Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.

“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.

During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”

Donald Trump has an enemies list. The Sierra Club has an allies list—some 259,000 Pennsylvanians who could decide the election.

They have demonstrated concern for the climate crisis, the clean energy transition, and the environment—but they are young, or newly registered, or do not regularly vote. “These voters can be critical,” says Sarah Burton, the Sierra Club’s national political director. “But they often need extra pushes to get out and actually vote.”

So the Sierra Club is enlisting a vast cadre of volunteers to turn them out. People are gathering in dining rooms across the state and in zoom calls nation-wide to write postcards and make phone calls. As of Thursday, they’d contacted about 100,000 people on the club’s list.

“The only thing that defeats Trump and MAGA Republicans is collective action, and in my mind, specifically collective action on climate. There is such a potential there. I think it’s really exciting,” Burton says.

With the election on everyone’s mind, it’s a good moment to revisit a consequential election from the past. No, we’re not talking about 2016. Let’s go way further back—to what’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history. 

In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and held elected office. This did not sit well with white supremacists, who during the election of 1898 used violence to intimidate voters and overthrow the elected government.

The leader of the coup, a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told white people: “If you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.”

The idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week.

Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” This, from a man who admitted to his employer in 2017 that he was in a relationship with a colleague 14 years his junior—something that reportedly led to his divorce from his first wife. “What else is she keeping from me?” Jesse mused, prompting guffaws from his fellow panelists.

Beyond hypocrisy, Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”

It’s an issue that Democrats and their anti-Trump allies have been eager to highlight, including former congresswoman and top Harris campaigner Liz Cheney, who told CBS’ Face the Nation on Wednesday, “I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris.”

After all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or protected, whether climate change is ignored or addressed, whether the privilege of plutocrats is enhanced or challenged, whether millions of Americans are deported or granted a path forward. But the election will also determine whether Americans live in a world of facts or one of false narratives. It will tell us if America is reality-based.

Donald Trump, as a politician, is a creature of reality television. And reality TV is not real. It is designed to convey the impression of verisimilitude. But the story lines are concocted. The editing is manipulative. The goal is to orchestrate human interactions that can then be turned into compelling, don’t-touch-that-dial stories. They need not be true; they often aren’t. The trick is to fool the viewer into believing they are—or at least to persuade the audience go along with the ruse.

That’s what happened with Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC show he starred in for 14 years. Prior to its appearance, Trump was in a slump as a businessman, having gone bust in Atlantic City as a casino owner and moving from the development of large real estate projects to licensing his name as a brand. The show created a new reality for Trump, depicting him as a hyper-successful billionaire with razor-sharp intuition.

John Miller, a former marketing executive for NBC, recently noted that the network forged a “false narrative for Donald Trump as a big businessman.” Explaining this, he said, “Clearly we had to make something bigger than it was.” That something was Trump. He added, “If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”

In early April, Trex Proffitt opened his mail-in primary ballot and saw that no Democrats were running for state senate in Pennsylvania’s 13th district.

It made sense: The district, which covers the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs, has been represented by Republicans for over a century. The incumbent, Scott Martin, is vocally anti-abortion and the sponsor of a bill banning instruction around gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary schools. Martin won a decisive eleven-point victory against a well-funded challenger in 2020. The odds for Democrats have likely gotten slimmer after the district was redrawn in 2022 to include more rural areas.  

But Proffitt, a 56-year-old history teacher at a small Quaker school, still felt something could be done. He decided to run against Martin, winning a write-in campaign to become the Democratic nominee for state senate. After a personal tragedy, Proffitt wanted to center LGBTQ rights in his campaign—even in a reliably Republican district.

In 2019, Proffitt’s son George, who was transgender, died at the age of 20 from a drug overdose. George loved folk punk music and was active in the local LGBTQ community. He had struggled for years with depression and suicidality, but he seemed to be doing better before his death.

Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.

This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.

However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprise, surprise.

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

According to the documents, the books must:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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