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 off the record 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.
In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.
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.
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.
I was thinking about this post this morning and then I saw someone reference it on Bluesky. It’s from July 2016 (“This Is Not the Natural State of Things“) and notes that not only is the world of the last 80 years not permanent or unchangeable. It’s not even the natural state of things. The world we all grew up in, from the late 1940s to some point in the last decade, was the product of very conscious and deliberate decisions made largely in the United States but also in the capitals of Europe. For all its many imperfections and discontents it was a period of prosperity and security essentially unrivaled in history.
Fire poured out of my eyes when I sat down at my computer and saw a Semafor email with the subject line “National Reckoning.” They cooled when I opened the email and saw the top item was a PPRI poll from March 2025. (“National reckoning” turns out to be from an Atlantic article about Kirk’s close relationship with the Trump family which was quoted in the email.) The poll contains the worrisome news that only 53% of Americans “completely disagree” with the statement that “political violence is sometimes necessary.” The story comes into clearer focus when the result is broken down by people’s view of Donald Trump. Only 39% of Trump supporters (those with a favorable view of him) believe this while 66% of his opponents do.
In other words, people who hold a favorable view of Donald Trump are overwhelmingly more likely to believe that political violence has a legitimate role in our society. The number of Trump supporters who believe this is 27% higher than that of his opponents. This is of course the least surprising thing imaginable to anyone who has lived in the United States or on earth for the last decade. But we live in a media ecosystem of ideational bullshit. So it yet comes as a breath of fresh air, a sublime encounter with reality.
I wanted to share two-and-a-half follow-on thoughts about the murder of Charlie Kirk and everything that is coming in its wake.
We are now seeing an escalating campaign of valorization of Kirk, one that a lot of non-partisan media and certainly everyone in the conservative movement is contributing to. Quite a few of his opponents are getting carried along with this. At the same time, you have the more extreme members of the right calling for violent and/or legal retribution against the “left” based on essentially nothing. As usual, the call is led by none other than the president of the United States. Yesterday we noted that political violence and terrorism is the antithesis of civic or liberal democracy. Because of that, civic democrats have the greatest interest in opposing it. But the gist of the matter is that we oppose civic violence targeting anyone regardless of belief, regardless of the qualities of the person. It applies to everyone. We don’t need to elevate someone or pretend they were something they weren’t to express our opposition to political assassination. And we shouldn’t. Kirk was a hyper-aggressive partisan who advocated a lot of deeply retrograde beliefs. That is just a fact. Let’s not pretend otherwise. His murder is at the same time deeply wrong and a disaster for the country.
In remarks to the media on Sunday, President Trump made it clear he will continue to use the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as grounds to investigate those he sees as his political foes. In fact, he suggested, that work is already underway.
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