Editors’ Blog

There’s lots of coverage, quite properly, of Rupert Murdoch admitting that he knew from the beginning that all the Big Lie claims were bogus while allowing numerous Fox hosts to repeat the lies for months. But there’s been less, though some, focus on the revelation that he personally gave Jared Kushner confidential information about Biden campaign ads and debate strategy. Here’s the passage from the court filing (emphasis added).

During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R.Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public). But, on election night, Rupert would not help with the Arizona call. As Rupert described it: “My friend Jared Kushner called me saying, ‘This is terrible,’ and I could hear Trump’s voice in the background shouting.” Ex.600, R.Murdoch 65:6-8. But Rupert refused to budge: “And I said, ‘Well, the numbers are the numbers.’”

I don’t find any of this shocking. But it’s notable to get it admitted officially and formally in court.

I am very curious about this. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reports that what the article calls a “bipartisan group” of senators is working a plan for various cuts to Social Security including raising the retirement age and changing the cost of living formula to phase in mounting benefit cuts over time. (They also have the idea of creating a sovereign wealth fund to put excess Social Security taxes into.) But the only senators mentioned in the article are Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota), both Republicans, and Angus King (Maine), who is an independent.

Now King does caucus with the Democrats. So he is part of their 51 seat majority. But this is a still a pretty strange definition of “bipartisan” since the article at least includes no Democrats.

While it’s been clear ever since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of his political-stunt election-crimes task force almost a year ago that the entire endeavor was designed to curry favor with voters who are all-in on election denialism, we’ve been tracking what’s come out of each of the “voter fraud” cases rather closely.

Nearly every single one of the cases tried thus far have gone nowhere, adding to the rather solid hypothesis that the arrests and creation of the task force were all done in service of DeSantis and his 2024 bid — which he hasn’t yet announced.

Greg Craig, impeachment lawyer for Bill Clinton and briefly the White House counsel for Barack Obama, has fallen a lot in standing among Democrats over the last decade. But there’s always further to fall. Today he has a piece in the Times arguing that to take account of his age, Joe Biden should announce that he is going to leave the choice of his vice presidential nominee in 2024 up to Democratic voters. In other words, a contested primary for vice president. I should give you this context: I’m not a big Kamala Harris partisan. I started off as one but her performance in the 2020 primaries — before she got the veep nod — made me question her political and campaign instincts. But this is such a spectacularly bad idea that it’s barely possible for me to understand how this piece even got published let alone how Craig came up with the idea.

In recent days I’ve seen every major paper write a version of the How Did This Tragic Train Derailment Become a New Culture War story. I didn’t need to ask myself whether any of them gave the actual answer, which I think most of us know. How is it that a train derailment caused by a major GOP-donating corporation, in a state run by a Republican governor, caused at least in part by regulations rolled back by Republican President Donald Trump … well, how exactly is that a story about Democrats not caring about people in “flyover country”? The Republican crackpot investigations complex is even now prepping to hold hearings about it.

For those of you who receive The Dispatch, I want to thank you for the responses to my question about your news consumption habits which I included in Friday’s email. I’ve gotten between three and four hundred of your replies so far. I really can’t express how valuable your comments and replies are. They’re very interesting and gratifying to me personally to read. But more importantly, they are really, really valuable for our ability to make decisions about how we run the site and, increasingly, how we operate and communicate with you beyond just the website itself. They amount to audience research, though a much more personal form of that than the phrase usually describes.

As I said, there’s more than three hundred of them. So I’ve only gotten part of the way through them. I think I’ve replied to all the ones I’ve read, at least to the point of acknowledging. With some I have follow up questions and with some of you I’ve already exchanged a few emails back and forth. I’m going to try to get to all of them over the next couple days.

Thank you.

Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.

The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?

I haven’t published so many reader replies in a while. But I’m doing so in this case because I find them very interesting and think some of you will too. But there’s a bit more than that. These discussions help me understand with more clarity some basic discussions we’re having as a society about artificial intelligence. They also help me line these discussions up with my own thoughts about the nature and utility of knowledge, the validation of theories by their ability to predict experimental results, and so on.

From TPM Reader FP …

I’ve worked for decades on language models, as a researcher in academia and industry, and as a research manager whose teams have brought language models into products several years before the current excitement. I’m enjoying your commentaries on the topic, so I’m writing with a bit of historical perspective and connections that might be helpful.

The connection between language models and games goes back a long way, arguably to Turing and Shannon. Consider a reader who is shown the words (or letters, the difference is not significant) one by one, from the books in a library, and has to bet on the next still unseen word. If the reader is sufficiently educated in English language and culture, they have an almost sure bet in continuing “… to be or not … ” However, if the text was “… classical concert goers prefer Beethoven to … ” there are several possible continuations, but there’s still some predictability: the following word is more likely to be “Stockhausen” than to be “Cheetos”: text from the library tends to have some thematic coherence, in this case musical preferences, rather than mixing music and snacks. 

A friend sent me an article from back in March 2016 which provides some interesting perspective on the current resurgence of Social Security politics and the various Republicans vying to be the “post-Trump” candidate for President while Trump refuses to leave the stage. It also has particular relevance to Ron DeSantis, which we’ll get to in a moment.

But first some context.

The piece is a Times article from March 2016. So it is early in the Trump takeover of the GOP but when it still wasn’t entirely clear he’d be able to pull it off. The subtext of the article is that while many Republicans focused either on the power of Trump’s chaotic personality or the red meat of immigrant bans and xenophobia to explain his success, there was something else in the mix. There was a whole population of people who had closed the door on ever supporting Democrats but were left entirely cold by the GOP’s reflexive focus on tax cuts, free trade and cutting “entitlements.”