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.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that a former executive with Trump Media, which owns Donald Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is alleging the company broke federal security laws, and that another executive was ousted for refusing Trump’s demand that he give his shares in the venture to Trump’s wife, Melania. 

Will Wilkerson, who was fired by Trump Media on Thursday, passed along hundreds of documents, photos, and audio files to the Washington Post and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Post‘s exclusive report details the chaos allegedly taking place at the company. 

The report details how cofounder Andy Litinsky was allegedly fired after refusing a personal demand by Trump, who already owned 90 percent of Trump Media shares, to give his shares to Melania. More broadly, the report portrays a company in disarray, one in which decisions were based not on logic or business savvy, but bitterness and spite. Five months after refusing Trump’s demands, writes tech reporter Drew Harwell… 

Litinsky, who first met Trump in 2004 as a contestant on the TV show “The Apprentice,” was abruptly removed from the company’s board. Wilkerson said he believes it was payback for his refusal to turn over a small fortune to the former president’s wife. Litinsky thought so, too, according to an email Wilkerson and his attorneys shared with The Washington Post and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In that email, Litinsky complained that Trump was “retaliating against me” by threatening to “ ‘blow up the company’ if his demands are not met.

Trump Media did not directly rebut any of Wilkerson’s claims, Harwell noted. Instead, it released a statement essentially accusing the Post of publishing fake news, and saying that…

This story was originally published by YaleE360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.

But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.

“I walked, boated, and swam through this entire site. The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared,” one mangrove rehabilitation expert wrote in a letter to the Guinness inspectors this year, which he shared with Yale Environment 360 on the condition of anonymity. The outcome was “entirely predictable,” he wrote. The muddy planting sites were washed by storms and waves and were otherwise “ecologically unsuited to mangrove establishment, because they are too waterlogged and there is no oxygen for them to breathe.”

“It was a complete disaster,” agrees Jim Enright, former Asia coordinator of the US-based nonprofit Mangrove Action Project. “But no one that we know of from Guinness or the record-planting proponents have carried out follow-up monitoring.” Guinness has not responded to requests for comment.

On Friday night, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Baptist pastor, and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a former football star, convened for a debate in Savannah, Georgia to answer questions about the policy issues Americans routinely rank as most important: Things like Abortion. Healthcare. Crime.

Warnock’s assignment was to prove he should keep the job. Walker’s mandate was proving he was fit for it. Friday was the only chance they would get to make their respective cases on the same stage, their first and only face-to-face debate before the election. And with the polls showing a less than 4-point margin in a state where Warnock won his last election by just 2 percentage points, the stakes of the candidates’ answers to questions about these issues couldn’t have been higher.

Walker has been characterized as sounding incoherent at times. Just this week at a rally, he shared a strange story about a bull who abandoned three pregnant cows to visit cows on the other side of the fence. Apparently, Walker was trying to explain that the grass is not always greener on the other side, because the cows across the fence ended up being male bulls. But the metaphor unintentionally evoked the recent bombshell allegations against Walker—that the staunch anti-abortion advocate has been credibly accused of pressuring a woman to get an abortion and paying for it. He’s also been accused of being an absentee father, not unlike the bull who leapt the fence.

Walker’s showing on Friday included a few head-scratchers, but was overall less bizarre than even his supporters were anticipating. “Herschel did a good job of keeping expectations low,” Walker surrogate Ralph Reed told reporters after the debate. “People said he can’t string three sentences together, [and that] he doesn’t know the issues. But that’s not what you saw on the stage.”

Based on crowd reaction, Warnock also had a strong showing, replete with several jabs.

This article is produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones.

For the first time since the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, voters in Minneapolis and greater Hennepin County will vote for their new top prosecutor. County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose office came under intense scrutiny that summer over racial disparities and its handling of police brutality, announced last fall he was not seeking re-election. An August primary cut a crowded field down to two candidates: Mary Moriarty, the county’s former chief public defender who regularly clashed with Freeman during her tenure, and Martha Holton Dimick, a judge who used to work for Freeman’s predecessor, Senator Amy Klobuchar. 

The candidates embody two sides of a debate that has divided Minneapolis and the nation since the summer of 2020. Moriarty is carrying the mantle of progressive criminal justice reform. Amidst a surge in homicides, Holton Dimick strives for a more traditional law and order agenda, and often seems outright hostile to the prospect of wielding the prosecutor’s office for the purpose of reform. 

“A referendum on what we want to do as a community moving forward since George Floyd was murdered,” is how Malaika Eban, the Deputy Director at the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, described the race for Hennepin County Attorney. “Even though this is a nonpartisan race, [the candidates] have been offering two really different perspectives on what to do in order to keep our community safe,” she added. 

Floyd’s killing on a south Minneapolis street corner in 2020 sparked a historic nationwide outpouring of protest and debate over policing and racism in America. This call for a less punitive, less racist system of policing dovetailed with the aims of reform-minded prosecutors in cities around the US who have leveraged the discretion held within district attorney’s offices in an attempt to undo mass incarceration. But since 2020 reform critics have invoked the rise in violent crime around the country to push back, and they often use Minneapolis as an example in their arguments about how criminal justice reform has gone too far. 

In a rambling letter responding to the January 6 committee, Donald Trump waxed nonsense about a witch hunt, Black Lives Matter, and television ratings—littering the entire document with his trademark chaotic capitalizations and election lies. But despite dedicating 14 pages to the matter, the former president declined to answer the only question of consequence: whether he’ll comply with the committee’s subpoena and finally testify.

That, of course, was likely the point. After all, if you wanted to convey useful information, you probably wouldn’t kick off a letter to Congress with, “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!” While much of the document recycles his false electoral conspiracy theories—you can take a full tour of the letter here if you have the patience for that kind of stuff—I feel the need to call out the appendix:

What you see above transcends an ordinary, sloppily done Microsoft Word, import-images job. It’s also a snapshot into the mind of a former president nearly two years after his historically disgraceful departure from the White House. Does he seem overly concerned with his ever-mounting legal woes? No, and we have plenty of other publicly available evidence to support that inkling, such as Trump having the gall to start something called “Trump Organization II” while being sued for financial fraud. Instead, Trump continues to obsess over seemingly pointless details, in this case, crowd size. He logs paragraphs worth of complaints in a letter to lawmakers about how the media failed to give him credit for attracting a large audience to the rally that proceeded the attack on the US Capitol. Here’s a glimpse:

The massive size of this crowd, and its meaning, has never been a subject of your Committee, nor has it been discussed by the Fake News Media that absolutely refuses to acknowledge, in any way, shape or form, the magnitude of what was taking place. In fact, for such a historic event, there are very few pictures that accurately show the event, or how many people were really there. Incredibly, it seems that pictures showing the size of the event were perhaps cancelled, scrubbed, deleted or, in any event, not available, but we still have some—as attached.

So, there we have it. Not long before an all-but-certain announcement heralding his future attempt to storm his way back into the White House, Donald Trump is here to remind you that in addition to being a menace to democracy, an unabashed bigot, and general terror—he’s also just a small-minded boy, writing hate mail to the January 6 committee, whining about crowd sizes. 

On the spring day last year the Supreme Court announced it would hear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, Sarah Lipton-Lubet knew immediately how the case would end: the court, stacked with six conservative Justices, would kill the right to abortion. A veteran reproductive rights advocate and lawyer who was consulting for multiple reproductive rights groups at the time, her realization was followed by another: She needed a new job. She’d spent the better part of two decades fighting for abortion access, relying on a backbone of judicial decisions that upheld reproductive rights—and on the premise of a Supreme Court that would uphold those precedents. But that wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

“Simply trying to move around the pieces on the playing field that existed was not going to treat this like the crisis that it was, the crisis that it is now.” Instead of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, she needed to plug the hole and right the ship. About two months later, she became executive director of Take Back the Court. This is an advocacy group that since 2018 has been leading the movement to add four justices to the Supreme Court and dethrone the conservative majority that now controls it. With the legal precedent central to her previous work now dead, Lipton-Lubet is fighting to change the make-up of the court before every other progressive priority goes the way of Roe. “I’ve never felt more hopeful about my work,” she says.

The movement to reform the Supreme Court is gaining momentum and credibility at a rapid pace in large part because of people like Lipton-Lubet—advocates for progressive causes who watched the ascension of Trump-appointed justices to ill-gotten seats on the bench and have now concluded that their life’s work can never be realized if the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority remains in power.

Staring down the court’s new term, which began last week, reform feels even more urgent. The court stands poised to allow more pollution of America’s water, to end affirmative action in college admissions, to give businesses the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people, and to green light gerrymandering schemes that disempower people of color. And that’s just the big cases in the term’s first three months. This is worse than a nightmare for the left, as SCOTUSBlog founder Tom Goldstein explained in July, because “you wake up from a nightmare and it’s over at some point.” But this court’s rulings will shape American life “for the next quarter century.”

Once considered both practically impossible and political suicide, there are now roughly 63 members of Congress who’ve sponsored legislation to expand the court, with several more behind legislation to impose term limits on the justices. Under pressure from the left, President Joe Biden summoned a commission to study Supreme Court reform, including court expansion, something inconceivable just a few years ago. On the heels of the high court’s decision to undo abortion rights this summer, advocacy groups focused on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, gun control, environmental issues, and climate change have all, for the first time, begun advocating for added justices.

Feel sympathy for the members of the January 6 House Select Committee.

They were handed a task simultaneously easy and arduous: demonstrating to the American public that a president—fully supported by one of the nation’s two main political parties—plotted to overturn election results to remain in office, incited violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and on the day of the riot willfully and malevolently abandoned his duties as a defender of the Constitution.

This is akin to arguing the case that the sky is blue. It’s a simple proposition—unless you are addressing people who refuse to believe reality. The committee’s investigation has confirmed and expanded the ugly story of January 6, reinforcing its importance for Americans who already feared the Trumpian war on democracy, and perhaps encouraging those who haven’t paid close attention to the consequences and implications of that day to do so.  Persuading Trumpland was never in the cards. The sky there is not blue.

The committee’s hearing on Thursday—which is assumed to be its last before the midterm elections, and perhaps its final public session (especially if the Republicans win back the House)—was a retelling of Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election, with a few new and startling pieces of evidence sprinkled in.

The sordid basic details are well established: Trump prepared to declare victory and claim the election was rigged even before Election Day. Afterward, he hurled a multitude of false allegations and promoted unsubstantiated and loony conspiracy theories. He initiated multiple (and perhaps illegal) schemes to overturn the results, pressuring state leaders, Department of Justice officials and, ultimately, his own vice president, to join the various plots. He encouraged his irrationally irate supporters to flock to Washington on January 6 and then, though he’d been told that many in the crowd were armed with weapons and tactical equipment, urged them to march on the Capitol. As the insurrectionist riot spread, he inflamed the marauders with a tweet attacking VP Mike Pence, watched the violence unfold on Fox News, and for hours did nothing to call off his cherished mob.

The congressional committee investigating January 6 on Thursday revealed new evidence that Donald Trump had a preexisting plan to falsely declare victory on election night in 2020—part of a plot to use made-up voting fraud claims in an attempt to retain power.

For the second time, the committee played leaked audio first reported by Mother Jones in which Trump adviser Steve Bannon, during an October 31, 2020, meeting, said that Trump had a “strategy” to prematurely assert he had won on Election Day. Explaining the so-called “red mirage,” in which Trump would show early leads in key states before mail-in ballots favoring Joe Biden were counted, Bannon said: “Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”

“He’s gonna declare victory,” Bannon said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

On November 1, 2020, before Election Day, Axios first reported Trump’s plan. But Trump denied it at the time. And he and his supporters have since claimed that he was not lying when he announced—just hours after the polls had closed—that he had won. He legitimately believed election fraud cost him victory, they claim.

The committee, however, presented new evidence Thursday that Trump actually knew he had lost—he admitted it to aides—and that his victory declaration was part of plan to rally his supporters to help him stay in office anyway.

New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge on Thursday to appoint an independent financial monitor to oversee Donald Trump’s finances until her $250 million civil fraud lawsuit against him is resolved. James cited what she said was ongoing evidence of continuing fraud on the part of Trump and his company, including the creation of an entirely new corporate entity named “Trump Organization II LLC” on September 21, the same day James originally filed her suit. The new company could be part of an attempt to hide assets, James said.

James’ lawsuit accuses Trump, his adult children, and his companies of fraudulently manipulating statements detailing the former president’s net worth to get better deals from banks and insurance companies. 

“Since we filed this sweeping lawsuit last month, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued those same fraudulent practices and taken measures to evade responsibility,” James said in a statement Thursday. “Today, we are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr. Trump should not get to play by different rules.”

Besides asking for $250 million to make up for the financial benefits James says the Trumps improperly received thanks to fraud, James is also asking that the Trumps and Trump’s companies lose their business licenses to operate in New York and be banned from commercial real estate transactions for five years. Obviously, the newly created company was not a target of James’ suit and, for now at least, is not included on the list of companies that could be punished if her suit is successful. James’ filing on Thursday asks a judge to order the Trumps not to transfer their assets in an effort to escape her jurisdiction. James also wants the judge to require that any efforts by the Trumps to move assets be approved in advance by the court. Finally, James is requesting the appointment of an independent overseer to monitor Trump’s finances to make sure he’s complying with all of the rules. 

Trump’s attorney in the case, Alina Habba, did not return a request for comment. However, in an email from Habba to James’ office that James included with her filing on Thursday, Habba wrote that her clients have no problem agreeing not to remove assets from James’ jurisdiction.

When Sen. Raphael Warnock addressed several dozen supporters at Atlanta’s East Point Avenue United Methodist Church on Wednesday night, what he didn’t say spoke more loudly than what he did.

Warnock’s speech at this outreach event for Latino voters was full of religious and pro-immigration sentiments. “I am a Senator for all Georgia—no matter what country you’re from, and no matter what language you speak,” the reverend said. “The Bible tells us to welcome the stranger.” But it was also surprisingly hospitable to Warnock’s scandal-plagued opponent. That’s because Warnock did not criticize or even mention Herschel Walker once. During his comments, simultaneously interpreted into Spanish, Warnock didn’t bring up that Walker has been accused of holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head. He didn’t mention that Walker has criticized absentee fathers, while also having been accused of being one. Nor did Warnock mention the most recent allegation: that Walker, who supports total abortion bans without exception, has been credibly accused of urging a woman to get an abortion, and paying for the procedure. 

Perhaps Warnock has decided that the allegations against the famed 1982 Heisman Trophy Winner are garnering plenty of attention on their own, or that the mud-slinging that has become customary among such high-profile elections is unbecoming of a man who first rose to political prominence as the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. once presided.

Asked why he hasn’t commented on the abortion allegations against Walker, outside of once calling them “disturbing,” Warnock told Mother Jones: “I’m focused on the job that the people of Georgia have hired me to do. And I think at the end of the day, the contrast—the deep differences between me and him—will be exceedingly clear.” 

But the stakes of his nice-guy gamble couldn’t be higher. National polls averaged by FiveThirtyEight show just a 4-point lead for Warnock in an election that very well may be a factor—or even the final determinant—in whether Democrats retain their narrow control of the Senate. Georgia’s elections decided Senate control in 2020, when Sen. Jon Ossoff and Warnock both won their races in run-offs. Out of 50 states, just Georgia and Louisiana require run-offs when no candidate receives a majority of ballots cast in general elections. Elsewhere, candidates win when they have a plurality of votes. (If Georgia’s election concludes with neither Warnock or Walker winning more than 50 percent of the vote tally because the Libertarian candidate claims even a small percentage of the votes, a second election will take place about a month later.)