely to have been written with AI, the pope’s X account flagged by Pangram for a suspected AI-generated tweet, a Modern Love column in the New York Times determined to be AI by a researcher using Pangram. At first the narrative appeared relatively positive. With much hand-wringing over the future viability of human-written text in a world of AI, here was finally a tool humans could use to fight back. Previous AI detection software had been spotty enough to apparently determine the Declaration of Independence was AI. Pangram, meanwhile, boasts an accuracy rate of 99.98%. In the hands of responsible administrators, it could potentially offer an effective deterrent to AI writing — not all that different from the anti-plagiarism software of the early 2000s. But in a digital world supposedly awash in AI-generated text, what would happen if everyone had access to this tool? What if we all started using Pangram to do our own analyses of what is AI and what is human? And how does this thing even work?
Pangram is itself an AI, part of a long tradition in Silicon Valley of offering up more technology as a solution to problems their technology created. The simple explanation of how it works is that it is trained on datasets of both human and LLM-produced text to determine the probability of each individual input (e.g. word or punctuation mark) belonging to a human or AI. Based on the probability of each input appearing in particular order over the course of the entire document, Pangram provides a likelihood that the author is human, AI, or somewhere in between. For example, if a human might use an em dash 50% of the time, an LLM might use it 90% of the time. The more inputs you have to compare, the more accurate the detection. And Pangram is, by most accounts, accurate. The company claims a false positive rate of only 1/10,000 and my own efforts to trick it have so far been unsuccessful. It correctly identified all 10 writing samples in the New York Times AI vs human writers quiz, something I could annoyingly not do. Even running AI-generated texts through “humanizers” — AI tools used to replace LLM tropes with more natural language — didn’t help avoid detection (others have apparently had more success). This all seemed promising, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that using Pangram to detect AI text wasn’t all that dissimilar to using an LLM to generate text. In both cases I was dropping text into a black-box and waiting on the results.
With Pangram installed in the browser, the experience of using the tool changes. Instead of copy and pasting text into the app, you simply highlight and right click on what you’re reading for an on-the-spot analysis. When you browse social platforms like X, Substack and Reddit, that analysis is automated so that users and posts are identified as human or AI as you scroll through the feed. This might be as dystopian as Richard Deckard scanning for replicants, but it’s also boring and not the least bit empowering. We already know that our feeds and search results are stuffed with spam and slop, whether AI-generated or not. AI detection is only really interesting when there is a human on the other end, either intending to deceive or being accused of deception. And it’s here where the narrative around Pangram starts to shift.
Last Sunday, the Atlantic ran a headline stating that America Has A Pangram Problem. Considering that the Atlantic was one of the foremost publications to buy into the benefits of Pangram, this caught my attention. The problem, according to writer Matteo Wong, is that Pangram’s accuracy has emboldened users to conduct witch hunts for AI using Pangram and cite the results as evidence. He points to a recent case where journalist Taylor Lorenz was accused of using AI after a Pangram scan, only to be later vindicated when she was able to show her edit history (ironically, Lorenz had recently declared Substack inundated with AI after she had performed a Pangram analysis of the platform). Wong also mentions efforts by Pangram users to highlight passages in Pope Leo’s AI-skeptical encyclical that may have been written with AI, accusations that the Vatican, of course, denies.
In addition to the bad-faith actions empowered by Pangram, there are also technical and conceptual problems with AI detection. LLMs evolve quickly, always toward the aim of appearing more human. It’s unlikely that tools like Pangram can keep pace, a prospect Wong likens to “building a sandcastle at low tide.” Conceptually, AI-detection might be too far downstream of where the biases of the LLM have the most influence on the writer, like during research. Finally, there is the question of how much people even care that something was AI-generated. It might feel rude or icky to encounter AI during what you thought were personal exchanges, but when it comes to art, studies continue to show that people prefer AI to humans — a finding writer Max Read explains by suggesting that people just like bad art, which seems undeniably true.
What Pangram appears to have accomplished is at least temporary proof that AI can be effectively used to identify other AI. But the product marketed to users has a slightly different objective. If Pangram really wanted to rein in AI bot slop, it would sell to the platforms, not the users. The reason that they don’t isn’t just that most platforms have little incentive to filter out AI, it’s that what Pangram is selling isn’t AI detection but agency. The AI companies have convinced us that AI is smarter than we are and thus a convenient tool for deception. Pangram sells us a false security of being able to root out deception.
In F is For Fake, Orson Welles’s excellent documentary essay on fakery, Welles explains that as long as there are fakers, there have to be experts. He then asks: but if there weren’t any experts, would there be any fakers? I doubt we’ll ever find out.
Progressive political commentator and strategist turned Unusual Take Haver Briahna Joy Gray: “I believe myself to be COVID vaccine-injured.”
[This Effing Guy]
Rep. Andy Ogles Pretends to Take a Principled Stance
Congressman Andy Ogles may be an avowed Islamophobe, but don’t you dare accuse him of being homophobic. The Tennessee Republican got into some hot water this week for kicking off Pride Month with a post on X declaring that “homosexuality has no place in America.” After bipartisan criticism, Ogles deleted it, blaming a comms staffer for the message, which he called “stupid, hurtful and a complete distraction from my America First focus,” and claimed he only heard about “while working on [his farm].” The old “scapetern” excuse might have been more effective if Ogles didn’t have such a long record of making inflammatory statements on social media. In March, for example, he posted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”
[In the Cafe]
Full Fascist
In the lead-up and aftermath of his appearance at the “Remigration Summit 2026” in Portugal last weekend, former Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino gave interviews to:
Far-right website VoxEuropa, in which he cited Nazi Germany general Erwin Rommel as an inspiration
Irish white nationalist influencer Keith Woods, a self-described “raging antisemite.”
So you can imagine the kinds of people who actually organized and attended the conference. Freelance journalist Christopher Mathias broke it all down for TPM in a new piece this week, and joined us on Substack Live to talk more about Bovino’s whole deal.
[TPM Trivia]
How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?
1) Who is the CBS employee fired this week for speaking out against Bari Weiss’ takeover of the news network?
2) What jobs does Bill Pulte hold in the second Trump administration, including a new one announced just this week?
3) What is the name for the (confusing) style of primary election they use in California?
4) Which former Trump official this week agreed to a plea deal over his retention of classified information?
Answers below
[No Words]
Happy 250th, America
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY – MAY 31: A protester waves an upside-down American flag at a police blockade near the Delaney Hall detention center during a protest against the transfer of detainees and federal immigration policies on May 31, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey. Tensions remain high outside the detention facility where activists have clashed with police for days after detainees began a hunger strike over Memorial Day weekend amid allegations of inhumane living conditions. (Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images)
Trivia answers: 1) Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” 2) Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now also Acting Director of National Intelligence. 3) Jungle primary 4) John Bolton
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Americans love when things explode. We love fireworks, action movies, and cannons shooting off. Americans also love weird science stuff we don’t really understand, like UFOs, the physics of airplane flight, and miracle cures. Combining these two interests can easily take an explainable event that’s got both loud booms and technical jargon and turn it into a conspiracy theory about what “they” are “really” doing in the skies over our heads.
Over the last week of May and into early June, Americans were puzzled by a series of loud explosions in the sky. They took place over western New York on May 27; Columbia, South Carolina on the 28; and Boston on the 30.
Immediately after each one, confused residents took to social media to express their puzzlement and concern over hearing what appeared to be loud explosions during a time of international tension and a government that often looks like it’s on a war footing with its own people. Thousands of people over the three locations called 911, believing their city had been attacked or that their neighborhood had been hit by a falling airplane. Some thought it was an earthquake. A few even went outside expecting to see carnage all around them.
In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.
Welcome back to Aakash Singh Points Memo. It turns out there’s even more. Earlier I mentioned the growing evidence that Singh is the point man, the conduit for White House/DOJ orders to corrupt grand juries and bring political retaliation indictments. But there’s so much more.
Yesterday the Times reported that on May 13 the DOJ convened a teleconference with most or all U.S. attorneys or senior assistant U.S. attorneys around the country to demand more prosecutions of non-citizen voters. The problem, of course, is that countless official tabulations, even in red states under Republican officials, have shown that such voting is close to non-existent, as TPM has reported literally for decades.
