Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for? 

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans, including a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump. 

This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

This week, soon after his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter was able to vote in his home state of Georgia—in part thanks to protections under the Voting Rights Act. As his grandson Jason Carter explained in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, voting assistance protections in Georgia allow family members to help cast absentee ballots (the vote can still be discarded if a signature or mark on the ballot does not match what is on file, per Georgia law).

“He sat down and told everybody what he wanted to do, and was excited about it,” Jason Carter told Tapper. “My aunt dropped his ballot [at] an absentee drop box, just like thousands and thousands of other Georgians.”

Jimmy Carter just voted. His grandson explains how. pic.twitter.com/Ax1Ulvt9RR

Even if Carter doesn’t consider himself disabled, many aging people benefit from disability rights laws and protections. Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice.”

Days after helping launch a clearly false claim about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a disinformation peddler with a huge platform has disappeared from X.

The “Black Insurrectionist” profile began claiming last week that he’d been in touch with a former student of Walz who baselessly alleged the Minnesota governor sexually abused him years ago when he was a teacher and football coach. The now-missing account, which posted under the name @Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.

“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool.”

The @Docnetyoutube account seems to have been deleted sometime on the evening of Thursday, October 17. It’s unclear if the user deleted the account or the company did: under Elon Musk’s ownership, X no longer responds to journalists and could not be reached for comment.

In an extraordinary monologue Tuesday at a Univision town hall, Donald Trump repeated the lie that the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6—which he described using the pronoun “we”—was unarmed.

“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “That was a day of love.”

That is a lie. The latest evidence showing that Trump’s claim is false came in a guilty plea Wednesday by a Texas man named Roger Preacher. Preacher admitted to carrying a pistol on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, though he knew that doing so was illegal.

Preacher said that he traveled to Washington with two other men who also brought “pistols and AR-style” rifles on the trip. They drove into Washington on January 6 from a Virginia hotel room with three rifles in a bag, the filing says. They left the bag in the car, but Preacher carried his pistol in “an inside-the-waistband holster “ to the lower West Terrace of the Capitol grounds where he remained for around an hour. Preacher said he believed the other two men “were also carrying firearms on their persons.”

As any schoolkid might tell you, US elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn’t been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans, and poor White people. The first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. 

The reality is that one person, one vote is far from how American democracy actually works. In fact, the political institutions created by the Founding Fathers were meant to constrain democracy, and that system is still alive today. 

Institutions like the Electoral College and US Senate were designed as checks against the power of the majority. What’s more, the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. Then there are newer tactics—like voter suppression and gerrymandering—that further erode democracy and often entrench the power of a conservative White minority.

These are some of the conclusions from Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman in his latest book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made his first appearance of the 2024 election with Donald Trump on Friday. The event marked another key moment of support by Kemp for Trump’s presidential bid, despite the vitriol Trump has directed at him and his family.

The two appeared together at a relief shelter in the east Georgia town of Evans, which was badly damaged last week by Hurricane Helene. “I want to thank President Trump for coming back to our state again for the second time to tour storm damage and keep a national focus on the state as we recover,” Kemp said.

In 2020, Trump relentlessly pressured Kemp to overturn the election. After Kemp refused, Trump spent years going after him: He tried to oust Kemp in 2022 by endorsing his primary Republican opponent, and this summer criticized him as “the most disloyal guy I’ve ever seen” and “very bad for the Republican Party” during a 10-minute tirade at a rally in Atlanta.

While Friday’s speech was not an official campaign event, Kemp’s appearance with Trump will be used by the ex-president to boost his campaign in the tight battleground state. “Your governor is doing a fantastic job, I will tell you that,” Trump said while surrounded by emergency relief supplies, such as bottled water, toilet paper, and diapers, contradicting his earlier Kemp criticisms. “We’re all with him and with everybody.”

Donald Trump’s claim that non-citizens are crossing the Southern border and registering to vote in US elections has become a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, even though every major study shows that non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare.

But a lawsuit filed last month shows that those false assertions of voter fraud are leading to real world instances of qualified voters being blocked from casting a ballot.

On August 13, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, an election denier who supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 results, announced that his office had identified 3,200 alleged noncitizens who had registered to vote in the state and had begun removing them from the voter rolls. He said the names were pulled from a list of individuals who had received noncitizen identification numbers from the Department of Homeland Security. Even then, he conceded that “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued noncitizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”

On September 27, the Department of Justice sued Alabama, arguing that Allen’s actions were in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which prohibits the removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. That so-called quiet period exists “to mitigate the risk that errors in systematic list maintenance will disenfranchise, confuse, or deter eligible voters by ensuring that they have adequate time to address errors and understand their rights,” the Justice Department wrote in its lawsuit.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.

But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33 percent worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.

In June, Oklahoma’s Trump-supporting top school official, Ryan Walters, ordered the state’s schools to teach the Bible in class—and this week, his department put in a $3 million proposal to buy 55,000 Bibles for Oklahoma schools. But out of the thousands of versions available for purchase, it seems only two holy books fit the state Department of Education’s strict criteria: one sold by Donald J. Trump, and one sold by his son Don Junior.

Surprise, surprise.

On Friday, the nonprofit news outlet Oklahoma Watch reported that the superintendent’s bid documents included specific standards for the Bibles set to be used in Oklahoma classrooms, standards only met by two editions.

According to the documents, the books must:

On Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) agency didn’t have enough funding for the rest of hurricane season. Some on the right, including Trump, seized on the moment to attack their favorite scapegoat: undocumented immigrants.

“They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants who they want to have vote for them,” Trump falsely claimed during a rally in Michigan yesterday.

FEMA’s response: a fact check page, where the agency denied diverting funds.

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” 

Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

As congratulations poured in for the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Award, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, should have been celebrating a career-defining achievement. But the full story was a bit more complicated. Around the same time that she had been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in intellectual circles, Dr. Benjamin was being chastised for pro-Palestine activism by her university.

She explained the context in a thread on X, which gained wide attention:

The thread publicized an ongoing conflict between Benjamin and her employer, which had opened an investigation into her involvement in an April protest in solidarity with pro-Palestinian student demonstrators. According to Benjamin, a “tense” phone call with university officials had taken place shortly before learning she had won a MacArthur grant, thus diluting the joy that comes with such an exceedingly rare achievement.

Donald Trump will be campaigning in North Carolina today—without Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor by his side. The Trump campaign has remained mum about Robinson, a top Trump ally, since CNN reported on Thursday that Robinson had made a series of “inflammatory comments” on a pornographic message board more than a decade ago, including referring to himself as a “black NAZI!” and praising Mein Kampf as a “good read.”

This wasn’t Robinson’s first scandal. Last October, Jewish Insider reported that Robinson had made antisemitic comments on social media going back a decade, including sharing a quote about racial pride that has been attributed to Adolf Hitler.

Trump endorsed Robinson in March despite these remarks, even referring to the candidate, who has denied that systemic racism exists, as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Trump won North Carolina in 2020 with his narrowest margin of victory. Politico reports that the Harris campaign sees the scandal as an opening to appeal to voters in the state. “Trump made Mark Robinson,” advisers wrote in a memo, “and he will have to answer for him.”

Less than two months before the election, the Trump-aligned majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a new set of eleventh-hour rule changes on Friday that could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.

During a highly contentious meeting, the state board voted 3-2 to require county election boards to hand count ballots cast on Election Day and then compare the results to the totals tallied by electronic voting machines to reconcile any discrepancies. While hand counts are commonly used in post-election audits to ensure accurate results, counting all votes by hand is significantly more burdensome, time-consuming, and error-prone than using standard voting machines. The rules were passed by three Republican appointees who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August.

“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, who voted against the rule changes, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”

Given the short time period for counties to certify the election—the deadline is the Monday after Election Day—voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,” will be weaponized by Republicans to oppose election certification. “After changing election certification rules in ways that give new power to local election officials to refuse to certify results, the MAGA board is now changing rules in ways that seem meant to create a fail point in our system,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight.

Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.

On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.

Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.

If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.

In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.  

You can read the full piece, here:

Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now. 

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.

This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.

Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.

This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.

Update: At a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, Trump backed away from another debate, saying “The problem with another debate is that it’s just too late. Voting has already started.”

Vice President Kamala Harris accepted an invitation from CNN to debate Donald Trump for a second time on October 23. Now the ball is in the former president’s court.

After getting trounced by Harris in their first debate earlier this month, Trump initially ruled out a second face-off. “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he posted on Truth Social two days after the candidates faced off on ABC. But by that Friday, he seemed more open to the idea. “Maybe if I got in the right mood, I don’t know,” he told reporters during a news conference in California.

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.