Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

Online Sleuths

I’ve had a few responses to last night’s post about the identity of the maurauding pro-Israel demonstrators/thugs who attacked the Gaza encampment on Tuesday night. There are clearly a lot of rumors circulating about it. The most interesting article I’ve seen so far is one that came out yesterday afternoon from the Los Angeles Times. It doesn’t include identities but reports on the team of online sleuths trying to identify them. Think of it as broadly similar to the “Sedition Hunters” group which has identified probably hundreds of people involved in the January 6th insurrection. The article doesn’t include any identities though it does seem like the sleuths have already identified or contingently identified some people.

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Details on Identities of the Violent Pro-Israel Protesters at UCLA?

This is a brief follow up on my post earlier that touched on the violence on Tuesday night at UCLA. As I noted, and has been widely reported, on Tuesday night a small contingent pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the Gaza encampment on campus. This group appears to have been willfully violent and focused on tearing down the barricades of the encampment, throwing various projectiles at pro-Gaza demonstrators, throwing anywhere from one to four firecrackers into the encampment and using something like pepper spray or other similarly noxious spray on people in the encampment. In short, a group of vigilantes or thugs who went in to break up the encampment and terrorize the protestors.

But as far as I can tell there’s no clear information on who these people were. And I’ve seen no evidence that any of them were or have been arrested.

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More Thoughts on the Campuses Prime Badge
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I wanted to do an update to my post on Monday about the situation in Israel-Palestine as well as on campuses on the United States.

A few of you asked, what was the response to the post? It was, I think, overwhelmingly positive. I did have one longtime reader say he was quitting the site and ending his subscription over it. If I interpreted his message and what I’ve known about his viewpoints generally, he thought I was being too critical of Israel. But people are entitled to their opinions and viewpoints and feelings. And I say that not as a throwaway line but as a statement of fact and a recognition of the right way to live in the world. But the overwhelming and almost universal response was positive.

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Decoding Trump Bullshit: Foreign Defense Budget Edition Prime Badge
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Everyone is publishing their bills of particulars about all the horrible things Donald Trump will do if he becomes president again. That’s become even easier with Time magazine’s publication today of a lengthy interview with Trump in which he expands on the list and provides quotes that make them more specific. (Get ready for your pregnancy ankle bracelet and fetal monitor if you get pregnant in a red state.) But there’s one item on these litanies that’s not really correct. And we should understand what it actually means more clearly.

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A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses Prime Badge
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I wanted to share a few thoughts on the ongoing crisis and mess in Israel-Palestine and also on America’s elite college campuses.

First, a thought on the campus situation and this question of whether these protests are tainted by anti-Semitism. I know most about the situation at Columbia, which certainly isn’t to say I’m an expert on it. To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.

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Peering into the Corrupt Court’s Pretensions and Corruption Prime Badge
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There were so many things that happened yesterday in the Supreme Court’s hearing on presidential immunity that it’s hard to know where to start. But one part that captured it for me was Sam Alito’s line of argument that presidential immunity might be necessary to make it possible for presidents to leave office voluntarily, or that not having some broad grant of immunity would make refusal to leave office more likely. Here’s one of the quotes: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is gonna be able to go off to a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

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The Court is Corrupt. Say It With Me.

I was watching cable news this afternoon at the gym. And I saw one of those examples of what has now become a Trump/Roberts Court-era set piece, where principled and very smart lawyers and/or legal academics have to say, I guess I was a chump.

Sure the Roberts Court is partisan, I thought. But there’s a threshold level belief in the rule of law. I’m not trying to make hay out of others’ mistakes. My guiding heuristic has been that the Roberts Court, especially in its post-2017 iteration is thoroughly corrupt and will generally do whatever is in the interests of the GOP so long as it doesn’t put too big a dent in the Court’s own perceived legitimacy and elite social standing. Based on this standard I assumed the Court would settle for delaying Trump’s trial until the Fall. It seems now that they’re likely to kick it back to the trial Court for further fact-finding and thus the case itself well into 2025.

Fair enough.

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Our Long National RCP Nightmare Is Over Prime Badge
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For most of this election season so far, FiveThirtyEight hasn’t surfaced its own presidential race average. Compiling these averages in a sophisticated and honest way is actually kind of complicated. (They explain their methodology here.) We used to play in this space with PollTracker. So I know from experience. For me it’s not that I put so much weight on the specific number. It’s just a simpler way of visualizing the trend over time.

Well, now they’ve finally rolled theirs out. So I don’t have to be so reliant on RealClearPolitics, which has both a clumsy methodology and goes to comical length to add or not add polls to juice their favored candidate. All that said, the absolute averages as of today as remarkably similar. Trump up .4% on FiveThirtyEight and .3% on RCP. This reminds us of some of the ironies and … how can I say it, melancholy and ennui of complexity. The FiveThirtyEight model is HUGELY complex and sophisticated. It factors in all sorts of different variables. It incorporates findings from individual states into the national averages and vice versa. And yet for all this statistical leg work the averages as of this moment are essentially identical.

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Chef’s Kiss

There’s going to be a lot to talk about tomorrow with these new fake electors indictments out of Arizona. In fact, there’s so much happening in the news at the moment it’s a bit hard to keep your head straight. But I wanted to note just one exquisite point. One of the indictees is Christina Bobb, OANN talking head turned Trump lawyer, who just last month was appointed as the new head of the RNC’s “election integrity” chief. So yes, the GOP’s head of election integrity has now been charged with election subversion and election fraud. So we’re off to a strong start.

A Poll Obsessive Gives You a Calm and Sober Read Prime Badge
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I routinely tell people not to look at every single poll but to focus on trends over time. That is, if you want to look at them at all. We’ll go into Election Day with the polls tight and the outcome still uncertain. I can say this because I actually watch them very, very closely … like unhealthily closely. It’s characterological. I don’t advise it for anyone else. But if you must, it’s okay, and I can relate.

This morning there’s a new batch of swing-state polls from Bloomberg/Morning Consult showing Trump ahead in all but one of those states and growing his lead versus the last of these polls a month ago. That’s not great at all. But as usual I would not invest too much weight in a single poll. These numbers are not in sync with other recent swing-state polls, though actually we have pretty few quality swing-state polls recently. But the overall trend over the last six or seven weeks still seems like what we’ve discussed in the last several posts on this topic. After several months of being behind by a small but real amount (2-4 percentage points), Biden has moved into roughly a tie.

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