Ben Smith has a piece up looking at what we might call the groundswelling backlash against Big Tech. It’s not tech per se of course. It’s the big platform monopolies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) and a few associated companies with similar characteristics. Ben is largely pulling together a number of threads that we’ve seen over recent weeks and months. It was punctuated by the ham-handed expulsion of Barry Lynn’s anti-monopoly group a couple weeks ago at the New America Foundation. But it’s been growing on numerous fronts: new policy research, new books, new political coalitions that are, if not bipartisan, at least cutting across established political factions and tribalism.

I wanted to add a couple thoughts to this emerging story.

Somewhat like the Trump White House, the ‘vote fraud’ racket tends to attract all the world’s worst people. Here’s the John Lott edition, a gun rights writer who doesn’t want any restrictions on your guns but would like you to need to do the equivalent of a gun background check in order to be allowed to vote.

Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is joining us in The Hive at 1 PM eastern to answer your questions. I just asked my question about how we balance combating Russian meddling in our domestic elections while not becoming obsessed with what I at least see as a declining state in strategic and economic terms? Get your questions in now and join us at 1 pm.

Apropos of reports that some of Trump’s lawyers wanted Jared Kushner to resign early last summer, here’s a bit of additional detail.

TPM Reader CM refocuses us on gender …

I agree really strongly with your general take on Trump being an expression of white backlash, but I also wanted to add that I think you’re missing a really important component: GENDER.

TPM Reader JB reminds us and me that elections are about the future, not the past and not to focus too much on a relatively thin slice of voters …

You make a number of good points about Trumpism and the Democrats. They call for thought. So, here is mine.

TPM Reader JB rightly notes there’s no single explanation or solution …

I hope you are well. I have been thinking about your piece this morning, the one on the 8th, and Greg Sargent’s piece yesterday in regards to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece. I think my biggest problem with the way this conversation is playing out is that we have to deliver a single silver bullet to slay Trumpism, “Identifying the roots of Trumpism doesn’t give you sufficient answers to how to combat it, especially if it’s true that there are enough white voters, susceptible to activation by white backlash politics, to win national elections.”

TPM Reader DL thinks my whole premise is wrong …

Josh wrote this in his blog entry on the Intra-Dem divide:

“But the reality is that simple math tells you that some significant number of white voters who were activated by racist appeals need to be won back to turn back the tide of Trumpism. This has the certainty of math.”

Probably not surprisingly I got a large number of responses to my post this morning on the intra-Democratic divide. These were responses to that post and also my post from other the weekend responding to the Coates’ piece in The Atlantic. I’m going to try to publish a number of them this evening. They run the gamut. I don’t agree or disagree with particular ones. But I think the breadth of opinions and insights are worth absorbing.

Here’s Part 2 of my conversation with Professor Stephen Shoemaker about his book The Death of a Prophet on the origins of Islam. If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here. As I noted when we ran the first episode, this is one of the most interesting historical works I’ve read in some time.

Back at the end of July we cut short the last two weeks of our Prime sign up drive until we’d done a full rebuild of the sign-up process, making it easier to use, making instructions more clear, making it more straightforward how to purchase credits and easier to apply to get free subscriptions. We’ve finally finished that process after a lot of hard work by our design and tech team. So we’ll be jumping back in for two more weeks of our drive. For now, though, I wanted address one point which I’ve told many of you over the last few months I’d get back to you on.

A number of existing Prime members have asked if they could do more to support TPM journalism beyond their Prime membership fee. Well, yes, you can! Part of the reason we were doing the rebuild I mentioned was to make the sign up and record keeping process for doing so more robust and organized. This weekend we finally rolled out our FIN (Future Is Now) program. You can purchase FIN credits and that money is all specifically and exclusively earmarked for our growing TPM Investigations Desk.

At the same time, for each credit people purchase we will make available a free Prime subscription for an enrolled student – high school, college, graduate, full-time or part-time. They’re available for any enrolled student.

So do you want to turbo-charge our investigative reporting. Just click right here to purchase FIN credits. Are you a student who’d like to get a free Prime subscription? Just click here.

Thanks!

Over the weekend I dipped into the debate within the Democratic party and the left side of the political spectrum over the meaning of Trumpism and the path forward to defeat it. As I noted, I’m pretty clearly on the side that sees Trump and Trumpism as fundamentally about race and racial backlash. It’s not solely about that. It’s also about rural areas versus cities, it’s about Christianity, it’s about sexual traditionalism. But fundamentally it is about race. That’s my take and the take of many others.