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

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2 percent tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise about $313 billion a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality, and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and Spain say a 2 percent tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.

“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece. “One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education, and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”

Donald Trump is on trial in Manhattan facing 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of another crime: conspiring to influence the 2016 election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argues that, to squelch negative publicity that might hurt Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump directed the creation of fake records to hide hush-money payments to women who claimed they’d had extramarital sex with him. 

That’s a complicated case to prove. And one in which it does not matter one whit, at least legally, who Trump actually had sex with. All Trump’s lawyers have to argue is that the payoffs, while perhaps unseemly, were legal. And they’re doing that. Yet Trump’s lawyers are also going further, asserting that the former president didn’t have sex with any of the three woman whose possible encounters with him resulted in payoffs for silence.

In one case—a $30,000 payout to a doorman who claimed to know of Trump fathering an out-of-wedlock child—the underlying allegation in fact seems to be false. But it’s striking that Trump’s defense includes denials that he slept with porn star Stormy Daniels (who received $130,000) and Playboy model Karen McDougal ($150,000). That’s because, to exaggerate only a bit, no one believes him.

The ongoing testimony of David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, who helped spearhead the so-called “catch and kill” scheme to buy the rights to stories about Trump’s alleged encounters in order to suppress the claims, drives home that point. Pecker on Thursday indicated that he, former Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, and Trump fixer Michael Cohen all believed McDougal’s account of a year-long sexual affair with Trump.

What’s more, according to Pecker, Trump did nothing at the time to counter that impression. Pecker recounted a June 2016 call with Trump which came while Pecker’s company was in the process of buying the rights to McDougal’s story. Trump, who Pecker said knew of McDougal’s claims and the talks about paying her to stay quiet, remarked that “she is a nice girl,” Pecker recalled. Trump then asked: “What do you think I should do?” Pecker said. Pecker said he suggested paying her. Trump, that is, did not deny McDougal’s claims. Nor, according to Pecker, did Trump dispute her claims in a January 2017 Trump Tower meeting in which he thanked Pecker for “handling” the matter.

Israel and its allies were scrambling to shoot down a fleet of Iran-launched drones on Saturday evening, according to both countries’ militaries, in a major escalation of a regional conflict sparked by the Israel-Hamas war. Iranian state media claimed that the country was coordinating the drones with a barrage of ballistic missiles.

The unfolding aerial attack comes in retaliation for Israel’s strike on an Iranian embassy in Syria earlier this month. Israel’s war cabinet held emergency meetings as President Biden cut short a weekend trip to Delaware to huddle with officials in the White House Situation Room. Flight tracking websites were reporting widespread airspace closures across multiple countries in the region as Israeli officials confirmed efforts to intercept the weapons before they entered Israeli territory, according to the New York Times. The exact targets of the offensive remained unclear.

Iran said that the April 1 attack on its consular facility in Damascus killed seven military advisers, including three top commanders, and in the weeks since, according to Reuters. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed retaliation, saying Israel “must be punished and shall be.” As recently as Friday, when asked to assess how close Iran was to attacking Israel, President Biden said “my expectation is sooner than later.” As of early Saturday evening in the United States, the US claimed to be shooting down incoming Iranian drones, as television images showed the night sky above Israel lighting up with what appeared to be intercept fire. 

In Gaza, the health care system has collapsed, but nearly 200 women each day still need to find a safe place to give birth. In this week’s episode of Reveal, reporters Gabrielle Berbey and Salmad Ahad Khan tell the story of one woman, 42-year-old Lubna Al Rayyes, as she deals with a complicated pregnancy in the midst of the war. After fleeing her home in Gaza City, Al Rayyes tries to find refuge in Khan Younis—only to be forced to evacuate again when that city comes under attack too. 

Also in this episode, reporters speak with Dutch researcher Dr. Tessa Roseboom, who has been studying how famine affects the development of babies in the womb, and Dr. Ghassan Jawad, an OB-GYN who had worked at Al-Shifa hospital before it was left in ruins by an Israeli military attack. 

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Days after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a near-total ban on abortion could be enforced in the state, Kamala Harris went after Trump for his position on abortion in a campaign speech Friday in Tucson. Harris said that the ruling, which granted abortion exceptions only when it was “necessary to save” a woman’s life, “demonstrated once and for all that overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy.”

“And we all must understand who all is to blame,” Harris, who has become the Biden administration’s most vocal official on abortion, said. “Former President Donald Trump did this.” She said that a second Trump term would produce even more abortion bans and adversely affect reproductive care for women. 

Harris calling out Trump comes as the former president appears to be carving out distance between himself and anti-abortion policies. Over the past week, he has repeatedly said that there is no longer a need for a federal abortion ban, because “we broke Roe v. Wade.” On Wednesday, he said he would decline to sign such a ban, and on Monday, he claimed that abortion policy should be left to the states. He also released a statement opposing the Arizona ban. 

Democrats, including President Biden, have accused Trump of lying as he attempts to avoid the political fallout of being associated with strict anti-abortion policies, which consistently poll as extremely unpopular among voters. 

Trump has moved back and forth on abortion as it has been politically expedient—prior to running for office, he both claimed to be “very pro-choice” and then “pro-life.” In 2016, he said he would attempt to defund Planned Parenthood and then try to provide “some form of punishment” to women seeking abortions. In 2017, he supported the 20-week abortion ban that the House passed, saying that he would sign it, though the bill never made it through the Senate. 

Famine is already happening in parts of Gaza, a top US humanitarian official publicly acknowledged this week for the first time. After six months of Israeli war and blockades, an estimated 2.2 million people are facing acute or catastrophic food shortages. One in three children in northern Gaza are malnourished, and deaths due to hunger are expected to accelerate quickly, US officials have warned.

According to the groundbreaking work of Dutch researcher Dr. Tessa Roseboom, the impacts of near starvation are also likely being experienced by generations not yet born. Roseboom, a biologist and professor of early development and health at the Amsterdam UMC/University of Amsterdam, has been studying the long-term consequences of prenatal malnutrition for almost 30 years.

Much of her work focuses on people like her parents, who were born around the time of the Dutch “Hunger Winter” at the end of World War II. In dozens of studies, Roseboom and her colleagues have provided some of the first direct evidence in humans of the intergenerational impact of in-utero exposure to stresses such as famine. Their work suggests that malnutrition during pregnancy can have lasting consequences not only for the future health of the child but for subsequent generations. “It’s one of the things that makes me very passionate to talk about how the decisions we make today will have an effect for many, many decades,” Roseboom says. “I really feel the generations before me urging me to speak out.”

Audio journalists Neroli Price, Salman Ahad Khan, and Gabrielle Berbey talked with Roseboom as part of their investigation into how Israel’s blocking of aid trucks carrying food and medical supplies is leading to a maternal and infant health disaster. Excerpts of their conversation can be heard on the latest Reveal radio episode, “In Gaza, Every Pregnancy is Complicated,” (available for listening on nearly 600 NPR stations or for download).  Given the timeliness and urgency of the subject, we are presenting a longer digital version here. 

Let’s start with the Hunger Winter. What was the confluence of events that made the winter of 1944-1945 so devastating for people in the Netherlands?

On CNN, John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump and rabid war lover who wants to bomb Iran and North Korea (among others), revealed that he is voting for a write-in candidate in 2024.

“I might as well say it now,” Bolton said, “I voted for Dick Cheney [in 2020]. And I’ll vote for Dick Cheney again this November.”

Why would Bolton do this? “Because [Cheney] was a principled Reaganite conservative, and he still is,” Bolton told the CNN viewers. Bolton then went on to explain that age is no longer a factor, allowing him to vote for a man who is 83 years old. And he continued, in a bit of a joking tone, to say that if he could sway the nation toward a write-in campaign for Cheney to prevent either Biden or Trump from being president, he would. Bolton also noted that someday he might vote for Cheney’s very hawkish, very anti-Trump daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney.

John Bolton: “I might as well say it now: I voted for Dick Cheney [in 2020]. And I’ll vote for Dick Cheney again this November.” pic.twitter.com/RCJGpeJQBJ

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 11, 2024

Everyone seems to be talking about saving democracy this year. “American democracy, that’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Joe Biden has emphasized, painting the threat of Donald Trump’s return to power as the central issue in the 2024 campaign. “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.”

But the crisis facing American democracy is much older and deeper than Trump and it is, indeed, a relic of a very different time in US history.

In a new video companion for Mother Jones, based on my forthcoming book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, digital producer Sam Van Pykeren explores how the US political system was created to restrain democracy, not protect it. The founders essentially placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of our political system—and this could be the year it explodes.

As I explain in my book, it all dates back to the birth of American democracy, when the Founding Fathers created political institutions within a system that concentrated power in the hands of an elite, propertied, white male minority. More than 200 years later, the series of compromises the founders made have increasingly vested the majority of political power in the hands of a minority of the population—a reactionary conservative white minority that is seeking to entrench and hold onto power through a wide variety of anti-democratic means.

You can pre-order Minority Rule here, and find the exclusive Mother Jones excerpt here.

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

With just two weeks left until the Democratic primary for western Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district, climate and environmental groups have overwhelmingly endorsed the anti-fracking incumbent, Rep. Summer Lee. 

One of the only contested Democratic congressional primaries in the state, the race between Lee and Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel has drawn attention, with the candidates clashing over the Biden Administration’s continued military funding for Israel and the GOP-funded Moderate PAC bankrolling advertisements targeting Lee on behalf of Patel, who supports continuing military aid. 

On Wednesday, the Lee campaign said it has received a slate of new and existing endorsements from 14 prominent climate and environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sunrise Movement, Sunrise Pittsburgh, Zero Hour, the Sierra Club of Pennsylvania, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Jane Fonda Climate PAC. The endorsements shift focus away from Israel and Palestine to Lee’s environmental justice platform, which advocates for bringing jobs and money to a district mostly made up of Pittsburgh that has spent decades under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry.

Edith Abeyta, an environmental justice organizer and air quality advocate in the district, said she is an enthusiastic supporter of Lee’s re-election campaign. “For me, it’s this intersectionality that Lee upholds within her district,” Abeyta said. “She represents a lot of people that live in environmental justice zones and frontline communities, and I think she gets it…she’s a voice for the people.” 

Despite Elon Musk’s enshittification of Twitter, to borrow a term from the novelist and culture critic Cory Doctorow, his rebranded social media platform is still useful to journalists like me to communicate with certain people and to promote good stories, even if its algorithm now seems to further reward clickbait, disinformation, and right-wing trolls.

But Musk has transformed the company’s comms apparatus into a scorched hellscape governed by mindless, nonhuman decision-making—which is ironic given the antipathy Musk has expressed about bots on his platform. I experienced the rot myself recently, after X locked up my account for “unusual behavior” that supposedly violated its rules. That was all the explanation I got.

Hours before, interestingly, I’d quote-tweeted a post from Musk wherein he mocked the notion of Americans living on land stolen from Indigenous people. At best, it was a really dumb joke, not the sort of thing most people would want to share with 180 million people—which is how many followers Musk has.

We live on stolen land.

By “we”, I mean us mammals.

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

In 2022, the sobriquet showed up once more in the halls of power: “Abortionist” was used four times in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, channeling a fraught history.

Until the late 1800s, abortion and reproductive health were primarily handled by women—midwives, many of whom were Black, Indigenous, or immigrants. As medicine professionalized, male doctors viewed this skilled group as a threat to their business. Birth, they argued, ought to take place in a hospital. “The midwife is a relic of barbarism,” Dr. Joseph DeLee, a prominent 20th century obstetrician, proclaimed, “a drag on the progress of the science and art of obstetrics.”

The restructuring of gynecological medicine went hand in hand with a budding movement to criminalize abortion. In 1860, governors of every state received a letter from the president of a young organization, the American Medical Association. Ghostwritten by Horatio Storer, a Harvard-educated surgeon, the letter was part of an AMA campaign touting a new idea: Abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception—not, as previous laws considered, at “quickening,” when fetal movements are first detected. Under this logic, as Storer made it his mission to convince the masses, practically all abortions should be a crime.

Donald Trump’s attacks on President Joe Biden have become familiar, but on Friday they reached a new level of terrifying. The former president posted a video on his Truth Social platform featuring a truck with an image of President Biden hog-tied on the tailgate, as if he’d just been kidnapped. 

This type of messaging is part of a specific routine for Trump—one that we’ve been reporting on for years. It’s called “stochastic terrorism,” a type of rhetoric from a leader that smears another person or group so that they are more likely to be attacked by the leader’s supporters, while the leader is able to deny any involvement. My colleague Mark Follman reported on Trump’s use of stochastic terrorism—and how it’s spread through the GOP—in 2022: 

Trump made this form of incitement a hallmark of his presidency, galvanizing extremists by railing against and dehumanizing his “enemies.” The country saw the devastating consequences when his supporters stormed Congress to obstruct certification of the presidential election. And now a growing number of Republicans are emulating Trump’s technique.

“While these attacks may defy specific predictability,” threat assessment experts Molly Amman and Reid Meloy wrote in a 2021 study in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, “their likelihood is greatly increased by the public demon­ization process.” Repetition and saturation through social media and news coverage further amplifies the effect, they observed.

Friday’s post from Trump is undoubtedly extreme and dangerous, but it’s unlikely to illicit widespread outrage or condemnation because he has succeeded in normalizing this type of speech. David Corn wrote about this phenomenon in September:

As a kid, I spent countless hours watching The Amanda Show, a sketch comedy series starring Amanda Bynes that aired on Nickelodeon from 1999 to 2002. The show was created by Dan Schneider, who went on to helm many of the channel’s most beloved series, including Drake and Josh and iCarly. In addition to providing plenty of laughs, it was a rare example of a children’s show that took the comedic talents of its young star seriously. But after watching the new docuseries Quiet on Set, I know my fond memories of watching The Amanda Show will never be the same. 

The four-part docuseries aired on Max and Investigation Discovery earlier this month, and a surprise fifth episode is in the works for next week. The show explores the dark side of Dan Schneider’s tenure at Nickelodeon, painting him as a temperamental, manipulative boss with a disturbing habit of inserting sexual innuendos into scenes with child actors. Details of Schneider’s conduct began to leak out in 2018, when Schneider left Nickelodeon amid allegations of abusive behavior. The New York Times reported in 2021 that an internal investigation had found Schneider was verbally abusive to staff, while a 2022 Business Insider investigation highlighted his controlling demeanor and sexism in the writers room. 

On set, Schneider’s crew included two now-convicted sex offenders. In 2004, Jason Handy, a production assistant, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading no contest to performing lewd acts on a child, distributing sexually explicit material, and child exploitation. The same year, dialogue coach Brian Peck pleaded no contest to two charges related child sexual abuse against an anonymous child actor and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. Quiet on Set’s biggest bombshell is that Peck’s victim was Drake Bell, a star of Drake & Josh and a regular on The Amanda Show. 

The documentary chronicles the Schneider years at Nickelodeon through interviews with former cast and crew members, journalists who reported on the scandal, and the parents of child actors. It also resurfaces moments of inappropriate humor from Schneider’s shows that seem alarming in retrospect: In one scene, a 16-year-old Ariana Grande, a cast member on Schneider’s Victorious, attempts to “juice” a potato while moaning suggestively. 

The fourth episode, originally slated to be the last in the series, ends with Bell sharing how the abuse impacted him emotionally. In the last shots, we see Bell and his dad walking off the documentary set, then the camera cuts to a sunset. As the credits rolled, I felt a mix of anger and hopelessness. While the filmmakers had done a skillful job of laying out the allegations against Schneider, the show also left many questions unanswered. Schneider declined to be interviewed for the documentary, though it included a written statement from him, saying his content went through many levels of approval before it aired. (Nickelodeon provided a statement to the documentary saying it “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to foster a safe and professional workplace.”) After the documentary, Schneider offered a lackluster mea culpa in a softball interview with a former iCarly cast member, where he muddled his apology with asides that his behavior was caused by “inexperience” and letting pressures get to him.

A federal judge on Friday granted a preliminary injunction that will force New Jersey to redo its controversial ballot design, known as the county-line ballot, a move that could fundamentally alter elections in a state long rife with allegations of political corruption. 

The ruling is a victory for Rep. Andy Kim, who last month sued the state’s counties to end the use of the design. But Friday’s decision, which at one point had been seen as a critical step in Kim’s campaign to replace the now twice-indited Sen. Bob Menendez, may carry less importance for those efforts. That’s because Tammy Murphy, wife to Gov. Phil Murphy and Kim’s opponent ahead of the June Democratic primary, announced last week that she was suddenly dropping out. Despite never having held office and being a registered Republican until 2014, Murphy had been backed by the state’s political machine and therefore widely perceived as unbeatable.

Still, the ruling’s potential effect on future elections, especially if it survives a likely appeal by county clerks, could be massive. My colleague Nina Wang explains:

Strong party endorsements offer an outsized electoral advantage in New Jersey’s primaries. Nineteen of the state’s 21 counties design their ballots in an extraordinarily confusing way that tips the scales toward local bigwigs’ favorite candidates. On ballot sheets, party bosses can put their top picks on the county line—a list of candidates endorsed for all seats currently up for election, from county clerk all the way to the presidency. Challengers who lack the bosses’ favor are often kicked to “ballot Siberia,” where they are likely to be ignored by voters.

“Today’s decision is a victory for a fairer, more democratic politics in New Jersey,” Kim said in a statement. “It’s a victory built from the incredible grassroots work of activists across our state who saw an undemocratic system marginalizing the voices of voters, and worked tirelessly to fix it.”

It’s easy to see the glaring hypocrisy of Brian Pritchard, the Republican official in Georgia and outspoken election denier, who was found guilty this week of voting illegally nine times. A judge apparently did not buy Pritchard’s claims that he had been unaware that his probation from felony forgery charges had not ended when he illegally cast his vote. All this is ironic considering voter fraud is an enduring conservative boogeyman despite scant evidence that such rampant fraud exists. 

Yet any schadenfreude that might be derived from Pritchard’s voting violations, which resulted in an order on Wednesday to pay a $5,000 fine and receive a public reprimand, is short-lived. It seems stunted by another piece of headline-making voter fraud news this week: A Texas court of appeals reversed a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Black woman who voted illegally in 2016 after unintentionally casting her ballot while technically still a felon under Texas law. (The state bars convicted felons from voting until a supervised release has been completed.) 

In the simplest terms, the reversal is good news; it’s hard not to feel emotional reading Mason’s statement celebrating that she will remain a “free Black woman.” But the wildly disparate punishments handed to Mason and Pritchard—a white man—over incredibly similar offenses once again underscores the deep flaws of a system borne out of a push to fix a virtually nonexistent problem. That Mason’s ordeal happened under the watch of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led the war on voter fraud while under indictment for securities fraud, adds to the dissonance. But for conservatives who have long relied on voter fraud fears to block ballot access, that whiplashing dissonance is precisely the point. As my colleague Pema Levy wrote in 2019:

Raising fears of fraud in order to make it harder for people—particularly people fitting certain demographic profiles—to vote didn’t start with [the Trump] administration, or even in the past 100 years. As Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar lays out in his 2000 book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, the tactic dates back to the early decades of the 19th century. Throughout US history, politicians and activists ginned up stories about fraud in order to keep their opponents from the polls. “Legislative debates were sprinkled heavily with tales of ballot box stuffing, miscounts, hordes of immigrants lined up to vote as the machine instructed, men trooping from precinct to precinct to vote early and often,” he writes. 

Put another way, these laws were never meant to hurt Brian Pritchard. This week, we were reminded of that once again. 

Today marks one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on what American officials say are false charges of espionage. He has been held in jail ever since.

Members of Russia’s Federal Security Service—the country’s intelligence agency, also known as the FSB—detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, according to the Journal. Gershkovich had deep familiarity the country: his parents fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He had full press credentials from Russia’s foreign ministry and had reported from Moscow for Agence France Press and the Moscow Times before joining the Journal in January 2022. Russia has not publicly presented evidence of its espionage claims against Gershkovich, the Journal reports. 

Since his arrest—which marks the first time an American journalist has been held on such charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War—Gershkovich has been in Russia’s notorious Lefortovo prison, where he spends 90 percent of his day in a small cell, according to the paper. Earlier this week, a Russian court extended Gershkovich’s pre-trial detention by three months, until June 30. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the extension, calling it “another cynical affront to press freedom by the Russian authorities.” 

In a letter published today, Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker called Gershkovich’s detention “a blatant attack on the rights of the free press,” adding that “given the lessons of history and the arbitrary power of the Russian state, if there is a trial, we would expect a guilty verdict—something we would view as a travesty of justice.” A conviction could carry a sentence of 10 to 20 years, the Journal reports.

Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s special envoy for hostage affairs, told the New York Times that the US government is involved in “intensive efforts” to secure the releases of Gershkovich and ex-Marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian custody since 2018 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, which American officials also deny.

n the afternoon of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and close friend Eric Swalwell a pen. “Here,” he said to the California Democrat. “Stick this in their neck if they get close to you.”

The Marine veteran, who’d seen combat in Iraq, leaped on a table and began issuing instructions to other panicked lawmakers, showing them how to don the gas masks secured under their chairs: “Tear gas will not kill you. But it’s important to remain calm. If you hyperventilate, you may pass out.” If necessary, Gallego told himself, he could use his own pen as a weapon to take a more lethal one from a rioter.

Three years later, the battle for American democracy continues, and Gallego, locked in one of the most pivotal contests of the 2024 election, is again attempting to hold the line. Along with close matchups in Ohio and Montana, his Senate race in Arizona for the seat Kyrsten Sinema is vacating could be one of a handful that decide control of the upper chamber and, with it, the future of our republic. Donald Trump, facing 88 criminal counts, has promised to usher in MAGA on steroids if reelected, including mass deportation and sweeping bans on gender-affirming care. A Democratic-­led Senate would be one of the last fortifications against his agenda.

As if to further underscore the stakes, Gallego’s opponent is the former TV news anchor turned Trump sycophant Kari Lake. A prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories, Lake claims not only that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump but also that she was robbed of the Arizona governorship in her 2022 race. If Trumpism is akin to a religion, Lake views herself as one of its martyrs. “You can call us extremists. You can call us domestic terrorists,” she declared during one campaign event in 2022. “You know who else was called a lot of names his whole life? Jesus.”

Lake’s loss two years ago is just one indicator that Arizona is turning away from Trump-style conservatism. Though Trump won the state by 3.6 percent in 2016, he lost it in 2020 by about half of a percent. In 2022, all of the major statewide candidates Trump endorsed were defeated. But the state is certainly not a Democratic stronghold, either. Of roughly 4.1 million registered voters, there are some 236,000 more Republicans and 197,000 more independents than there are Democrats. To win, Gallego “has to appeal to a cross ­section of voters,” says former Arizona Democratic Party Chair Jim Pederson, “particularly moderate Republicans.”

At the start of a slickly produced 19-minute YouTube video titled “How T.Rex Arms Got Started,” Lucas Botkin, the company’s 30-year-old founder, runs through an obstacle course. A guitar-­heavy soundtrack plays as Botkin, decked out in tactical gear and filtered through overwrought video effects, picks off targets with a variety of handguns and rifles. We briefly see the course from his eyes, first-person-shooter style.

When the drums bang to a halt, the video cuts to an interview where Botkin explains his company’s mission. “We try to produce thought-provoking content and educational content that inspires people to understand their obligations to God and country and their responsibilities,” he says, over more shooting footage. “Then we equip them with the equipment necessary so they can fulfill those obligations and those responsibilities with maximum effectiveness.”

T.Rex Arms, a Tennessee-based, family-­run, Christian firearms accessory company—think holsters, body armor, and the like—is at the forefront of what extremism researchers call GunTube, an ecosphere of gun influencers whose videos peddle a wide range of conservative content. The company has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers; its origin story video has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Botkin, who can cut a nerdy presence when digging into gun minutiae, has nearly half a million Instagram followers and enough right-wing cachet to have been an ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and have earned an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show the month before he left the network.

“They are jacks of all trades,” says Meghan Conroy, who monitors extremist influencers for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. What separates T.Rex Arms from the rest of the gun community, she says, is its “masterful ability to create content that appeals to so many different people.” While some of its most popular videos offer product reviews and shooting tips, they are accompanied by a wide range of political content, including interviews with conservative officials and activists. In weekly “T.Rex Talks,” Lucas and his brothers sit in a dimly lit studio to discuss America in decay, and how like-minded, God-oriented people can save it. They often reference the end times and urge their viewers to seize control before things get worse. “They’re selling products,” says Max Rizzuto, another Atlantic Council researcher, “and the product is ideology, too.”

For example, in the days following the 2020 election, Lucas and his older brother, Isaac, a designer at the company who frequently appears on T.Rex Talks, discussed journalism. “We’re at a place right now where a lot of people don’t trust the mainstream media,” Isaac said, to which Lucas quickly replied, “Reasonably so.” The brothers argued reporters should be held accountable for their coverage of topics like Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests. “I’m starting to wonder when a news network will be actually prosecuted for things that they say that result in the death of people, which I think has happened in the past four years,” Lucas said. “It results in people getting killed, or businesses just getting burned, looted. Theft. And they’re not being held responsible for it.” Lucas went on to predict that economic collapse was “very likely” in his lifetime: “The way we live can be radically different 30 years from now.” In another stream, he warned of the “apocalyptic” prospect of a nationwide gun ban.

One month after releasing a line of gilded high-tops for $399, Donald Trump revealed on Tuesday a new item: the Bible. “All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” the former president explained in a video promoting the country singer Lee Greenwood’s version of a King James translation, the “God Bless the USA Bible.”

“It’s my favorite book,” Trump added.

Throughout the rest of the clip, as if daring us into a collective disgust, Trump swerved through random opportunities to rail against bureaucrats and a country under threat—all while hawking a holy text.

But his latest sales pitch also prompted some legitimate questions. Such as: What the hell is going on? And: Excuse me? Here, we try to answer some of the queries.

So, that first question—what the hell—but more formally: What exactly is Trump promoting and how much will it cost me to shell out for this? 

On Tuesday, Alabama provided even more evidence of what we already know to be true: Abortion rights win elections. 

Democrat Marilyn Lands won a special election for an Alabama state House seat, flipping a Republican-held seat by campaigning on abortion rights in the deep-red state that bans abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. Lands won 62 percent of the nearly 6,000 votes cast, while her challenger, Republican Teddy Powell, won 37.5 percent, according to the unofficial election night results from the Alabama Secretary of State. The candidates were running to replace Republican David Cole, who resigned last year after he was arrested on a voting fraud charge. (Lands ran against Cole in 2022 and lost by just under 1,000 votes, or about 7 percentage points—making her win last night all the more significant.)

Lands—a licensed professional counselor whose website says her “Christian values deeply influence her life and work”—campaigned on repealing the state’s abortion ban, as well as expanding Medicaid, investing in community mental health resources, and improving the local economy and education. Days after the state Supreme Court‘s decision threatening IVF last month, Lands released a campaign ad in which she and another Alabama woman, Alyssa Gonzales, each shared their personal stories of getting emergency abortions following nonviable pregnancies. For Lands, it happened 20 years ago; for Gonzales, it happened after the Dobbs decision was handed down in 2022. 

“We will not stand by and watch our most basic human rights be stripped from us,” Lands says in the ad.  

I’m sharing my abortion story because Alabama's no exceptions abortion ban is putting lives at risk. We must repeal this legislation, and if I'm elected on March 26th, I'll work tirelessly to do just that.