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September 16, 2025 4:23 p.m.
What Makes TPM TPM?

This is a post about TPM. So that’s just as a heads-up. It’s not about the news of the moment. It’s inwardly looking about this website.

On Friday, I did an interview tied to our 25th anniversary celebration. It should be out closer to the date of the anniversary in mid-November. Toward the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked me if I thought TPM had stayed true to the vision I originally had for it and, if so, what that was. I began by referencing a point I’d made earlier in the interview which was that it couldn’t be true to the original vision because I didn’t have any clear sense of what I was trying to do at the beginning. But pretty quickly I did. When I thought about the site and its continuity I realized there are three things that make up TPM. Oddly, in the interview, I only mentioned two of them. I probably just lost my train of thought. It was toward the end of an hour-long interview. But I wanted to share with you what those three things are.

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September 16, 2025 12:26 p.m.
Kirk’s Posthumous and Paradoxically Fitting Employment Reign of Terror Prime Badge

I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.

Needless to say, when people do this they’re not only trying to get these individuals fired but are also unleashing a wave of harassment, doxxing and possibly worse. It’s all intentional. Sometimes the reactions they’re highlighting are legitimately gross, even awful. More often they’re just rude or unkind. And in many cases they’re simply not sufficiently reverent or respectful. I’ve seen a number of cases where it’s simply saying explicitly that the killing was wrong but also all the very real reasons why Kirk’s role in our public life was bad, malignant, destructive, etc. It runs the gamut.

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September 16, 2025 12:19 p.m.
Keep An Eye on What We Know (And Don’t)

This is kind of a secondary issue. But it’s important to focus on for a number of reasons. In the past, generally speaking, you could use formal communications and background briefings from federal law enforcement, within important parameters, as a guide to the state of an investigation. It’s a given that they would be sure to make you think that whoever they thought was guilty was definitely guilty. They could also be relied on to speak in the institutional interest of their department or agency. But for a general understanding of what an investigation had uncovered, you could learn a lot from it, so long as these critical points of skepticism were borne in mind. Federal law enforcement, certainly off the record, could also often provide some constraint or filter on what the administration was saying. My point isn’t to romanticize the old system. But it was, from a journalistic perspective, often a key source of information.

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September 4, 2025 2:07 p.m.
Blue State Law, Red State Law Prime Badge

Here’s an interesting little detail behind the headlines. The medical news website StatNews has a whole package of pieces out today about the new NIH policy restricting so-called “indirects” (see this post) to 15%. One of their pieces is about 22 states going to court today to block that new directive. Unsurprisingly, the 22 states are all either blue states or ones that currently have Democratic governors or AGs. Again, no surprise. But as I discussed over the weekend, those grants are very important, for example, not just to the University of Alabama but the State of Alabama generally. The state’s junior senator Katie Britt talked to local media over the weekend saying, albeit in the politest terms to President Trump, that it’s super important to keep these funds flowing and that she looks “forward to working with incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to accomplish this vital mission.”

I only knew knew about Britt’s velvet pushback because of a tip from a TPM Reader. I’m pretty confident there are similar reports from other senators and representatives in similar positions. As Philip Bump notes here, NIH funding in red states is more likely to go to colleges and universities than in blue states. But it’s the pattern I want to highlight: blue states going to the courts and red states (or at least their political stakeholders) trying to work directly with the administration. As I said, I don’t think this will survive as an across-the-board policy. There are too many pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent stakeholders affected. But it’s a view toward a different kind of politics or state we could be heading toward: cash and prizes for supporters and nothing for opponents.

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November 4, 2024 6:34 p.m.
An Interesting Data Point

I’ve told you a few times about Professor Michael McDonald’s early vote analysis. He has a paywalled final analysis of the early vote in North Carolina. The upshot is that by conventional early vote analysis, Donald Trump appears poised to win North Carolina. That wouldn’t be a surprising result either on the basis of history or the current polls, which show a dead heat race with the slightest advantage to Trump.

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November 4, 2024 6:33 p.m.
Political Betting Markets Remain Over-Valued

If you’ve followed my thinking on this you know I’ve long had a pretty low opinion of political betting markets. Their user base tends to lean right, with the built-in bias you would expect that to cause. They’re also prone to manipulation. But the biggest problem is that, in my view, they’re largely derivative of polls and the press narratives. Garbage in, garbage out. I will simply note that the wild gyrations all of them have been doing over the last three or four days provide, I think, some backing for my argument.

March 26, 2024 10:25 a.m.
The Lonesome Tale of Ronna X Prime Badge

We’re seeing an ongoing — and to me, pretty comical — garbage fire at NBC News over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (or who I guess we might call Ronna X, since her last name may be subject to ongoing contract negotiation) as a paid contributor. I’ll assume you’ve seen at least some reports on the controversy. I want to add three things. First a personal aside, second a guess about what happened and third something about the structural roots of “bothsidesist” news coverage.

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