Tomorrow is two weeks since we launched this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re doing okay. But we’re at the point where we really, really need that second wind. We’re at $316,000 and we need to get to $500,000. If you’ve been considering contributing or meaning to but you just haven’t found the right moment, can you make it today? It would really help. Any amount helps. You can just click right here. It’s super simple and quick. Just take a moment and make today the day. We really appreciate it.

I think this was pretty much in the cards. But now it’s official. Former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) enters the North Carolina Senate race, which is now an open race after Sen. Tom Tillis (R) announced his essentially (Trump) forced retirement. Nothing is a sure thing for Democrats in North Carolina. But this is about the best case scenario they could have hoped for — no incumbent, one of the most if not the most popular Democrat in the state running. (I heard from someone that the new Gov., Josh Stein, may be slightly more popular now.) Of course it is an absolute must pick up for Dems to be in contention to take hold of the Senate. So they’re at least laying the groundwork if the winds are moving just right next November.

A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.

Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

I’m leaving the original version of this post up, below, as published. But it is incorrect. The “bias monitor” mentioned below does not report to the President of the United States but rather the President of Paramount, or at least that’s what the actual FCC agreement says. I was going on the article from Gizmodo which I linked below. I believe it was edited after I wrote this post. Because just what “president” they were referring to was something I tried to make sure I was clear on and the article seemed clear that they were referring to the President of the United States. In any case, what’s important is to correct the record. The broader corruptness of the deal notwithstanding this is an internal watchdog at CBS who reports to the President of the company which owns CBS.

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Even today this is quite astonishing. FCC Chair Brendan Carr is making the rounds of conservative media bragging that to allow the Paramount/Skydance merger the company agreed to put in embed a political commissar at CBS (dubbed a “bias monitor”) who will report directly to Donald Trump on whether the news content is acceptable. This is Skydance, which is a creature of the Ellison family. So I would imagine it didn’t require that much pressure. But that’s where we are.