We seem to be in another Epstein hiatus before the story and obsession again explodes into the center of the political news ecosystem. Presumably the next episode will come when the White House releases the heavily redacted and/or cooked version of the “Epstein files” that Congress ordered the administration to release. But I wanted to note this very weird oddity right smack in the center of the story that continues to be almost entirely ignored. I was reminded of it last night by this story in The Bulwark by Mona Charen. I first heard about in those interviews Sid Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz did with Michael Wolff about Jeff Epstein, which I wrote about back in September. Wolff discussed something that I had never heard before: that Steve Bannon, basically right up to the time Epstein died, was working with him on a combo rebrand/crisis comms effort to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation. Yes! Bannon was working as Epstein’s image rehab specialist. The man at the center of all the anti-“elite”, anti-“globalist” pedophiles was tight with Epstein and trying to help him come in from the sex offender cold. He’d actually done hours of video interviews with Epstein as prep for either a 60 Minutes or 60 Minutes-style interview to revive his reputation.
Recently, Tom Nichols — the dissident or lapsed conservative who is a key Never Trump figure — wrote a Bluesky thread on the importance of federalism. He focused on the longstanding Democratic demand (albeit a futile one) that the president be elected by a national popular vote. I’ve made the same argument, though I’ve never treated it as a big focus since abolishing the Electoral College is all but impossible. You’re never going to get small states to disempower themselves by agreeing to such a constitutional amendment. But Nichols made the argument that some form of the Electoral College is an essential component of American federalism and that federalism is one sheet anchor of our liberties, as we’re finding out today.
A few days ago, I was looking at one of the many recent (post-shutdown) polls that show an increasingly dark mood toward the GOP and favorable signs for the Democrats. There was something else in those polls that surprised me: people are really, really down on AI. Now, to be clear, this is sort of cardinal assumption almost bordering on a prejudice in the world I live in: a fairly educated, generally left-leaning world. Everyone’s down on AI in various ways in that world and for many good reasons, even as many also incorporate AI into aspects of their professional lives. (This is a pervasive dichotomy: we’re generally AI skeptic; AI is also allowing our programmers to be vastly more productive.) What struck me though is how widespread the skepticism or hostility is. It goes across demographics and age, political persuasions.
There are many good reasons for this. The explosion of investment in AI poses various near and long term environmental dangers; it might … well, take your job away from you (downer); it’s driving up prices for energy, ubiquitous parts of the modern economy like computer memory; and … oh, there’s that one thing that even the biggest champions of AI talk about and are oddly fascinated by … the non-trivial chance that AI could lead to the extermination of the human race (bummer!). This is the list of horribles that leaves many us thinking what in the actual fuck are we doing here?
No one should lose sight of the fact that the National Guard was only in Washington, D.C. as part of an extended political messaging stunt. They are there because of a legal lacunae created by the district’s non-statehood and consequent lack of democratic sovereignty. The shooter (the man in custody is suspected of, but not proven to be, that person) is guilty of the attack and the carnage surrounding it. Donald Trump is responsible for them. This episode is the collateral damage of, downstream of, Trump abusing his powers as president.
byNicole LaFondTPM Illustrations/Getty Images Audio: Youtube-AverytheCubanAmerican/Jackie Wilhelm
Some of you sickos have been waiting all year for this 🫶🏻
TPM’s 17th annual celebration of our beloved Golden Duke awards — the season when the TPM community comes together to celebrate those who gave us new highs (lows) in the field of public betrayal, political corruption, venality and nonsense — is special this year. Not only is it TPM’s 25th anniversary as an independent news outlet that grew out of our coverage of the George W. Bush administration’s lawlessness, but it is a special, albeit sad, year for those who have grown to love TPM’s annual toast to our nation’s most tenacious political trolls.
TPM Reader EB emailed today to tell me something that hadn’t come across my radar: the cost of computer memory is going absolutely through the roof. Just do a Google search for something like rising cost of computer memory and you’ll see a ton of articles. To give you a sense of scale the cost increases are approaching 200% year over year and as much as 30% for certain kinds of gaming RAM recently in one week. The cause is what you’d expect: the insatiable demand for memory created by the AI server farm buildout. I buy computer memory too but I don’t think I’ve tried to buy recently enough to be aware of the surge.
I told EB that I continue to find all of this surreal.
