I wanted to share a few more thoughts with you about this roiling public debate about AI and the dangers of rogue, uncontrollable “agents.”

I start with the quite predictable conclusion that a lot of the contending theories we were talking about are true at the same time, at least to some degree. It is impossible not to see how a controlled deceleration of AI development serves financial purposes for the frontier AI labs. A regulatory pause sort of freezes their current lead in place, at least to a degree. It also allows them to focus on the massive returns of what we might call “meh” AI/LLMs while deprioritizing the kind of cutting edge research that costs a lot, has various risks and doesn’t have clear returns within the time horizon of your IPO. (The two top U.S. “frontier” labs are in their final preparations for going public.) It has also become increasingly clear to me that significant chunks of the AI world are in the thrall of a self-styled “rationalist” subculture which spends an inordinate amount of time postulating future human extinction events — dressed up in a lot of “rationalist” language but about which no one really has any idea — and then devising often quite sinister strategies for averting these imagined futures. (AI was a big focus of theirs before the last few years, but they have several storylines about future extinction events in the distant future.) It is finally the case that a lot of the people sounding these alarms have little acquaintance with how the world works outside of the computing domain and speak on issues of intelligence, sentience and self-awareness while knowing little or nothing about the scientific fields where these topics have been studied for decades or even centuries.

Needless to say, none of these facts inspire a lot of confidence.

Let me give you a brief update on a story out of North Carolina, or rather rumors out of North Carolina. Because it’s really nothing more than rumors. But it could be real and could be a pretty big deal. We’re told that CNN is about to publish a story that is likely to, or could, knock Lt Gov. Mark Robinson out of the governor’s race in North Carolina. That’s pretty stunning because Robinson is a freakshow candidate even in the broader menagerie of GOP freakshow candidates. Hunter Walker had an early jump on his freak flag in this story from a year and a half ago. That raises the question of what could possibly be so bad, so insane, outrageous or criminal that it would knock him out of the race. The rumors suggest something of a sexual nature. There already was a story a couple week ago claiming, over Robinson’s denials, that Robinson was a regular at porn-shop viewing booths in the ’90s and early 2000s. So what could it possibly be? And don’t forget that a major shakeup at the top of the ticket in North Carolina could conceivably impact the winner of the presidential election.

Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.

Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.

Another weird week in American politics is coming to a close, and TPM investigative reporter Hunter Walker joined publisher Joe Ragazzo to talk about it. Hunter and Joe got into Don Jr.’s lavish Bahamas wedding that was bankrolled by a Russian oligarch; the, uh, not-so-triumphant return of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Capitol Hill; what’s going on with Major League Baseball; and the forthcoming “To Catch a Predator” movie starring Robert Pattinson.

Check out their full conversation on YouTube Live below.

We’re just days out from our first Morning Memo Live event on the weaponization and politicization of the Justice Department under Trump II. To preview the kinds of topics we’ll be digging into, Josh Marshall joined David Kurtz on Substack Live to talk about the aftermath of the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

“There’s no longer any independence between the White House and the Justice Department,” David told Josh. “And it’s been made abundantly clear that what the White House says is what goes.”

Join us on Jan. 29 at the National Union Building in Washington, D.C. to talk about what’s going on at Main Justice, Pam Bondi, Trump’s retribution campaign against his political enemies, and where things go from here.

All TPM members should have a special discount code in their inboxes. And 2 for 1 tickets available now at checkout (even for those who already purchased a ticket!).

We’ll see you there.

Three candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — Claire Valdez (NY-7), Brad Lander (NY-10) and Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13) — won their congressional primaries tonight. In another New York City congressional race, the chaotic NY-12, won by Micah Lasher, Mamdani didn’t endorse.

The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.

This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.

Here’s another post following up on the earlier one about free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the pinched off little turn in the Persian Gulf where the waterway is at its narrowest. On Bluesky, in response to my earlier post, one user pointed me to this video, a daily ~30 minute update on a YouTube channel called What’s Going on With Shipping.

I want to start by stating clearly the basis upon which I’m sharing this video. I’d never heard of the channel before a couple hours ago. It’s run by a guy named Sal Mercogliano who says he’s a former merchant mariner and historian who teaches maritime history and also consults on the topic. In other words, he appears to be a merchant shipping and tanker professional/nerd. And he runs this shipping news channel. I can’t independently vouch for his credibility. However, I watched today’s episode and a number of factors — subscriber count, reliance on credentialed news articles and industry data sources, tone, meticulousness and more — make me think that it’s at least legit enough to get a beginning overview of the situation in the Gulf. I found it fascinating. It reminds me — sadly — of reporting on the supply chain breakdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. You suddenly had to come up to speed on the complex but to most of us little-understood world of global supply chains, the underbelly and machinery of how the modern interconnected world actually runs.