Last month, I published an investigation showing that Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant was deceiving voters by wildly misrepresenting his business history. After the story came out, Marchant told fellow election denier Steve Bannon, “Mother Jones did some sort of colonoscopy on me and they came up with everything.” He contested nothing.

“Everything,” in this case, included a former employee who said he “would not want Jim to be secretary of a preschool,” overwhelming evidence that Marchant’s most prominent company quickly imploded, and previously unpublished divorce records that revealed that his career ended in financial ruin. Marchant was betting that it wouldn’t matter—having a R next to his name would be enough in 2022. He was wrong.

Marchant narrowly lost his race for secretary of state to Democrat Cisco Aguilar, a lawyer and former aide to the late Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Marchant was one of the most extreme candidates running for statewide office this year. He claimed that all Nevada elections since 2006 had been rigged and that the winners had been “installed by the deep-state cabal.” Nevertheless, he nearly found himself in charge of all elections in the state. (Marchant didn’t answer when I called him on Friday evening to see if he was conceding.)

The origin story for Marchant’s campaign would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In 2020, Marchant lost his race for Congress by more than 16,000 votes. Instead of accepting defeat, he claimed that he and Donald Trump had been victims of voter fraud. The day after the election, he checked himself into the Venetian so that he could work with Trump’s team to try to overturn the results of both contests.

His lawsuit to try to force Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, to hold a new election was quickly thrown out. But while on the Strip, he’s said he received a visit from Wayne Willott, a fringe QAnon influencer who goes by the alias Juan O. Savin. Willott told Marchant to run for secretary of state in 2022 so that he could control Nevada elections. He also pushed Marchant to build a coalition of like-minded candidates in other states. Marchant followed Willott’s advice. 

For months leading up to Election Day, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada was widely perceived as one of the most—if not the most—vulnerable Democratic incumbents and her seat as one of the best pick-up opportunities for Republicans to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. The contested and costly race between Cortez Masto and GOP challenger Adam Laxalt, which was critical in determining the balance of power in the split Senate, remained a toss-up until pretty much the last minute. But with a slim margin of votes—half a percentage point—the majority of voters in the swing state of Nevada have decided to keep the first-ever Latina senator and reject an election denialist. Her victory secured 50 seats in the Senate for the Democrats, with only the Georgia run-off remaining to determine the final breakdown. 

A Nevada native and two-term attorney general, Cortez Masto was first elected to the Senate in 2016 following a tight race to fill the seat of her mentor, the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who built the Democratic machine in the state and picked her as his successor. Throughout her campaign this election cycle, Cortez Masto repeatedly called out her Trump loyalist opponent for peddling the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential elections were stolen and leading efforts in the state to overturn the results. She also made abortion rights a central tenet of her candidacy, vowing to block any attempts to pass a nationwide ban and decrying Laxalt for saying he would support a referendum to ban abortions after 13 weeks of pregnancy. Laxalt, who Trump called a “MAGA all the way” candidate, has described the US Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade as a “historic victory.” 

“There’s a stark difference between the two of us,” Cortez Masto told MSNBC. “To me this is about a race for Nevadans, fighting for Nevadans…It’s clear my opponent is about his own political agenda which is very extreme and is in opposition to even what Nevadans want.” The victorious Democratic senator also emphasized her background as the granddaughter of an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, and her local roots, reminding voters that improving their lives is personal to her. Her ads often emphasize her efforts to secure relief for small businesses hit hard by the pandemic. “It’s about Nevadans that I know. It’s about my family. My mother still lives in this community, grocery shops…I hear it, I see it when I go fill up my gas tank.” 

I grew up hearing our family stories from my cousins and tias around my grandparents' dinner table – everything I am is thanks to them.

I'll never forget where I come from – it's what drives me to fight for our families every day. pic.twitter.com/MMeWFDiDqp

What’s been likely for days is now official: Democrats will hold the US Senate. Media outlets on Saturday night projected that Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto had narrowly won her race, giving Democrats at least 50 Senate seats—enough to control the chamber.

The party has many people to thank. Their own candidates for staying on message, avoiding gaffes, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and generally coming across as the kind of people who don’t laugh at octogenarians who get assaulted in home invasions. The other party for nominating candidates who had no business making it to general elections. The Supreme Court for overturning women’s right to have an abortion five months before Election Day. And finally the voters—particularly in Arizona and Nevada—who decided by the slimmest of margins that they preferred people who accepted the results of the last election. 

It all combined to create an exceptionally good week for Senate Democrats, who could now actually gain a seat if Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) prevails in his December runoff against Herschel Walker. If Warnock wins, Dems will hold a 51-49 majority instead of the 50-50 split that’s required Vice President Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking votes. As a result, the party would no longer have to get both Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to sign off on everything.

The House, on the other hand, still appears more likely than not to flip to the Republicans. The odds that a divided Congress will pass major pieces of President Joe Biden’s agenda in the next two years are slim. But Democratic control of the Senate means that they will remain able to confirm judges to federal courts, fill positions in the executive branch, and determine what legislation makes it to the Senate floor. It will also prevent at least one-half of the Benghazi-style hearings Republicans are expected to launch on Capitol Hill.

On a fundamentals level, Democrats had no business doing as well as they did. Biden’s approval rating is stuck in the low 40s, inflation is running at the highest level in decades, and off-year elections are almost always bad for the party in power. Democrats responded by focusing on the threats to abortion and democracy posed by their opponents. Republicans were plagued by what (at least for now) Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called his “candidate quality” problem. Four of the five nominees in the closest Senate races—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—were exceptionally weak.

FiveThirtyEight’s final election forecast projected that Washington Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent would win by more than 12 points. Instead, in the biggest upset of the midterms, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has carried the Republican-leaning district in southwestern Washington.

Gluesenkamp Perez is the kind of relatable candidate Democrats have often struggled to nominate in recent years. At 34, she is more than two decades younger than the average House member. After Reed College, she started running a Portland, Oregon, auto shop along with her husband. They live across the state line in rural Skamania County, Washington, in a home they built themselves. She’d run for office once before in 2016. Gluesenkamp Perez lost that race for county commission, but managed to run ahead of Hillary Clinton by 6 points.

In her first debate with Kent, Gluesenkamp Perez introduced herself as a practical small business owner who was struggling with the costs of health care, child care, and government regulations. Her opponent, she argued, was an extreme figure who lived in a social-media-warped reality while she ran her auto shop.

Kent had gotten into the race after Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, the Republican who currently represents the district, voted to impeach Donald Trump in the wake of January 6. In August, Kent and Gluesenkamp Perez advanced to the general election after prevailing over Herrera Beutler in an open primary. Kent’s main consultant was Matt Braynard, a prominent election denier, and his people were the ones who thought Trump won.

Still, Kent, 42, had the kind of personal story and charisma that should have assured victory in an off-year election. After enlisting in the Army as a teenager in the late 1990s, he became a Green Beret and served 11 combat deployments—mostly in Iraq. In 2019, his wife Sharon, a Navy cryptologist, was killed in Syria by a suicide bomber. He was comfortable in front of the camera and gave hours-long interviews in which he tried to make sense of his service and his wife’s death. “He’s got a very clean-cut, square-jawed sort of marketing,” Gluesenkamp Perez told the New York Times, “and if you’re not really paying attention, you’re going to get distracted by the hair.”

For nearly nine months, the people of Kherson, Ukraine, had been living under Russian occupation, with countless families forced to live without basic means including food, running water, and electricity. But after Russian troops suddenly announced a retreat from the city on Friday, scenes of joy have brought a reprieve from the brutality of the war.

Videos and images quickly began flooding social media, showing Ukrainians taking to the streets to celebrate a rare moment of peace in southern Ukraine, where the fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces has been especially intense. The liberation of Kherson comes as a critical blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just last month had declared Kherson among four Ukrainian regions to have been annexed into Russia “forever.”

One especially poignant video clip shared online by Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist working for BBC News, showed a grandmother weeping with joy at the sight of her grandson, a Ukrainian solder:

The moment a grandmother kneels before her grandson soldier who’d been fighting for Kherson liberation. pic.twitter.com/f6JkBiPmMD

— Myroslava Petsa (@myroslavapetsa) November 12, 2022

Tiffany Trump is so often forgotten among Donald Trump’s adult children. But for one brief Saturday, the former president’s 27-year-old daughter will be the focus of media and family attention as the Trumps gather in Mar-a-Lago for Tiffany’s wedding to her fiancé, a Lebanese billionaire heir named Michael Boulos. Or at least that’s what one might reasonably expect.

But after a gaggle of Trump-endorsed Republican candidates lost in the midterm elections, the GOP knives are out and dad is in the midst of a vintage meltdown. Who knows what chaos could erupt at Mar-a-Lago, as many in the GOP blame Trump for backing extremist, lying candidates and setting the stage for what proved to be a red dribble. 

Control of Congress has yet to be determined—but watch out wedding guests. Ketchup may fly during the traditional father of the bride speech. An early warning sign: Look how sullen Trump appeared to be while practicing the walk down the aisle on Friday night:

Donald Trump walks daughter Tiffany down the aisle at wedding rehearsals https://t.co/ugmERTRx7m pic.twitter.com/QHKDRY2xSt

— Page Six (@PageSix) November 11, 2022

Of all the far-right extremists on the ballot Tuesday, perhaps none had the bona fides of Ammon Bundy.

In 2014, he took part in an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at his father Cliven’s Nevada ranch after agents tried to impound Cliven’s cows for his failure to pay 20 years worth of grazing fees. In 2016, he led a 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon to protest the arrest of two ranchers. Bundy spent more than 600 days in jail, half in solitary confinement, awaiting trial on federal charges related to the standoffs. When he was acquitted by a jury in Oregon and freed after a mistrial in Nevada, it only contributed to his mythical outlaw status.

But then, a year and a half ago, in an unusual career twist, Bundy announced a run for governor of Idaho. He began as a Republican, then he switched to an independent when it became clear he’d lose the primary. On Tuesday, Bundy’s divinely inspired campaign came to an end. He finished in third-place.

Bundy’s campaign platform was extreme. It included criminalizing abortion, eliminating most “immoral” taxes, cutting welfare programs, seizing control of federal public lands in the state and turning much of it over to affordable housing development and extractive industries. His message was a motto: “Keep Idaho Idaho.” He proposed paying liberals to move back to California—an idea that resonated with a significant number of voters who have seen a huge influx of new residents push up housing prices. Bundy jumped on the hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of the far right, calling trans people “groomers” and promising to put drag queens in prison if elected. In one of the weirder ads of the election season, he took on the “woke cult.”

But the outlaw candidate also ran a remarkably energetic, old-fashioned retail campaign of the sort rarely seen in the US these days. For more than a year, he has hosted an endless stream of town halls and in-person events across the state, gladhanding with the public, showing off his beautiful family, and relying on his personal magnetism rather than TV ads. On the trail, the former Virgin River Valley high school class president has seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

Illinois workers are on the verge of a historic win: a labor rights amendment to the state constitution that—among other things—would make the state the first to ban so-called “right-to-work laws” throughout its territory. The amendment, on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, has to meet a high bar: either 60 percent approval (not counting blanks) or more than half of all ballots, even ones that skipped that question. With more than 95 percent of votes counted, unions across the state have already started to celebrate: the yes vote holds a 58 percent lead and looks set to win.

Amendment 1, also called the Workers’ Rights Amendment, makes collective bargaining a constitutional right that can’t be legislated or contracted away. It goes further than any state ever has in barring right-to-work laws—and any other legislation that “interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively.” That mandate, and the bill’s wide support, are the high point so far of a pro-worker push under Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, kicked off by the 2019 Collective Bargaining Freedom Act (which forbid legislation that interfered with union security agreements, where employers agree to require union membership or dues). Amendment 1 protects gains like those from conservative rollback attempts down the line.

Right-to-work laws allow employees in a union workplace to not join, not pay dues, but enjoy all the benefits of the union contract. That compels the rest of the employees to work, for free, on behalf of people who specifically don’t want to help or pay—with the idea of starving their funding and killing incentives to join. In right-to-work states, wages are lower across the board, union or not, there’s less employer-provided healthcare, and workers are poorer in retirement. They’re also considerably less safe: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2016 that the rate of workplace fatalities in states with right-to-work laws is 54 percent higher than in those without.

For the cherry on top, their history is also incredibly racist, as noted in 2012 by Dissent :

Southern conservatives feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the politics of the South, where Jim Crow laws helped keep white and black workers on opposite sides of the political fence. They argued that unions could bring “black domination in the South”…

Mark Finchem, a Trump-backed “poster child” of election denialism, has lost his bid to become Arizona’s top election official.

Even by the current standards of the Republican Party, Finchem is extreme. After spending the first part of his career as a public safety officer in Michigan, he relocated to Arizona and adopted the look of a western lawman. In 2014, while running for the state house, Finchem said he was a member of the Oath Keepers, the right-wing militia whose founder is now on trial for seditious conspiracy. He won that election and has been a state representative ever since.

On January 6, 2020, he was photographed outside the US Capitol in one of his trademark cowboy hats (he didn’t enter the building). The next year, he started his run for secretary of state. As Mother Jones explained in August, he called for decertifying the results of the 2020 election, said he supported banning early voting, and co-sponsored legislation that would allow state legislators to overturn election results. He told supporters that if he’d been secretary of state in 2020, “we would have won. Plain and simple.”

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump endorsed him and other members of the America First Secretary of State Coalition started by Nevada candidate Jim Marchant.

In August, Finchem won his primary by nearly 20 percentage points, despite GOP Gov. Doug Ducey endorsing his main opponent. In the general election, Finchem faced Democrat Adrian Fontes, who’d previously served as the recorder of Maricopa County.

During his days as a Stanford libertarian, Blake Masters was nothing if not principled. The 36-year-old Peter Thiel protégé turned Arizona Republican Senate candidate considered voting morally indefensible, taxation theft, and nationalism a scourge. He called for open borders and full drug legalization. He was an anarcho-capitalist. 

But as I reported this summer, this was not the Blake Masters that Arizona voters saw in one of the closest and most consequential Senate races in 2022. Masters entered the race as a Republican with $10 million from Thiel as the avatar of a young and highly online New Right. He called abortion “demonic.” He tweeted that “not everything has to be gay” after a bisexual Superman was announced. He plugged the Unabomber’s manifesto. More half-heartedly, he claimed Trump won the 2020 election.

After securing Trump’s endorsement, he won a competitive primary with ease. Predictably, he moderated when needed later in the cycle. Abortion was no longer a “genocide,” but something in need of “common-sense regulation.” Instead of gun-slinging campaign videos whose aesthetic reminded one of his childhood best friends of a “creepy teenage boy in his basement,” he ran ads featuring his wife and boys working around the kitchen table. But he never abandoned the idea that Americans would warm to his cold-blooded style of Stanford-knows-best intellectual combat.

But Masters was wrong. Arizonans chose Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat and onetime astronaut married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords. Masters’ transformation from college-aged libertarian to champion of state control did not matter so much as what both of those versions of him had in common. He was always, as Kelly put it during their only debate, one of those “guys that think they know better than everyone about everything.” 

Kelly’s winning message: “c’mon man just look at this guy” pic.twitter.com/lce9BJiMXb

David DePape, the man accused of bludgeoning the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi early Friday morning apparently posted a lot of politically extreme things online and apparently subscribed to a lot of conspiracy theories. Among them: QAnon. According to the Associated Press, DePape wrote blog posts as recently as August 24 promoting the far-right theory:

An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.

“Big Brother has deemed doing your own research as a thought crime,” read a post that appeared to blend references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

The suspect’s exact motivation has yet to be established. But this week’s attack on Pelosi’s husband isn’t the first time an apparent QAnon follower has allegedly targeted the House Speaker with violence. On January 7, 2021, the FBI arrested Cleveland Grover Meredith at a DC hotel after he texted friends that he was, “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi’s… speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on live TV.” Meredith had been planning to be at the Capitol on January 6 but had car trouble and never made it. The FBI found hundreds of rounds of ammo, guns, and an assault rifle in his trailer. In 2018, Meredith put up a billboard emblazoned “#QANON” that advertised his car wash in Georgia. When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked him about it, he said he’d been drawn to QAnon by “common sense.” In court, his lawyer said that Meredith had “found a sense of purpose” in the QAnon world. He was sentenced to 28 months in prison.

QAnon emerged in 2017 as an online phenomenon, with followers taking cues from the anonymous “Q” who posted cryptic messages on 8chan. But it has been bleeding into real life in a violent fashion. In 2018, for instance, a man drove an armored truck to the Hoover Dam claiming to be on a mission from QAnon to force the Office of the Inspector General to release the “real” report on Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, referring to another strand of the far-right conspiracy theory. He engaged in a standoff with police before finally being arrested.

The Guantanamo Bay detention center isn’t anyone’s idea of an assisted living facility. But the controversial prison that former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2002 would hold “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects has been open for so long that many inmates are now elderly people with health problems. Today, the Biden administration finally released the oldest prisoner, a 75-year-old Pakistani man, Saifullah Paracha, and returned him to Pakistan. Paracha, once a wealthy businessman who lived in New York City, had been at the Cuban base since 2003, when the US government “captured” him in Thailand. He was never charged with a crime.

According to the Associated Press, Paracha suffers from diabetes and heart problems, among other ailments, and is in such poor health that the government says he is “not a continuing threat” to the US. It’s not clear that Paracha was ever a threat to the US. His son Uzair Paracha, then 23, was convicted in the US in 2005 of providing material support for terrorism, in a prosecution based on the same witnesses who provided the basis for holding his father in Cuba. In 2020, a federal judge threw out those witness statements in his case, largely because the government had withheld exculpatory material about them from Uzair’s lawyers, and Uzair was returned to Pakistan.

Saifullah Paracha at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Counsel to Saifullah Paracha / AP

Those witnesses, also held at Guantanamo, included people the CIA tortured and waterboarded, notably Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man the government accuses of masterminding the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. After nearly 20 years in US custody, first in a secret prison, then at Guantanamo, KSM will finally stand trial for his alleged role in 9/11 early next month. (He’s not as old as Paracha, but at 57, KSM has reached the age of AARP membership eligibility.)

An ally of white nationalists; a former CEO and conspiracy theorist who tried to convince Donald Trump to use the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election; an Ohio math teacher who claims he discovered an algorithm showing that virtually every county in the United States was hacked to prevent Trump’s reelection two years ago—these are people with whom Republican secretary of state candidates have forged alliances. 

Mark Finchem, Jim Marchant, and Kristina Karamo, each an election denialist and a GOP contender for secretary of state in, respectively, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, were scheduled to appear October 29 at a self-described “Florida Election Integrity Conference 2.0” in Orlando. Also on the bill: other proponents of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. The event, one in a series of such conferences being mounted by 2020 truthers across the country, shows how these Republican candidates are closely tied to right-wing extremism. The previous conference in this series, held in New Mexico, was moderated by Lara Logan, the past CBS News reporter who has recently been mouthing bonkers QAnon-ish claims that a Satanic global cabal of elitists is kidnapping hundreds of thousands of children to drink their blood. (She has been booted off Fox News and Newsmax for her conspiracy-driven ravings.)

The Florida event is moderated by Carolyn Ryan, who works for Real America’s Voice, a conservative network that broadcasts Steve Bannon’s daily show and has promoted QAnon material. Scheduled speakers at the conference—in addition to the three Republican secretary of state candidates—include Laura Loomer, Patrick Byrne, and Douglas Frank, each a luminary in the 2020 truther movement. 

In August, Loomer, who describes herself as a “proud Islamaphobe,” narrowly lost a Republican primary contest for a House seat. She had previously declared, “I’m a really big supporter of the Christian nationalist movement,” and “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist movements.” She has also proclaimed, “I love Nick Fuentes,” referring to one of the nation’s leading antisemitic white nationalists, called this racist an “ally,” and agreed to speak at one of his conferences. After losing that GOP congressional primary, Loomer insisted she was the victim of election fraud—yes, another conspiracy theory—and called on MAGA Republicans to not vote for the Republican candidate who defeated her. 

Byrne has earned notoriety in several ways. He was head of Overstock.com for two decades and resigned in 2019 following the revelation that he had had an affair with  Maria Butina, a Russian agent who infiltrated the American conservative world, including the NRA. After the 2020 election, he championed the baseless claim that voting machines had been rigged to ensure Trump’s defeat. And Byrne pushed Trump to adopt extreme measures. He attended the infamous December 18, 2020, meeting in the Oval Office with Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, two lawyers challenging the election results for Trump, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Byrne urged Trump to order the National Guard to round up voting machines across the nation and overturn the election. He appeared with Michael Flynn on Alex Jones’ show last year and called the January 6 riot a “deep state attempt to trigger a bloody civil war.” Byrne hasn’t confined his loony conspiracism to the 2020 election. As the Washington Post reported, “He toured the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, giving anti-vaccine speeches, and he has spread misinformation about covid-19 on websites and via social media.”

The first time many Brazilians heard of Nikolas Ferreira was the day the newly elected federal lawmaker received the highest number of votes in the country’s 2022 legislative elections—and in the history of the key battleground state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. Born in an impoverished favela, the 26-year-old self-described conservative Christian “defender of the family” and advocate for abstinence until marriage is a staunch supporter of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for reelection this Sunday in the final round of the most contentious presidential race in recent memory. Ferreira, a baby-faced member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, racked up about 1.5 million votes, almost 500,000 more than the next best performing candidate for the Lower House, and a monumental leap from the 30,000 that had secured him a city council seat in Belo Horizonte in 2020, when he vowed to be a “wall against the leftists.”

“The culture war is here; get ready,” Ferreira wrote a few days after the early October closer-than-expected first round of the election that saw left-leaning former two-term President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, come out on top with 48 percent of the votes. He was promoting his online course, which carries the same title as his book, The Christian and Politics: Discover How to Win the Culture War. His mission is to prepare Christians to prevail on the battlegrounds of abortion, gender ideology, and crime—all extremely familiar subjects for American voters and another example of how, in this presidential election in South America’s largest democracy, life is imitating Donald Trump. “Brazil and the United States are mirrors of each other,” former US ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon told BBC News. 

Bolsonaro, a former army captain and longtime congressman from Rio de Janeiro with a mediocre legislative track record has often been referred to as the “Trump of the tropics.” He rose to power by deliberately evoking “fears, panics, and revulsions” of a perceived deterioration of traditional family values and, similar to Trump, positioning himself as a populist hero and the only true guardian of the people’s will. Ferreira may stand out as one of the most successful exponents of “Bolsonarism”—the MAGA-like reactionary populism cultivated around Bolsonaro and his “God, family, and homeland” motto—but he is joined by many others. Several of the movement’s disciples have been elected to Congress this election cycle, spurring concerns of an ideological hijacking of the legislature by a breed of hardliners. Their performative grievance politics as candidates center on mobilizing dread of social change to manipulate a disaffected electorate and advance an ultra-conservative agenda.

What has taken place during the Brazilian elections this year could easily be mistaken for the GOP’s culture wars, dubbed in Portuguese. In Foreign Affairs, Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, writes, “The campaign’s tone and content sometimes seem to have been cut and pasted from the conservative agenda in the United States.” At an October presidential debate, the incumbent president, who repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process and the institutions overseeing it, doubled down on his signature retrograde discourse. “We want a free country, we don’t want gender ideology, we don’t want drug liberation, and the other side wants it,” Bolsonaro said. “No to abortion, nor the MST [Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement] invading the land, and for the right of self-defense.”

His authoritarian strategy involves creating a political culture organized around an artificial sense of generalized moral panic over a “Holy War” between the pure and virtuous and the heretical and satanic. Opponents of Bolsonaro are presented “as the incarnation of the Antichrist” while he and his followers are the protectors “of the family, the homeland, and the good,” explains political scientist and historian Christian Lynch, co-author of the new book Reactionary Populism: Rise and Legacy of Bolsonarism. “It’s importing the Trumpist techniques to Brazil and adapting them to the Brazilian context.”

Virtually every one of the 70 or so speakers at Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour last weekend in Manheim, Pennsylvania, had something to sell, and Gene Ho was no exception. There was his book, TRUMPography: How Biblical Principles Paved the Way to the American Presidency, a memoir of sorts about Ho’s time as Trump’s personal photographer during the 2016 campaign. There was his new weekly show on AmericanMediaPeriscope, an online news outlet sponsored by—who else?—My Pillow’s Mike Lindell. And then there was his exciting new magazine, George, with Ho as the new editor-in-chief. “They turned on the website just for you guys today,” he told the several thousand people who’d gathered for the event and promised a print edition soon. “Starting next week, you can start buying copies of George.” The crowd cheered.

When Ho first mentioned his new project at the conference, I thought he was referring to some sort of Founding Fathers’ fanzine. The ReAwaken tour was being held inside an enormous warehouse sports complex called Spooky Nook Sports that was filled with American flag garb, “We the People” banners, and other patriotic regalia. Surely this couldn’t be a revival of the glossy George political magazine created by the late, liberal John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1995, I thought. But then on Saturday, as I walked around the exhibit hall full of booths hawking “Kingdom Fuel” protein powder for Christian meatheads, or nano silver toothpaste, I spotted a woman at a booth wearing a T-shirt with the cover of Ho’s “new” George on it.

It looked exactly like the old George, except that it had Trump on the cover, dressed as Paul Revere in a tricorn hat, instead of the iconic model Cindy Crawford as George Washington. Even the logo was the same. The woman in the T-shirt readily acknowledged that the new magazine was supposed to be a reprise of Kennedy’s, except, she told me, “We obviously hope it will bring people to God.”

After getting over the shock of seeing George among the quack cancer cures and anti-vax promoters of the ReAwaken tour, I realized that (duh) I am at a conference full of QAnon believers. Of course, this is an imitation JFK Jr. magazine!

QAnon, for the uninitiated, is the cult-like following of the anonymous message board user known as Q, a mysterious leader in the fight against a global cabal that supposedly reaches into the “deep state,” and includes politicians and celebrities like Hillary Clinton who torture and abuse children in a Satanic pedophile ring. One subgenre of the conspiracy theory holds that John Jr. never really died in that fateful 1999 plane crash. What happened instead? Well, he faked his death to team up with Donald Trump to take on the Satanic pedophiles. Some of this conspiracy’s adherents even believe a man named Vincent Fusca, a rather short and swarthy middle-aged man who favors fedoras, is Kennedy in disguise. (Fusca was at the convention this weekend.)

In a deep blue Arizona district, a conservative group is spending big bucks to boost the write-in campaign of a Republican activist who led the push for Arizona’s notorious 2021 election “audit”—without telling voters which party he actually belongs to or mentioning his Big Lie advocacy.

The open state senate seat in Arizona’s 22nd legislative district, a majority Hispanic and reliably Democratic stretch of Maricopa County, was supposed to be one thing Democrats in the state didn’t have to worry about this year. In August, Democratic voters nominated state Rep. Diego Espinoza to serve as their next state senator. Republicans didn’t nominate anyone at all. 

But one month after the primary, Espinoza quit the race to become a lobbyist. Now Democrats are stuck with his name on the ballot, but votes cast for him will not count. And suddenly what looked like a slam-dunk became anything but. Despite an effort by the local party and major Democratic-aligned groups to consolidate behind a single candidate, public-school teacher Eva Diaz, multiple Democrats have filed to run for the seat anyway. And conservatives, in an audacious strategy first reported by the Arizona Capitol Times, have spent tens of thousands of dollars to try to capitalize on the confusion.

National grassroots Democratic donors have poured money into the race to help Diaz, and in the span of just a few weeks, LD-22 has emerged as an expensive battleground in a state with the highest of stakes. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Democrats, facing Midterm headwinds, have little margin for error in their quest to flip the chamber. With Arizona poised to play a key role in how the 2024 presidential election is conducted, and a Civil War-era abortion ban on the books, what happens this fall could have far-reaching implications, in Arizona and beyond. Democrats’ ambitions of flipping the legislature—and keeping an election-denier out of office—hinge on whether Diaz and local Democrats are able to educate voters in time about the process. 

“This race is so critical,” Diaz says. “We don’t want it to be in the hands of the MAGA Republican.”

Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” during a break-in at the couple’s San Francisco home early Friday morning, according to a statement from the top Democrat’s office.

“The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation,” the statement read. “Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery.  The Speaker was not in San Francisco at the time.”

In a press conference, law enforcement officials identified the suspect as David Depape.

The assailant reportedly used a hammer to carry out the attack. A source told the New York Times that the person was heard shouting”Where’s Nancy?” before assaulting Pelosi.

This is a breaking news post. We’ll provide updates as more information becomes available.

One hundred and seventeen miles Northwest of Savannah, nestled between fields of cotton and grazing livestock, sits the majority-Black town of Wrightsville, Georgia (population: 3,638).

The sleepy southern hamlet is where Curtis Dixon, now 67, taught GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker social studies, coached him in football, and drove him to and from practice at Johnson County High School.

But from the front porch of his craftsman ranch home in Wrightsville, Dixon told me he is not supporting the candidacy of  the onetime star athlete who helped the Johnson County High School Trojans bring home the state championship football title in 1979, won the 1982 Heisman trophy as a standout running back at the University of Georgia (UGA), and played 12 seasons in the NFL.

“Herschel is a celebrity,” Dixon said. “We don’t need a celebrity, because we’re at the point where we’re about to lose our democracy.”

Walker’s performance during his October 14 debate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock merely confirmed Dixon’s misgivings. In response to a comment Warnock made about a measure in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that lowers insulin prices, Walker, who opposed that bill, erroneously claimed that “unless you are eating right,” insulin “does no good.”

Deep in northwest Georgia, in what was once a patchwork of forest and farms, sits Paulding County, a quiet collection of towns that straddle two worlds. Less than an hour’s drive southeast is the sprawl and thrum of Atlanta; just to the north are the state’s mountainous rural communities, where life still moves at a slower pace. As an in-between place, Paulding doesn’t get much attention (though its meandering Silver Comet Bike Trail alone is worth the drive). But in election seasons, it occupies a unique position: Paulding is where deep blue Atlanta and unwaveringly red North Georgia meet in the middle.

Just before Georgia’s runoff Senate election back in 2020, I sat down at a Paulding County Starbucks with Andrea Baerwalde, chair of the Paulding County Democrats. Baerwalde, who was then 61 and working as a speech therapist, talked about what it was like to be an outspoken Democrat in her deep red county. Baerwalde’s yard signs were constantly getting stolen. Passersby booed and swore at Dems’ events. She had long since agreed to disagree on politics with her own family members—including her husband. Still, she told me at the time, “I think Warnock and Ossoff do have a chance.” But she added, “I always worry because I’m not used to Democrats who have a chance in Georgia. So I’m trying not to get ahead of myself.”

In that election her cautious optimism was warranted: Georgians elected the two Democratic candidates, thus securing a razor-thin blue Senate majority. Paulding County, however, elected conservative firebrand and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene as its congressional representative, and just 36 percent of its voters went for Warnock and Ossoff. And yet, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 28 percent votes in 2016, for Democrats like Baerwalde, this was an incremental improvement that she thinks will continue this election season. Yard signs are a useful barometer: This year, signs for Democrats—even those for avowed progressives like gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams—“stay in the same place for a little while,” she said. “Which is super exciting because usually if you see a sign, it’s gone soon.”

I was curious about the changes that Baerwalde described—and how Paulding County residents were thinking about the upcoming races. How were they feeling about Marjorie Taylor Greene two years in? Does her opponent, Army veteran Marcus Flowers, appeal as an alternative? What about all the controversies surrounding Herschel Walker—his history of domestic violence, the allegations that the pro-life candidate has paid for past girlfriends’ abortions, his own children’s disavowal of their father? Have they dimmed the enthusiasm of some Republican voters? So, earlier this week, I drove to Paulding County to talk to some residents who showed up to the polls for early voting.

It was a warm fall morning, and the highway was lined with trees just beginning to change color. As I approached the county seat of Dallas, Georgia, the old stands of the forest gave way to car dealerships, a Ruby Tuesday, and a warehouse converted into a trampoline park. Just before I reached the polling place, I stopped for a coffee at a dessert shop that shared a strip mall with a dialysis center and a bail bonds store. Next door to the strip mall was Paulding County’s Watson Government Complex, a cluster of stolid brick buildings with an expansive parking lot from which people streamed in to take advantage of early voting.

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

In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert’s office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic.

Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration.

After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.”

Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished—to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine.