This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Drive through rural Minnesota in high summer and you’ll take in a view that dominates nearly the entire US Midwest: an emerald sea of ripening corn and soybeans. But on a small operation called Salvatierra, 40 minutes south of Minneapolis, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is trying something different. When he bought the land in 2020, this 18-acre patch had been devoted for decades to the region’s most prevalent crops. The soil was so depleted, Haslett-Marroquin says, he thought of it as a “corn and soybean desert.” Soon after, he applied 13 tons of compost, sowed a mix of prairie grasses and rye, and planted 8,200 hazelnut saplings.

While he won’t reap a nut harvest until 2025, the farmer and Guatemalan immigrant doesn’t have to wait to make money from the land. He also runs flocks of chickens in narrow grassy paddocks between the rows of the fledging trees, where they hunt for insects and also munch on feed made from organic corn and soybeans, which they transform into manure that fertilizes the trees and forage.

Salvatierra is the latest addition to Tree-Range Farms, a cooperative network of 19 poultry farms cofounded in 2022 by Haslett-Marroquin. Chickens evolved from birds known as junglefowl in the forests of South Asia, he notes, and the co-op’s goal is to conjure that jungle-like habitat. Chickens crave shade and fear open spaces; trees shelter them from weather and hide them from predators. In 2021, Haslett-Marroquin’s nonprofit, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, purchased a poultry slaughterhouse just south of the Minnesota border in Stacyville, Iowa, where farms in the Tree-Range network process their birds. You can find the meat in natural-food stores from the Twin Cities area to northern Iowa.

By combining food-bearing trees and shrubs with poultry production, Haslett-Marroquin and his peers are practicing what is known as agroforestry—an ancient practice that intertwines annual and perennial agriculture. Other forms include alley cropping, in which annual crops including grains, legumes, and vegetables grow between rows of food-bearing trees, and silvopasture, which features cattle munching grass between the rows.

“With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”

Agroforestry was largely abandoned in the United States after the nation’s westward expansion in the 19th century. In the 2022 Agricultural Census, just 1.7 percent of US farmers reported integrating trees into crop and livestock operations. But it’s widely practiced across the globe, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 43 percent of all agricultural land globally includes agroforestry features.

Bringing trees to the region now known as the Corn Belt, known for its industrial-scale agriculture and largely devoid of perennial crops, might seem like the height of folly. On closer inspection, however, agroforestry systems like Haslett-Marroquin’s might be a crucial strategy for both preserving and revitalizing one of the globe’s most important farming regions. And while the corn-soybean duopoly that holds sway in the US heartland produces mainly feed for livestock and ethanol, agroforestry can deliver a broader variety of nutrient-dense foods, like nuts and fruit, even as it diversifies farmer income away from the volatile global livestock-feed market. In recognition of this potential, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in late 2022, launched a $60 million grant program to help farmers adopt such practices.

For decades, Midwestern farmers have devoted tens of millions of acres to just two crops, leaving the ground largely unprotected from wind and rain between harvest and planting. As a result, the loamy trove of topsoil that settlers found there has been pillaged. Using satellite imagery, a team of University of Massachusetts researchers has calculated that a third of the land in the present-day Corn Belt has completely lost its layer of carbon-rich soil. And what’s left is washing away at least 25 times faster than it naturally replenishes. As prime topsoil vanishes, farmers become more dependent on fertilizers derived from fossil fuel.

Not surprisingly, given those applications, the Corn Belt is also in the midst of a burgeoning water-pollution crisis, as agrichemicals and manure from crowded livestock confinements leach away from farm fields and into streams and aquifers. In other words, our breadbasket is a basket case. As University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery noted in his magisterial 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”

These practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans.

Breaking up the corn and soybean rotation with trees—and freeing some farm animals from vast indoor facilities to roam between rows, where their manure can be taken up by crops—could go a long way to addressing these crises, experts say. Trees actually have a much longer and more robust history in the Midwestern landscape than do annual crops. Think of the Midwestern countryside before US settlers arrived, and you might picture lush grasses and flowers swaying in the wind. That vision is largely accurate, but it’s incomplete. Amid the tall-grass prairies and wetlands, oak trees once dotted landscapes from the shores of Lake Michigan through swathes of present-day Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, clear down to the Mexican border. These trees didn’t clump together in dense forests with closed canopies but rather in what ecologists call savannas—patches of grassland interspersed with oaks. Within these oak savannas, which were interlaced with prairies, tree crowns covered between 10 percent and 30 percent of the ground. They were essentially a transition between the tight deciduous forests of the East and the fully open grasslands further west.

And in the region where Haslett-Marroquin farms—part of the so-called Driftless Area, which was never glaciated—trees proliferated even more intensely. In pre-settlement times, according to a 2014 analysis coauthored by Iowa State University ecologist Lisa Schulte Moore, closed-canopy forests of oaks, sugar maples, and other species covered 15.3 percent of the area, and woodlands (low-density forests) took up another 8.6 percent. Prairies—the ecosystem we readily imagine—composed just 6.9 percent. Oak savannas made up the rest.

In the Driftless and in the rest of the Midwest, Native Americans played an active role in managing savannas, prairies, and forests, where they harvested nutrient-dense acorns for food and other uses. Everything began to change in the mid-19th century, when settlers evicted or killed most of the original inhabitants, drained wetlands, razed trees for lumber, and ripped into the land with plows. In place of staggering biodiversity, an agricultural empire of row crops arose, tended with the tools of modern engineering and industry: genetically modified seeds, insect- and weed-killing chemicals, synthetic and mined fertilizers, and massive tractors and combines. Oak savannas, meanwhile, have been vanishing from the landscape. Today, they occupy a mere 0.02 percent of their historic Midwestern range.

For most of the past century, any push to return trees to the Corn Belt centered on ecosystem services, not food production. Planting trees along streams and rivers—creating what’s known as riparian buffers—helps filter agrichemical runoff and improve water quality. Then there are “wind breaks,” stands of trees strategically placed to shelter crops from wind.

But these practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans, with subsidized crop insurance and price supports, and disincentivize planting alternative crops.

Trees could play a much bigger role and, once established, could more than pay their way by delivering cash crops. A 2018 paper by University of Illinois researchers found that black walnut trees placed in rows between fields of corn and soybeans (alley cropping) would deliver more profits to landowners than field-crop-only farming on nearly a quarter of the Corn Belt’s land.

Haslett-Marroquin and his fellow poultry farmers aren’t the only ones hoping to reimagine agriculture in the Corn Belt by reinstating the role of trees. The Savanna Institute, founded in 2013 by a group of farmers and academic researchers at a gathering in Illinois, promotes agroforestry in the region. Its funders include the USDA and other government agencies, environmental foundations, and business interests including Patagonia and the family behind Clif Bar. In addition to operating demonstration farms in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, run in partnership with landowners, the Institute trains and places apprentices on farms that mix trees with crops or livestock. At the 250-acre Hawkeye Buffalo & Cattle Ranch in northeast Iowa, for example, the McFarland family sells grass-fed beef and bison meat from animals raised on restored oak savanna. The other “apprenticeship” farms are smaller operations.

Fred Iutzi, the institute’s director of agroforestry innovation, says an arboreal revival throughout the region would make it more resilient to climate change. Tree canopies buffer soil from the impact of heavy rain, and their roots plunge deep beneath the soil surface and fan out laterally, further holding soil in place. They suck up nutrients all year long, keeping excess fertilizer and manure from leaching away and polluting water. Trees shield crops and soil from the wind. And they both build carbon in the soil as their leaves drop and decompose and store it in their roots, trunks, and branches. Altogether, Iutzi says, an acre of land under agroforestry can sequester five metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, versus about one ton for an acre of corn or soybeans under optimal conditions, which include reducing tillage and planting off-season cover crops.

“There’s a ton of momentum; there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.”

While practices like alley cropping and silvopasture are eligible for support from USDA conservation programs, they haven’t been widely adopted. A recent study co-authored by Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist, found that between 2017 and 2023, the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program doled out just $900,000 to support agroforestry practices in the Corn Belt, a sliver of its overall budget.

But more money is on the way. In 2022, as part of its $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities program, the USDA announced a $60-million five-year effort to expand agroforestry production and markets in the central and eastern regions of the United States, plus Hawaii. Managed by The Nature Conversancy in partnership with the Savanna Institute and other groups, the project’s goal is 30,000 new acres of agroforestry by 2026, says TNC’s Audrey Epp Schmidt, who leads the project. So far, 35 projects have been selected for funding, eight in the Corn Belt.

For now, an agroforestry renaissance remains at a nascent phase, Epp Schmidt says, “but there’s a ton of momentum, there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.” What the movement needs, she says, is a farmer-to-farmer network: “That’s really when this is going to take off—when farmers see the success of their neighbor’s [agroforestry] operations.”

Even so, the Corn Belt will be a tough nut to crack, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa. Such expenditures, while important, will struggle to overcome the formidable inertia of corn and soybeans. The proximate reason is the subsidies that keep the region’s farmers afloat even as their soil washes away. But ultimately, she says, farmers in the region “strive to be as simple as possible and as mechanized as possible”—a mindset that favors focusing on two cash crops instead of a more complex, labor-intensive approach, like agroforestry.

Yet Iutzi remains hopeful. In the 1920s, he says, the idea of a federal farm policy centered on soil conservation seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Then came the Dust Bowl, a severe soil-erosion crisis that triggered New Deal legislation that, for a time, tempered overproduction of farm commodities and held soil in place.

It’s impossible to say precisely what type of event would force policymakers and farmers to drastically change course in the Corn Belt. But as the region’s vast corn and soybean operations continue hemorrhaging soil and fouling water and climate change proceeds apace, they may find themselves looking for new directions sooner than later. Iutzi thinks projects like Tree Range Farms could show the way forward. “History is just absolutely peppered with this pattern of big disruptions of one kind or another being the catalyst for big change,” he says. “And it’s ideas that are really well honed, when the time comes, that really surge.”

Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.

“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,'” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”

“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”

Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision. 

In the days since ProPublica broke the news of these preventable deaths, anti-abortion activists have sought to blame the women. “Abortion killed Amber Thurman,” anti-abortion activist Lila Rose posted on X, shifting blame from the ban to the procedure and, implicitly, Thurman herself. The stories are complicated for advocates fighting to keep abortion medication on the market, as their stories highlight the rare times in which medication abortions require emergency follow-up care. (Such episodes are at the center of a current lawsuit to take one of the drugs, mifepristone, off the market.) But from the beginning to the end of their tragic stories, it’s clear that both women died for one reason: Georgia’s strict abortion ban. 

It’s a story the Harris campaign is continuing to tell, with a Friday rally in Atlanta, where she delivered a warning: “If [Trump] is elected again, I am certain, he will sign a national abortion ban.” And with it, more people will die. “There is a word, preventable, and there is another word, predictable,” Harris said. “And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing.”

On the debate stage last week, Trump would not rule out signing a national abortion ban. And his allies who crafted Project 2025 have laid out how to ban abortion, including those conducted with medication, nationwide. It’s a message her campaign has sounded from the start, as it leans on the health crisis caused by the overturning of Roe to motivate voters. But it’s also the sad truth.

The two women’s stories are eerily reminiscent of ones from over 50 years ago, when women died either from obtaining illegal abortions from doctors or others ill equipped to perform them, or from torturous attempts to induce one at home. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, physicians, historians, and politicians warned that women would die. We now know that it took less than two months before at least one did.

“I fear that their situations are not unique,” Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of a research group on reproductive health at the University of California, San Francisco, posted on X. “I think it’s very likely that other women and pregnant people have died due to their care being denied or delayed or due to being too scared to seek care—all because of the bans on abortion.” As evidence, Grossman cited a new study in which patients and providers reported on the near-death scenarios they have encountered under post-Roe abortion bans, cases very similar to those of Thurman and Miller. In 86 narratives, the report describes patients whose pregnancies, miscarriages, and post-abortion complications threatened their life. And yet doctors refused to treat them. 

Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Georgia instituted a six-week ban. Like other draconian laws that popped up around the country that summer, its language was medically vague but legally punitive. Doctors and hospitals were left to guess what procedures were actually prohibited and when exactly exceptions for the life of the mother kicked in. If a prosecutor and jury second-guessed their decision, possible prison sentences loomed over their decisions. Almost immediately, in Thurman’s case, doctors chose a path that led to her death.

Hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications jeopardize women from all walks of life.

Thurman was a healthy 28-year-old single mother of a six-year-old when she learned she was pregnant with twins. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion, but as ProPublica reported, Georgia’s six-week ban had just taken effect. Thurman drove to North Carolina for the procedure, but after traffic caused her to miss her appointment, she was offered a medication abortion instead. As happens in rare instances, not all of the fetal tissue was expelled, leading to sepsis. If Thurman were in North Carolina, she could have returned to the clinic and received a dilation and curettage, a common procedure that would have saved her life. But she was stuck in Georgia. Again, the state failed her. When Thurman was admitted to an ER in Georgia, it was clear that she needed a D&C to clear away the tissue that was poisoning her. But the hospital delayed surgery for 20 hours. By then, it was too late. A statewide maternal mortality review committee, which operates on a two-year lag and is only now examining post-Roe cases, deemed her death preventable.

In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller discovered she was pregnant. Because the 41-year-old mother of three had diabetes, hypertension, and lupus, doctors warned that another pregnancy might kill her. But Georgia’s abortion ban made no exceptions for people whose chronic conditions made pregnancy a deadly proposition. Abandoned by her state, Miller ordered abortion pills online and took them at home. As with Thurman, her body did not expel all the tissue, spawning an infection. She suffered for days until her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her three year old daughter by her side.

She hadn’t sought out a doctor, her family said, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Tragically, as Thurman’s death suggests, it’s not clear that it would have helped if she had.

“It is exactly like what it was before it was made, open, available and legal,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime. Reagan recalls reading coroner reports of women just like Miller, only decades earlier, who died because they were afraid of being arrested or prosecuted if they went to the hospital.

If Roe were still in place, Miller could have sought a surgical abortion or taken the pills under supervision of a doctor, who could have intervened when she needed further care. But that’s not how it works in Georgia anymore. Again, the same panel, which finally reviewed her case last month, immediately deemed her death preventable. ProPublica reported that the panel is reviewing additional deaths involving abortions after the ban was passed.

History seems to be repeating itself. Both Thurman and Miller were Black, and both died of sepsis. 

When doctors and historians warned that people would die from post-Dobbs abortion bans, they weren’t being hyperbolic, they were looking at the facts. In one study, economists found that maternal death rates for nonwhite women plummeted after states began legalizing the procedure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to Roe in January 1973. ​​Legal abortion reduced non-white abortion-related mortality by 30-60 percent.

“These are two black women,” says Reagan, noting that before Roe, Black women were far more likely to die trying to obtain an abortion. “This just, again, accentuates and replicates the past. And you know, frankly, the people passing these laws do not care about that.”

Further, deaths due to abortion-related infection were the most common fatal complication. “Over 1960 to 1980, legal abortion has been suggested as a major contributor to the decline in maternal deaths, primarily from abortion-related sepsis,” according to the report. In an account quoted in the study, an obstetrician from the period recalls that “complications of illegal abortion were so common that a septic ward was set aside for the infections. Surgery for hemorrhage was a common night duty.”

But for all the historical echoes, there are key differences. Rather than an abortion from an unqualified doctor or an attempt to induce an abortion by harming themselves, both Thurman and Miller took safe medication greenlit by the Food and Drug Administration. Both had the rare occurrence of failure to expel all fetal tissue, resulting in the need for medical attention.

While it’s clear that poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of the new wave of abortion-related fatalities, hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications from abortion and miscarriage jeopardize women from all walks of life. Just ask Amanda Zurawski, a white woman from Texas who faced the imminent loss of her pregnancy but was told to go home and wait for the onset of sepsis. She ended up fighting for her life in the ICU. Indeed, it appears that under today’s abortion bans, doctors and hospitals are forcing women into septic shock and, in some cases, even delaying care once sepsis has already arrived.

Poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of new abortion-related fatalities.

This is not an accident. In fact, the lawsuit against mifepristone launched by the hard right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom was premised on the idea that doctors should be able to refuse to treat patients in the exact position as Thurman and Miller. Their lawyers argued that the doctors’ personal opposition to abortion meant they should never have to save a woman’s life if she was suffering complications from taking mifepristone, even if the fetus was not living. As the group’s attorney, Erin Hawley, said during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, an anti-abortion doctor’s conscience is harmed by “completing an elective abortion,” meaning “removing an embryo, a fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue.”

It was a shocking courtroom moment, but also a revealing one. The Alliance Defending Freedom doesn’t just represent doctors—it has also been instrumental in crafting and defending state abortion bans. They are not only willing to let women die, but it is in keeping with their beliefs. The lawmakers who wrote laws like Georgia’s—and refused to amend them despite warnings—seem similarly inclined to allow preventable deaths. Louisiana is about to limit access to misoprostol, a drug that is part of the medication abortion regimen but is also a life-saving anti-hemorrhage drug used in postpartum care, by categorizing it as a controlled substance. Again, people could die.

Just as the pre-Roe era saw unnecessary death, so now are we. And it’s easy to see, from the vague yet strict laws to the fear instilled in both doctors and patients, that it’s all by design. 

In Atlanta, Harris presented a stark choice. She would restore Roe, he would usher in more bans. “He brags about overturning Roe v Wade,” Harris said of Trump on Friday. “He says he is proud. Proud that women are dying?”

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

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

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

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

Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).

Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.

Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”

Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”

Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.

This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.

Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:

Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.

The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.

What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

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

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

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

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

It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”

Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence. 

This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers. 

Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.

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

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

You can read the full piece, here:

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

Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.

Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.” 

In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing. 

Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have. 

Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts. 

Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”

On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.

“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.” 

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

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

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

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

The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.

Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking out for months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.

“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”

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

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

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

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

The new rules put the state board directly at odds with election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike. A lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the results of the 2020 election, said they were likely illegal and poorly timed, noting that the new requirements will not go into effect until October 14 at the earliest, after absentee ballots have been mailed to voters on October 7 and just as in-person early voting starts on October 15.

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

“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for Raffensperger, wrote to the board before Friday’s meeting. The new voting hand counting rules “would disrupt existing chain of custody protocols under the law and needlessly introduce the risk of error, lost ballots, or fraud,” she added.

The office of Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr sent a letter to the board Friday morning informing them that several of the proposed rules, including the hand count of ballots, “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority” and “appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.” (At least two other rules approved by the board on Friday, including one that significantly expands the areas where partisan poll watchers can observe the vote counting, also likely violate state laws, the attorney general said.)

“The overwhelming number of election officials I’ve heard from are opposed to this,” said John Fervier, the GOP chair of the board, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s too close to the election. It’s too late to train a lot of poll workers. There’s a lack of resources in many counties to effectuate this rule.” Most importantly, he said, “this is not supported at all in statute.”

All five election officials who spoke during the public comment section of the meeting spoke against the new rules. “The only people who support this are activists who think that the 2020 election was stolen,” says Tindall Ghazal. “Election workers don’t want it. Election supervisors don’t want it. You don’t change the rules this dramatically, this close to the election.”

The board did, however, vote 4-1 to table another proposal to count ballots by hand during early voting, which one of the pro-Trump members, Janelle King, said could lead to privacy concerns ahead of the election. (King also criticized Raffensperger for “unethical” behavior for recording the call where Trump demanded he “find 11,780 votes” to overturn’s Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, but did not reprimand Trump for pressuring the secretary of state to overturn the election.)

The push for hand counts has become a rallying cry of election deniers who falsely blame electronic voting machines for Trump’s defeat. One of the biggest backers of this conspiracy theory is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Ironically, under the guise of protecting election integrity, hand counts actually lead to less accurate results due to human error. Numerous studies show that hand counts produce double the error rate of machine scanners. When Republicans in Nye County, Nevada, attempted to hand count ballots in 2022, they reported an error rate of 25 percent on the first day before the courts shut the effort down.   

“It’s a rule looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Travis Doss, executive director of the Augusta-Richmond County Board of Elections. Doss is president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a bipartisan group of more than 500 election workers from across the state. The group asked the board last month not to pass any more rule changes before the election because it was “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation.” It specifically opposed the hand counting requitement because of “the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”

There’s good reason to worry that delays or errors caused by a hand count of ballots would then be cited by Republicans as a reason not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That occurred in 2022, when the election board in rural Cochise County, Arizona, attempted to hand count all ballots, were told by a court it was illegal, then refused to certify the results after Democrats narrowly won close state races. The two Republican board members who led the scheme were subsequently indicted by the state’s attorney general for obstructing the vote counting process.

That kind of controversy over the vote counting process is exactly what Trump and his allies seem to be agitating for, which is why they’ve worked so hard to stack local and state election boards with MAGA election deniers in places like Georgia. The new rules are “throwing things off kilter to the point where it could create chaos when that’s the last thing we need,” Doss says. (The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also repeatedly warned states not to implement voting changes close to an election.)

Tindall Ghazal predicts that any effort to refuse to certify the election will fail, because courts and state officials will force rogue counties to approve the results, but she worries how Trump could weaponize any delay or dispute in the vote counting process, which are now far more likely to occur because of the new rules passed by his allies on the state election board.

“It leads to public uncertainty and public distrust, because it gets messy,” she says. “And that’s the real goal. To throw enough sand in the eyes of the public to make them think maybe something went wrong.”

Before Bernie Moreno was the 2024 Ohio Republican candidate for Senate, he was the owner of numerous luxury car dealerships, hawking rarified brands like Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz.

To sell pretty cars, it helps to have pretty dealerships. So in December 2007, Moreno hired the firm Welty Building Company (WBC) “for the design and construction of a Porsche dealership and a Mercedes-Benz dealership” in the Cleveland area, according to a 2014 court document.

Details of the initial contract, such as exact work orders and total costs, are not public record. But legal documents obtained from Cuyahoga County’s clerk of courts show Moreno’s company M1 Motors failed to promptly pay Welty hundreds of thousands of dollars upon completion of the work. After an arbitrator declared in July 2014 that Moreno’s company owed WBC $313,058, Moreno still didn’t pay, forcing the construction firm to file a legal claim in September 2014 seeking a court to confirm the arbitrator’s decision. As a result, the court scheduled a conference meeting to discuss. Even after that meeting was scheduled, WBC had to file a “Motion to Enforce” before Moreno finally fulfilled his financial obligations to WBC in full, including post-judgment interest, sometime after early January 2015.

Delays aren’t necessarily standard-operating procedure after arbitration rulings. But many people, either out of inability to pay or frustration with the ruling, sometimes drag their feet. Jeremy Fogel, the executive director at the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former US District Court and state court judge, said he saw similar situations play out all the time when he held the gavel. “It’s a kind of litigation behavior that, unfortunately, is not unheard of,” he says. 

This saga, not previously reported, is just the latest example of past legal disputes involving Moreno. A litany of cases from Moreno’s pre-politics days of building a car dealership empire—lawsuits claiming racial, gender, and age discrimination, as well as wage withholding—have clouded Moreno’s attempt to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur who knows what’s best for Ohio workers because he’s employed thousands of them at his dealerships. This is at least the second example from Moreno’s past in which he did not promptly comply with official legal renderings: Amid proceedings over a case in which he was ultimately found liable for withholding overtime wages from his employees in Massachusetts, Moreno shredded company documents that he and his lawyers “were required to preserve” and “knew or should have known [were] relevant.”

Welty CEO Donzell S. Taylor told Mother Jones that there’s no bad blood between his construction company and Moreno. “Issues like these are not uncommon in the construction business and this one was resolved through the proper channels,” he said in a statement. “We are proud of the work we did for Mr. Moreno and look forward to working with his team again in the future.” But evidently, Moreno was not the CEO’s first pick for the Senate seat: Federal Election Commission records show Taylor donated the election-cycle maximum of $6,600 to one of Moreno’s opponents in the GOP primary, Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose.

A Moreno campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

For the average Ohioan whose debt is more likely tied to a modest mortgage or credit cards, Moreno’s history of delaying or withholding payment to workers and contractors may impact how they view the candidate whose campaign hinges on his image as a wealthy businessman.

Initially, Moreno’s 2014 legal dispute with WBC took place outside of court. As is increasingly common, WBC and M1 Motors entered arbitration, an alternative legal process that is typically less expensive and tends to be friendlier to large corporations.

The independent arbitrator’s decision explains WBC pursued legal action to seek its remaining balance of $271,371 (which M1 “admittedly owed”), plus prejudgment interest of $39,688. For its part, M1 claimed WBC erred in its design and construction processes to the tune of $1.13 million.

“There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

Moreno’s company alleged construction errors from WBC required M1 to replace portions of the roof and relocate poorly designed drains for more than $100,000, re-do $70,000 worth of decorative concrete and pavers, rebuild a $265,000 car wash, fix exposed metal trusses costing $15,000, and replace a $416,000 Porsche metal wall panel. The arbitrator concluded M1 owed WBC $313,058, minus $30,000 WBC owed M1 for minor construction flaws. The $30,000 credit made the sum M1 owed WBC on July 28 come out to $283,058.

“The testimony of M1’s principal was that he did not believe that WBC’s designer did anything wrong. M1’s expert did not offer any opinion contrary to that testimony,” the arbitrator’s ruling concluded. “There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

According to a motion filed by WBC, Moreno didn’t comply with the decision for more than two months. In Ohio, the deadline to appeal an arbitration decision is 30 days from the date the judgment is rendered in an arbitrator’s report. There’s no evidence Moreno’s company appealed. “Despite the arbitration award itself and numerous requests from Welty’s counsel seeking payment, Ml refused to pay Welty,” a November 7 motion said.

To discuss M1’s non-payment, the court in mid-September scheduled a conference call hearing. Two days prior to that court conference slated for October 15, M1 Motors finally paid WBC its principal debt and pre-judgment interest of $283,058, a full 77 days after the arbitration concluded in July. However, M1 did not pay interest on the principal that accrued between the date of the July arbitration ruling and the date of the belated October 13 payment, which led WBC to file its “Motion to Enforce.”

Finally, a judge settled the matter on January 2, 2015. Citing previous case law, Judge Nancy Fuerst ruled M1 had to pay WBC “post judgment statutory interest.”

“No just cause for delay,” the judge wrote to M1. “So Ordered.”

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

Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a different scale: They aim to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, rather than the dozens of tons or less captured by existing systems.

The US has a few things going for it when it comes to DAC: It has the right kind of geological formations that can store carbon dioxide pumped underground, it has an oil and gas industry that knows a lot about drilling into that ground, and it has federal grants and subsidies for the carbon capture industry. The projects in Louisiana and Texas are supported by up to $1.05 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funds, and the projects will be eligible for tax credits of up to $180 per ton of carbon dioxide stored.

“It’s quite clear that the United States is the leader in policy to support this nascent sector,” says Jason Hochman, executive director at the Direct Air Capture Coalition, a nonprofit that works to accelerate the deployment of DAC technology. “At the same time, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be to get on track—to the scale we need to get to net zero.”

The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just doubt the carbon removal industry—it is openly skeptical about climate change

But support for carbon storage is far from guaranteed. Project 2025, the nearly thousand-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump presidency, would dramatically roll back policies that support the DAC industry and carbon capture more generally. The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document proposes eliminating the DOE’s Office for Clean Energy Demonstrations, which provides funds for DAC facilities and carbon capture projects, and also calls out the 45Q tax credit that supports DAC as well as carbon capture, usage, and storage—filtering and storing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and heavy industry. (The Heritage Foundation did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

Sucking carbon out of the sky is not uncontroversial—not least because of the oil and gas industry’s involvement in the sector—but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report says that using carbon dioxide removal to balance emissions from sectors like aviation and agriculture is unavoidable if we want to achieve net zero. Carbon dioxide removal can mean planting trees and sequestering carbon in soil, but a technology like DAC is attractive because it’s easy to measure how much carbon you’re sequestering, and stored carbon should stay locked up for a very long time, which isn’t necessarily the case with forests and soil.

As DAC technology is so new, and the facilities constructed so far are small, it’s still extremely expensive to remove carbon from the atmosphere this way. Estimated costs for extracting carbon go from hundreds of dollars per ton to in excess of $1,000—although Google just announced it is paying $100 for DAC removal credits for carbon that will be sequestered in the early 2030s. On top of that, large-scale DAC plants are likely to cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to build.

That’s why government support like the DOE Regional DAC Hubs program is so important, says Jack Andreasen at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–founded initiative to accelerate technology to reach net zero. “This gets projects built,” he says. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed in 2021 set aside $3.5 billion in federal funds to help the construction of four regional DAC hubs. This is the money that is going into the Louisiana and Texas projects.

Climeworks is one of the companies working on the Louisiana DAC hub, which is eligible for up to $550 million in federal funding. Eventually, the facility aims to capture more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and store it underground. “If you do want to build an industry, you cannot do it with demo projects. You have to put your money where your mouth is and say there are certain projects that should be eligible for a larger share of funding,” says Daniel Nathan, chief project development officer at Climeworks. When the hub starts sequestering carbon, it will be eligible to claim up to $180 for each ton of carbon stored, under tax credit 45Q, which was extended under the Inflation Reduction Act.

“You cannot start an industry with a societal good in mind unless you get governments to take an active role.”

These tax credits are important because they provide long-term support for companies actually sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. “What you have is a guaranteed revenue stream of $180 per ton for a minimum of 12 years,” says Andreasen. It’s particularly critical given that the costs of capturing and storing a ton of carbon dioxide are likely to exceed the market rate of carbon credits for a long time. Other forms of carbon removal, notably planting forests, are much cheaper than DAC, and removal offsets also compete with offsets for renewable energy, which avoid emitting new emissions. Without a top-up from the government, it’s unlikely that a market for DAC sequestration would be able to sustain itself.

Most of the DAC industry experts WIRED spoke to thought there was little political appetite to reverse the 45Q tax credit—not least because it also allows firms to claim a tax credit for using carbon dioxide to physically extract more oil from existing reservoirs. They were more worried, however, about the prospect that existing DOE funds set aside for DAC and other projects might not be allocated under a future administration.

“I do think a slowing down of the DOE is a possibility,” says Andreasen. “That just means the money takes longer to get out, and that is not great.” Katie Lebling at the World Resources Institute, a sustainability nonprofit, agrees, saying there is a risk that unallocated funds could be slowed down and stalled if a new administration looked less favorably on carbon removal.

The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just doubt the carbon removal industry—it is openly skeptical about climate change, writing in one report that observed warming could only “theoretically” be due to the burning of fossil fuels, and that “this claim cannot be demonstrated through science.” In its Project 2025 plan, the foundation says the “government should not be picking winners and losers and should not be subsidizing the private sector to bring resources to market.”

But without government support, the private sector would never develop technologies like DAC, says Jonas Meckling, an associate professor at UC Berkeley and climate fellow at Harvard Business School. The same was true of the solar industry, Meckling says. “You cannot start an industry with a societal good in mind unless you get governments to take an active role,” says Nathan of Climeworks.

While there are some question marks over the future of DOE grants for DAC, the industry appeals to legislators on both sides of the aisle. The Texas DAC hub is being built by 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, and both DOE projects are located in firmly red states. When it was announced that DOE DAC hubs funding would be spent in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy said: “Carbon capture opens a new era of energy and manufacturing dominance for Louisiana. It is the future of job creation and economic development for our state.”

In the long run, Nathan says, the aim is for DAC to be viable on its own economic terms. In time, he says, that will mean regulation that requires industries to pay for carbon removal—a stricter version of emissions-trading schemes that already exist in places like California and the European Union. Eventually, that should lead to a place where the direct air industry no longer requires government support to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale. “I’m looking at the fundamentals, and those aren’t driven by who’s in office,” Nathan says

Disabled people are five times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-disabled people, and make up a third of its victims, according to a new report published today by the federal Government Accountability Office. People with cognitive disabilities, such as those who are autistic, are even more likely to be abused. Disabled women are also more likely to be the target of such violence than disabled men.

The rates of abuse, drawn from Justice Department data from 2017 to 2022 underscore the necessity for domestic violence centers and their services to be accessible to disabled people—which is required by both the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, key items of federal civil rights legislation, but is not always the case. ADA enforcement, for instance, often requires disabled people to make complaints after the fact. Someone actively experiencing domestic violence may not have the capacity to do so, let alone wait for a center to make itself accessible—highlighting the importance of government enforcement of accessibility laws for disabled people’s safety.

“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities.”

“We must guarantee that our systems are not only adequately funded but also effectively implemented, so survivors, regardless of their abilities, receive the support they need,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Vir.), who released the report with Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), in a statement to Mother Jones.

The GAO report investigated whether domestic violence programs that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services are accessible to disabled people; most of the domestic violence centers interviewed for the report across Maryland, Mississippi and Washington said that they served relatively few disabled survivors, and officials at nine of 12 centers weren’t certain how to identify whether a survivor had a disability. Some disability groups, according to the report, say that local centers do not work with them to better reach disabled survivors.

Disabled people may also be scared to report domestic violence if they are abused by people they rely on for caregiving, as the report notes:

One domestic violence group told us that some people with disabilities who require caregiving to live in their homes may not seek domestic violence services because they are reluctant to report the abuse they have suffered. Officials from that group said people with disabilities who require caregiving may be worried that if they seek domestic violence services from a local center, law enforcement or other authorities will be notified of the abuse and move them from their preferred living situations into institutions.

HHS is responsible for ensuring compliance with federal law at the institutions it makes grants to, but here it also falls short, investigators found. The GAO report notes that there were no accessibility-related findings from on-site visits by HHS from 2019 to 2022 across 17 states, which HHS says it’s addressing by updating its monitoring requirements “to include more specific accessibility compliance questions.”

Investigators also reached out to resource centers like the National Network to End Domestic Violence: 11 of the 16 that responded said they shared best practices for how to work with survivors with disabilities, but only two have developed technical assistance on making shelters accessible to disabled people. GAO’s site visits, the report says, “raise questions about whether the assistance provided by national resource centers and state coalitions” addresses local needs, made still more difficult by a lack of data on accessibility needs and efforts.

“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities,” Scott said. “We must invest in the collection of crucial data to understand the needs of survivors with disabilities, but also must ensure this information leads to meaningful improvements.”

The report, available in full on GAO’s website, recommends that HHS investigate how it can better support local centers in accessibility and support for disabled survivors, and implement those changes.

On Sunday, two New York City police officers fired into a crowded Brooklyn subway station, shooting and injuring four people, including two bystanders, one of whom is a hospital employee now in critical condition after police shot him in the head during his commute. 

The catalyst for this bloody confrontation: an alleged fare evasion. In other words, $2.90.

According to the NYPD, officers suspected that 37-year-old Derell Mickles had skipped a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. The officers followed Mickles, resulting in a chase that ended with officers shooting him, two bystanders, and another officer on duty. While police initially claimed that they had recovered a knife Mickles had used to threaten officers, officials later contradicted their own claim, prompting questions over what exactly had happened.

Asked about body camera footage on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams deflected, telling a reporter to “speak with the police commissioner,” before praising the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting for demonstrating a “great level of restraint.” The NYPD has since firmly defended the officers, with the police departments chief of patrol stating, “We are not perfect.”

The violent incident, inside one of the world’s busiest subway systems, has sparked outrage among New Yorkers as well as a victim’s family members, who condemned the officers’ actions as “reckless.”

And they’re far from alone. Criminal justice reform advocates are slamming what they see as an outsized response by the NYPD to something as minor and trivial as alleged fare evasion. It comes amid New York Mayor Eric Adams’ aggressive crackdown on fare evaders, a policy Adams has claimed would also help with violence that occurs on trains. Protests have since broken out across the city, calling for the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting to be held accountable.

I spoke with Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York City Civil Liberties Union, to learn more about Adams’ crackdown on fare evasion, overpolicing, and lack of police transparency surrounding Sunday’s violent encounter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is an ongoing investigation. But there are already significant concerns over how the police handled this situation and how the mayor has responded.

This disturbing incident is sadly not surprising, given what we’ve seen from this administration. The Adams administration and NYPD have been dramatically ramping up enforcement activity, increasing their presence in the subways, increasing stops, increasing frisks, and increasing all of the hallmarks of broken windows policing.  This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset. There are so many questions about what we’ve heard from the mayor’s office from the NYPD about what exactly unfolded. 

We have heard officer accounts of what happened. We’ve heard some witness accounts. The NYPD and the mayor’s office have been reviewing body camera footage. But, we have not been able to see this. We’re not getting a transparent accounting of what took place. It’s absolutely critical that we see the evidence that they’re relying on to make these assertions. 

We’re being asked to take the word of a mayor whose initial tweet in response to this incident had to get community noted because it was leaving out the important context of the officer he was talking about having been shot was shot by a fellow officer. We can’t really trust their version of events when they’re not showing us the evidence of what took place in that incident.

This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset.

Are complaints over transparency from the NYPD common?

It’s a hallmark of the NYPD. We know that they can be transparent when they choose to be and when they think it serves their interest. Folks may remember back in January of 2024 the NYPD released body camera footage within hours, within a day of the traffic stop of a city council member when they sought to use that footage to highlight their version of what took place. But they treat incidents like this very differently.

How common—or rare—are shootings like this in New York?

I don’t know that we have the full stats on how common this type of shooting is in the subway from an officer.  It’s not something that I’ve seen a full accounting of, but what we have seen are increased reports of police misconduct and abuse of New Yorkers that have upticked with this administration. Civilian complaints going into the Civilian Complaint Review Board have reached alarmingly high levels. At the same time, there have also been real concerns about what the department is actually doing with complaints that are moving through the NYPD disciplinary system, where they’re just not taking those reports seriously. 

When you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more cases where someone is subject to use of force.

Can overpolicing backfire? How do outsize police presences affect communities, particularly communities of color?

The approach that this administration has taken since day one is overpolicing. 

They’ve identified police officers as the be-all, end-all, sole solution to every societal ill. Fare evasion? Send a cop after it. Homelessness? Send police to conduct sweeps. Mental health crises? Instead of sending peers and EMTs, send a cop instead.

It’s a formula that this administration seems wedded to, but it’s not improving community safety for New Yorkers. Police are primarily concerned with enforcing criminal laws, making arrests, and issuing summonses. They have an enforcement mindset, not a delivery of services or addressing root causes mindset.

So when you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more and more cases where someone is subject to use of force, someone is tased, someone is shot, someone is killed when they did not need to be, because you are responding to a situation with tools that are just fundamentally not a good fit for that scenario.

We see this play out largely in communities that need more investments to address the root causes of crime, poverty, homelessness, the need for increased mental health and healthcare services. Rather than making those investments, which are harder and will take more thought to accomplish, we instead default to a reliance on police officers.

In March, the NYPD announced they would send 800 officers into subways to combat fare evasion. In the same month, Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed the National Guard in response to several violent incidents that occurred a few weeks prior. Realistically, how effective are methods like this in preventing crime, and what are some of the pitfalls?

It’s brought up time and time again that if you focus on low-level crime and low-level signs of disorder, you’re mitigating the potential for it to escalate into more serious criminal activity and driving down overall crime rates as a result. 

That’s been studied and debunked numerous times. New York City hit historically low crime rates as stop and frisk plummeted to historic lows and was reined in as enforcement fell, as summonses and arrest activity went down. The data is just not there to justify the approach to broken windows or quality-of-life policing.

Instead, it’s very effective at funneling more and more people into the criminal legal system, saddling people with fines that they cannot afford, making them attend court dates that they cannot afford, and giving people the potentially lifelong consequence of acquiring a criminal record which can extend to every aspect of their life. What it’s not doing is meeting community needs and making New Yorkers safer.

Eric Adams has pushed for a crackdown on fare evasion. Last month, the MTA announced that they’ll be sending summons of up to $50 to $100 to fare evaders. Did a “tough on crime” approach play into what happened over the weekend?

What happened over the weekend is an inevitable outcome of that kind of tough-on-crime approach, where the only tool that we seem to have to offer is police officers, who are going to focus on enforcement and if they’re given an aggressive mandate to enforce, are going to enforce that aggressively.

We haven’t seen the actual footage yet. We’re relying on accounts of what happened. But it’s very easy to see how a police officer pursuing someone, chasing them, is a tactic that is escalatory, as opposed to thinking of ways we can tackle issues like fare evasion without the threat of violence.

That is such a mismatch we don’t need to be constrained thinking about responding to fare evasion with just a police law enforcement tool.

We should be thinking more broadly about getting people access to the support they need to enroll in programs for New Yorkers who can’t afford to pay for fares to get to work, pay for child care, or get access to medical care. We can think about other ways that we are addressing those causes without putting armed officers in and telling them you need to make sure that you are aggressively cracking down on everyone within the system.

As this case has gained traction on social media, one of the most disturbing responses I’ve seen is how so many people justify using this level of force because Mickles was suspected of evading a $2.90 fare. It’s a narrative that oftentimes rears its head after a high-profile case of police brutality. We saw this with George Floyd, Eric Garner. 

The level of force used here is so disproportionate to the alleged infraction. No one should be subject to having their life put in jeopardy because of an alleged evasion of a $2.90 cent fare, to say nothing of the fact that officers pursued him into a crowded station and onto a train.

That response is not only out of proportion to the individual’s alleged offense, but it is putting so many other people needlessly in harm’s way.

It’s deeply disturbing that the NYPD and the administration could view that level of a response as an appropriate reaction when we’re talking about something as trivial as the evasion of a $2.90 cent fare.

Since the shooting occurred, plenty of New Yorkers have started to protest the NYPD’s crackdown on fare evasion. What are your thoughts on some of these demonstrations?

People are recognizing an uptick in the targeting of their communities and an uptick in stop activity racial disparities as bad or even worse than they were at its height. There is a real sense that the NYPD is not providing a service to New Yorkers but is causing active harm In communities.

And I think that an expression that also finds a voice in the number of complaints of police misconduct going in, being on the rise, and is evident in the types of protests that we’re seeing against this incident and against other instances of police brutality and violence.

It’s important that New Yorkers be able to express their to raise their voice and express their views in protesting against policies that are causing harm in their communities rather than actually helping deliver real safety for them.

The Uncommitted movement announced on Thursday that it will not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision comes in response to Harris declining to break with the Biden administration over its response to the war in Israel and Palestine and after a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in which Palestinian voices were largely shut out from speaking about the horrors happening in Gaza.

The group, which represents the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” during the primaries in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in a statement released Thursday that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”

At the same time, the movement’s leaders stressed that they oppose Donald Trump and are not recommending that supporters vote for a third-party candidate because doing so could help elect Trump.

“I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her, but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.”

“We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday. “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”

Uncommitted leaders, throughout the past months, have been eager to endorse Harris and organize on her behalf if she were willing to move more aggressively towards ending the war. In early August, when organizer Layla Elabed briefly met the vice president, she told her as much. “I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her,” Elabed said at the time, “but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.” Elabed stressed that “pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.”

Uncommitted had asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to a request to meet with Palestinian Americans in Michigan whose family members have been killed during the war. That meeting has not happened and the Harris campaign has not committed to making it happen.

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

The latest announcement from Uncommitted comes one month after the group made news with a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Uncommitted made two main policy asks at the convention: an immediate ceasefire and a US arms embargo on Israel to help bring one about. But Uncommitted delegates also made much smaller demands in the lead up to and during the convention.

Most notably, they asked that an American doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, or a Palestinian American, be given a brief speaking slot from the convention’s main stage. After convention organizers rejected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, the group eventually began pushing for a speaking slot for Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat.

Lexis Zeidan, an organizer with the Uncommitted national movement, said that in their refusal to allow even one Palestinian American speaker, “the DNC and the vice president’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture.”

“Now, the vice president’s team is courting people like Dick Cheney, while sidelining these incredibly important anti-war voices,” she said. Some leaders within Uncommitted are voting for Harris—and others will not be voting at the top of the ticket at all. Zeidan, who is Palestinian American, said that on a personal level, she “simply cannot go to the ballot box and cast a vote for a candidate that is not hearing the demands of her people.” Her fellow organizer, Abbas Alawieh, will be voting for Harris, a choice he describes as a “chess move” against Donald Trump.

“If you’re willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that’ll help you sleep at night, I can respect that,” Alawieh said. But, he added, “In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I’m blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.”

Mother Jones reported during the convention that Romman, who was not an Uncommitted delegate, planned to explicitly endorse Harris from the main stage. Nevertheless, national Democrats denied her and any other Palestinian American Democrat a speaking slot without asking to see their remarks. Uncommitted had made clear that any speech would be vetted and pre-approved by convention planners. As we reported:

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100,000 have been injured in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Public health experts fear that the full death toll may be far higher. Nearly a year into the war, the chances for a ceasefire in the near future still appear low.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears committed to prolonging the war—even if it means the death of more hostages—to appease far-right cabinet members and remain in power. President Biden has largely refused to use the United States’ extensive leverage to push Netanyahu toward a ceasefire.

In last week’s debate, Harris reiterated her support for Israel and once again called for the US to have the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” 

“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate,” Alawieh, the Uncommitted cofounder, made clear on Thursday. “It has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”

Update, September 19: This post has been updated with a statement from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.

In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”

If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.

“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”

What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12^th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.

“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.

Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.

Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.

“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”

But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.

“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”

Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.

“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”

As the 2024 election hits the final stretch, the Republican Party has been touting its “Young Guns,” a group of 30 non-incumbent candidates in competitive House districts. The party presents this bunch as hot prospects who will help the GOP not just protect its slim House majority but expand it. But anyone who scrutinizes the list will find an assortment of extremists, conspiracy theory-mongers, underfunded aspirants, and oddball contenders who might more accurately be labeled potential duds.

The Young Guns program has a mixed legacy. In 2010, the Republican Party concocted this sassy branding exercise to promote a supposedly new and different generation of House leaders, with an emphasis on three of them: Kevin McCarthy, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan. This trio even produced a bestselling book with the title Young Guns, and the promotional copy proclaimed these conservatives, more middled-aged than youthful, were “changing the face of the Republican party and giving us a new road map back to the American dream.” But the fate of the original Young Guns ended up more a nightmare for each. Four years later, Cantor was defeated in a GOP primary by a far-right tea partier. After an unsuccessful vice presidential run in 2012, Ryan reluctantly became House speaker, only to be essentially hounded out of that position by extremist Republicans in his caucus. And half-a-decade later, McCarthy managed to hold on to the speakership for only nine months before a mutiny waged by radical Republicans booted him.

Yet despite the sad tale of these three, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP outfit in charge of House races, has continued to use the “Young Guns” label to promote candidates. This summer it released a list of the contenders in its Young Gun program, with Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), the chair of the NRCC, declaring the Republicans will boost their majority in the House because “we’ve got really good candidates…really quality candidates.” Yet this roster of GOP House nominees is full of politicians weighed down by extremist baggage, fundraising challenges, and flip-flops.

Here’s a look at some of the Young Guns.

Caroleene Dobson. Running for an open seat in Alabama’s newly-drawn 2nd congressional district, Dobson is up against Shomari Figures, a former deputy chief of staff for Attorney General Merrick Garland. Dobson attended what’s known as a “segregation academy”—private schools established in Alabama that allowed white families to opt out of integrated schools—and she’s has been a fierce advocate of a generous school choice measure that critics say will divert public funds from majority Black public schools. An ardent foe of abortion who now says she supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, Dobson in April commended a draconian Alabama anti-abortion law that contains no exceptions. When asked by the Christian Coalition if she backed any exemptions, she did not express support for them. A poll in August showed Figures ahead by 12 points.

Scott Baugh. Competing for the seat in California’s 47th congressional district left open when Democratic Rep. Katie Porter ran (unsuccessfully) for the Senate, Baugh is a returning contender who lost to Porter by 3.4 points in 2022. In the 1990s, according to the Los Angeles Times, Baugh, then a state assembly member and an Orange County Republican, “was charged with four felonies, including falsifying campaign reports and persuading another person to commit perjury. He also was charged with 18 misdemeanors for allegedly concealing the source of campaign money.” He eventually paid a civil fine of $47,900 to resolve the case. In a speech to the International Christian Ambassadors Association last year, he decried so-called wokeism as the “greatest threat” to the United States in its history: “We were born in the Revolutionary War. We survived civil wars, World War II, World War I, a lot of wars, 9/11. None of those were that threatening to our country compared to the war that we’re fighting now. That war is about wokeism and the lack of common sense.” His Democratic opponent is state senator Dave Min.

Gabe Evans. In Colorado’s recently created 8th congressional district and up against Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the state’s first Latina House member, Evans failed to obtain the state party’s endorsement. The GOP’s pooh-bahs believed he was not a strong candidate. Still, he won its primary contest. During a July interview, Evans, an abortion opponent, curiously said he could not recall how he voted on a 2020 state ballot initiative that would have partially banned abortion. He also oddly said that his wife, who had experienced eight miscarriages, has tried to explain to him the “nuances to that female reproductive care stuff” that she learns about at her “doctors visits” but that he doesn’t attend those visits because “I don’t got the right parts.” In fundraising, Evans has so far been smoked by Caraveo. According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, she raised $4.5 million and had $3.4 million cash on hand. Evans had collected $1 million and had $532,000 left to spend.

Joe Teirab. In Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district, Teirab, a US Marine vet and former prosector, is facing Democratic Rep. Angie Craig, who has won the past three contests. Teirab is another one of these Republicans who has had a tough time handling the abortion issue. As a student and Republican activist at Cornell University in 2009, he remarked to a reporter for the school newspaper that “the unborn have a right to life too, regardless of the conception.” As a candidate, he told an anti-abortion group that he recognized “a federal role in protecting unborn children.” And he serves on the board of a group that operates “pregnancy centers” that promote “abortion pill reversal”—a procedure the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has declared “unproved and unethical.” Yet he now insists that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother and says abortion “is a state issue, not a federal issue,” contradicting his previous stance. Craig has nearly outraised Teirab four-to-one and, per the most recent FEC records, swamping him $4.1 million to $535,000.

Yvette Herrell. In 2022, during what was supposed to be a “red wave” election, Herrell, then the one-term incumbent, lost to Democrat Gabe Vasquez in New Mexico’s 2nd congressional district by about 1,300 votes. She’s back for a rematch. In 2018, Associated Press reported that she “failed to disclose that her real estate company earned nearly a half-million dollars in contracts with two state agencies over five years” and noted this “could put Herrell at odds with state ethics officials.” And she, too, has been struggling to calibrate her position on abortion. In 2020, she said at a candidate’s forum, “I wish we could have eliminated all abortion in the state.” In Congress, she co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act that aimed to define “human being” as beginning with “the moment of fertilization,” with no exceptions for in vitro fertilization. Now, as HuffPost reports, “Herrell has cut all references to abortion from her website and campaign materials. Her campaign has emphasized that she believes abortion rights decisions should be left to the states.” A poll this month had Vasquez up by a whopping 9 points, while he has maintained a two-to-one advantage in cash on hand.

John Lee. In Nevada’s 4th congressional district, Lee, who served as North Las Vegas mayor from 2013 to 2022 and who was an anti-abortion Democrat until becoming a Republican in 2021, is challenging Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. At 69, Lee hardly fits the image of a Young Gun, but this NRCC program doesn’t mind a touch of false advertising. What’s odd about his campaign so far is money. As of the most recent campaign filings, covering the period up until the end of June, Horsford had raised $4 million and his campaign treasury had $2.2 million in it. Lee had pulled in $919,000 and was left with a measly $39,000 cash on hand. It’s true that Lee didn’t win the GOP primary until the beginning of June and spent all his money on that race. But unless he pulled in a big haul in the last two months, he will likely not be competitive. This week, the Nevada-based Daily Indy reported that the NRCC has not spent any money to help Lee—a sign it isn’t too hopeful about him. With help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Horsford has booked over $1 million in television ads. And a Democratic super PAC is kicking in millions more to help him and two other Nevada Democratic House members.

Alison Esposito. A former New York City cop, Esposito is running in New York’s 18th congressional district against Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, who won the seat in 2022 by 1.3 points. She is touting her career in law enforcement as a top selling point for her candidacy. But as a cop she was sued twice for wrongful arrests—and New York City taxpayers had to dole out over $100,000 to resolve these cases. In a 2005 episode, three Black women sued her and other NYPD officers for allegedly wrongfully arresting them on suspicion of shoplifting. The city paid $95,000 to settle that case. In 2017, she was sued for allegedly arresting and assaulting an “infant.” (In some legal proceedings in New York State, “infant” can mean a minor.) Settling that case cost the city $25,000. Her campaign lawyer has denied the allegations.

Orlando Sonza. In Ohio’s 1st congressional district, Sonza is taking on Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman, who in 2022 defeated Republican Steve Chabot, a 13-term incumbent. In his early 30s, Sonza, a lawyer, Army veteran, and son of Filipino immigrants, is gunning to become the youngest Republican House member. He, too, has a past as an anti-abortion absolutist. Last year, he told the Daily Mail that the United States “should be a place where there’s no abortion.” When he ran for a state senate seat unsuccessfully in 2022—he lost by 45 points—Sonza filled out a candidate questionnaire in which he declared he would support “federal and state legislation to ban abortion-on-demand from fertilization to birth.” He also said there should be no legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Last year, Ohio passed a state constitutional amendment enshrining reproductive rights that restored Roe v. Wade-era access to abortion. It pass with 57 percent of the vote. As of mid-summer, Landsman had $1.9 million available to Sonza’s $246,000

Derek Merrin. In Ohio’s 9th congressional district, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, now serving in her 21st term, is one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the House. The district twice voted for Donald Trump, and state representative Merrin, 38 years old, should have a good shot at bouncing her. But he is also an anti-abortion extremist. In 2019, he backed a measure to impose a total ban on abortion that would create “the capital offense of aggravated abortion murder and the offense of abortion murder.” Under this proposed law, a woman who sought an abortion, including someone as young as 13, or a health care provider who performed an abortion could be prosecuted, with the ultimate penalty being the death sentence. He also supported a six-week abortion ban that did not include exceptions for rape and incest that eventually passed. Last year, Merrin was deemed too extreme by 22 of his fellow GOP state representatives. They bolted the Republican caucus and cut a deal with the Democratic minority to elect a more moderate Republican speaker of the house instead of Merrin. In June, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has hailed Merrin as “an extraordinary candidate,” praised him for being a “runner-up” in that race for leader of the state legislature. As of the end of June, Merrin’s campaign had $408,000 in the bank, compared to Kaptur’s $2.6 million.

Mayra Flores. In Texas’ 34th congressional district, it’s another rematch. Flores, who won a special election in June 2022, served only a few months before being defeated that fall by 8.5 points by Democratic Rep. Vincente Gonzalez, a congressman in a neighboring district. Flores’ initial win was surprising, given she was a far-right extremist, climate denier, and conspiracy theorist. She was a passionate proponent of Trump’s big lie, tweeting that President Joe Biden should be “impeached immediately.” She supported the conspiracy theory that the January 6 riot was a setup (presumably orchestrated by the Deep State) and spurred by antifa. She has also hobnobbed with the loony QAnon movement, which claims a global cabal of satanic and cannibalistic pedophiles and sex traffickers (which includes billionaires, Hollywood elites, and, of course, prominent Democrats) is scheming to control the entire world. Business Insider reported that Flores has “openly affiliated” with QAnon. Media Matters noted that she has “repeatedly posted the QAnon hashtag and ‘#Q’ on Twitter and on Facebook, including in a Facebook ad. On Instagram, she repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan.” (She told the San Antonio Express-News that she has “never been supportive” of QAnon.) In May, her campaign sent out a fundraising solicitation that claimed the left was waging “disgusting attacks on Christian Americans” and forcing them to “worship in the shadows.” It included a poll with two choices: “Yes, I love God!” and “No, I am a Democrat.” And then there’s “Grubgate”—earlier this year Flores was caught swiping from the internet photos of delicious food offerings and posting them as her own concoctions. In this race, the fundraising has been close. Flores ] brought in $4.2 million through June, and Gonzalez $2 million, but as of that point, Gonzalez had more cash on hand with $1.7 million to Flores’ $1.1 million.

Joe Kent. In 2022, Kent ran against Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington’s 3rd congressional district and lost by less than 1 percent, and he’s returned to challenge her. Kent has been an anti-abortion extremist and a purveyor of various conspiracy theories. In the 2022 GOP primary, with the backing of libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, Kent, who had attended a rally to support January 6 rioters, knocked out one of the 10 Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump after the assault on the Capitol. Kent’s campaign that year was hindered by news stories on its ties to the Proud Boys and other white identity extremists. He has long supported a national abortion ban, calling the procedure “absolutely evil” and comparing it to slavery. Now he is softening his stance, saying that abortion is a “state issue” and that he will not support such a national prohibition. This year he called for pardoning January 6 marauders convicted of crimes. He claimed the Biden administration has been purposefully bringing undocumented immigrants into the United States to expand the Democratic voting base. And he has echoed Vladmir Putin’s false talking points about the Ukraine war. In July, Kent, who has often railed against the Deep State and urged defunding the FBI, suggested that Secret Service agents may have been “in on” the assassination attempt against Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. As of mid-July, Gluesenkamp Perez had $3.8 million in cash on hand, and Kent, as of late August, only had $585,000.

Though some of the GOP’s Young Guns may prevail—several of these races are tight—overall this is not an impressive band of candidates. Many of them are shape-shifters on abortion, running from their previous hard-core positions and vulnerable to accusations of flip-flopping on this top issue. Several champion the most noxious conspiracy theories. Polls and fundraising numbers raise questions about others. After eight years of Trump dominating the Republican Party, the best it has to offer as House candidates includes extremists and paranoia pushers with spotty records. But in what could well be a tight race for control of the House, any one of them could make a difference.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.

When Gov. Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, released a statement hailing him as someone who “has worked to protect clean air and water, grow our clean energy economy, and see to it that we do all we can to avoid the very worst of the climate crisis.” 

But to a group of Indigenous environmental activists familiar with Walz’s record in Minnesota—particularly their view he broke a promise to block the construction of Line 3, a cross-state oil pipeline—such a ringing endorsement of his green credentials rings hollow. 

A few days after her home state’s governor joined the ticket, Tara Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights activist, expressed that point of view in an Instagram video post where she said he had led “a brutal, multi-year campaign to suppress Indigenous people and allies trying to stop Line 3 tar sands.” It showed a clash between protesters and police at a Line 3 pipeline construction site over a soundtrack of rising drums. In the final scene, Houska is being escorted away by police while in restraints. 

Houska first became involved in protesting pipelines in 2016 when, after working as a Native policy advisor for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, news about the Dakota Access Pipeline drew her back to the Midwest. After six months demonstrating against that pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation, Houska returned to the East Coast. She soon saw news coming out of the Midwest about a different pipeline: “I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go home.’”

The debate in Minnesota, which would lead to hundreds of demonstrators being arrested, came in the wake of major protests against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. The projects were opposed by environmental activists upset they would speed fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and by Indigenous communities concerned about the impact on their historic lands and waters.

The controversy dates back to April 2015, when Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, proposed to then-Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration a plan to replace an aging pipeline originally completed in 1968. The project, Enbridge argued, would address “integrity and safety concerns” and allow the company to transmit 760,000 barrels of oil per day. The proposed new route traveled from Canada to Minnesota’s border with Wisconsin, passing through state forests and the Fond du Lac Reservation, home to over four thousand members of the Lake Superior Chippewa.

Beyond climate-related concerns, opponents feared the pipeline would threaten water systems, especially wild rice beds, that Indigenous communities rely on. Enbridge’s track record includes two of the largest inland oil spills in national history. In 1991, Line 3 released 1.7 million gallons of crude oil in Northern Minnesota, and in 2010, another Enbridge pipe spilled over 1 million gallons in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

“We were sold one thing to vote for them…When we did vote, we were totally betrayed.” 

Walz’s first public comments on the pipeline came in 2017, after Dayton announced he would not seek another term, and Walz, who had represented a southern Minnesota congressional district for 10 years, rolled out a campaign to succeed him. During a contested Democratic primary, Walz advocated against Line 3 by criticizing its harm to Native communities and lands. 

“Any line that goes through treaty lands is a nonstarter for me,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that “every route would disproportionately and adversely affect Native people. Unacceptable.” His stand drew in support from the Indigenous community and environmentalists, reassuring voters who may have been troubled by his record in Congress, where he was just one of thirty Democratic members to vote in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline. 

“They got that extra push from climate folks and from tribal folks,” Houska recalled, explaining that Walz and his running mate, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Nation, earned her vote in 2018. 

Enbridge’s proposal, after years of reviews, appeals, and public forums, finally garnered the approval of Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission in June of 2018. But in the final weeks of Dayton’s term, his administration sued to overturn the decision, with the outgoing governor writing that he hoped to “ensure that a project with this magnitude of environmental impact upon our state serves the needs of our citizens.” 

After Walz took office in early 2019, he said he would continue Dayton’s lawsuit, but in public remarks seemed to lay the groundwork to wash his hands of the issue, suggesting the project’s fate laid with an appeals court’s review of the commission’s decision. He explained he would not use executive powers to stop the pipeline “as a protection against the checks and balances being weakened.”

While Walz’s administration would continue to refile and support the suit Dayton launched, after a new environmental review, Enbridge was nonetheless able to obtain final permits and begin construction in December 2020. By early 2021, protests began to ramp up near Line 3 construction sites that would continue through the summer. In February, a group of tribal leaders asked Walz to enact an executive order to stop construction while litigation continued. At that point, a spokesperson for Walz said he did “not believe it is within his role to stay project permits that have been issued by state agencies after a thorough environmental review and permitting process.” 

Houska says Walz passed the buck. “The reality is his administration could’ve stopped Line 3,” she argues, by upholding treaty obligations—specifically the Ojibwe nation’s unique right to harvest wild rice, which activists warned was threatened by the pipeline. 

As opposition to the pipeline entered a new confrontational phase, demonstrators were met by a unique police force: the Northern Lights Task Force, which was made up of county law-enforcement agents whose time, training, and equipment were supported by a state account funded with $8 million from Enbridge. (Public records obtained by the Intercept show Walz hosted a conference call with senior task force members, and discussed its use of tear gas.) In addition to tear gas, rubber bullets, and other non-lethal weapons, police deployed “pain compliance” tactics that left multiple protestors partially paralyzed. 

Walz’s choice of Flanagan, who had supported the Standing Rock pipeline protesters, as a running mate had been seen as a signal within Native communities that he would stand fast against the pipeline. “When it came through that he wasn’t doing anything, Peggy was very silent on the matter. She never showed up to rallies. Didn’t show up to the treaty camps,” says Dannah Thompson, an Anishinaabe anti-pipeline activist from Roseville, Minnesota.

As protest activity swirled, the lieutenant governor faced pressure to step in. Flanagan released a statement in July 2021 on Facebook: “While I cannot stop Line 3, I will continue to do what is within my power to make sure our people are seen, heard, valued and protected. Using my voice is an important part of that work.”

Walz’s administration did not respond to a request for comment. But in August 2021, just after a thousand Line 3 protestors picketed at the state capitol, Walz defended the project, by saying that while “we need to move away from fossil fuels… in the meantime if we’re gonna transport oil, we need to do it as safely as we possibly can with the most modern equipment.”

Construction only took about 10 months. (Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources has since documented multiple aquifer breaches that took place during building.) When tar sands began being pumped through the pipeline in the fall of 2021, MN350, a state climate justice non-profit, issued a blistering statement: “Shame on Governor Walz, who broke his campaign promise.” 

“[We] fought as hard as we possibly could on every front: the ground fight, the regulatory fight, the political pressure, everything and anything to try to protect our wild rice and our waterways,” Houska said.

“Line 3 was an opportunity to prove that they wanted to take these bigger actions and stand up to financial powers and corporate powers,” says Thompson. “We were blindsided, and we were sold one thing to vote for them…When we did vote, we were totally betrayed.” 

“There is a small faction of us that I know who aren’t able to move past this,” Thompson adds. Citing “the violence that was pushed towards Native people” by police, she says sorting through Walz’s record on the pipeline is a pre-election “conversation that is going to be had in the months coming up in the Native community.” 

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency—you know, that document he knows nothing about even though 140 people from his first administration, including six former Cabinet members, helped create it—is full of delightful little Easter eggs. One provision that has attracted almost no public notice, perhaps because it seems so reasonable, is the authors’ call for the government to create “universal savings accounts” (USAs).

Heck, it even has a patriotic name!

All taxpayers should be allowed to contribute up to $15,000 (adjusted for inflation) of post-tax earnings into Universal Savings Accounts (USAs). The tax treatment of these accounts would be comparable to Roth IRAs. USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business. Gains from investments in USAs would be non-taxable and could be withdrawn at any
time for any purpose. This would allow the vast majority of American families to save and invest without facing a punitive double layer of taxation.

But let’s think about this. Over the past few decades, Congress passed a series of bills to help Americans save for old age privately via government-subsidized pensions, 401(k)-type plans, and individual retirement accounts—of which Roth IRAs are one type. These tax breaks and program expansions have all been bipartisan, and all have passed with flying colors, because they sound pretty good—much like these universal savings accounts—until you examine them more closely.

And then you have to ask: Good for whom?

Taken collectively, the various retirement subsidies are mind-bogglingly expensive. They are, in fact, the federal government’s single largest tax expenditure, projected to deprive the Treasury of almost $2.5 trillion over five years (2023–2027), according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—mostly, as I’ve written, to the wildly disproportionate benefit of our most affluent.

In the most extreme case reported thus far (by ProPublica), the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and political puppet-master Peter Thiel used a $1,700 contribution to his Roth IRA—Roths are intended for middle-class savers—decades ago to purchase 1.7 million “founder’s shares” of PayPal at one-tenth of a cent each. Because of that, by 2002, the year eBay purchased PayPal, ProPublica reported, the balance in Thiel’s Roth was up to $28.5 million, with all of those gains nontaxable. He then repeated this cycle with other fledgling companies, culminating in a Roth IRA containing north of $5 billion in assets.

Thiel was an outlier, but ProPublica identified others with IRAs worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, in 2021, at the request of Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the JCT counted more than 28,000 taxpayers with traditional or Roth IRAs with balances exceeding $5 million—497 of the accounts contained $25 million or more.

What does this have to do with Project 2025? Well, USAs would be Roths on steroids. The $15,000 annual contribution limit is more than twice what people under 50 are allowed to contribute to a Roth. And even the highest earners could contribute to a USA—with Roths, you can only make the full contribution if your income is $146,000 or less. The fact that one needn’t wait until retirement to withdraw funds make USAs all the more compelling.

Heck, if you can afford to put $15,000 a year into an investment fund and let it take a tax-free ride—which the majority of Americans cannot—there would be no reason not to. “High bracket taxpayers would get the biggest tax benefits and could find the disposable savings to participate most easily,” says Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center who has written about the retirement system’s income and race disparities.

Roth IRAs cost taxpayers relatively little, mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and cost the government a pretty penny.

But the real poison pill is this line: USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business.

That sounds an awful lot like what Thiel did. Or, for example, a private equity fund manager could put his “carried interest” in a USA at the outset of a project. A CEO could contribute tens of thousands of shares of cheaply acquired stock options before the company goes public. A garage inventor—like Bill Gates once was—could value his company initially at $15,000 and put all of the stock into his USA. It’s not worth much now, but wait 10 years—Jackpot!

“Their tax avoidance potential would be infinitely greater. They would have the potential to exempt multibillion-dollar gains, even trillion-dollar gains, from taxation,” tax attorney Bob Lord and Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, wrote in a Fortune commentary.

“Allowing taxpayers to invest ‘as they see fit,’ could fuel stuffing…when an individual uses a tax-free account to acquire non-publicly traded assets at prices below fair market value,” Rosenthal told me in an email. (He and New York University law professor Daniel Hemel have written to the Senate Finance Committee, urging lawmakers to crack down on the practice.)

Whether Thiel’s Roth magic trick violates current IRS rules on “prohibited transactions” is a private matter for him and agency lawyers to hash out—but legal minds who have thought it through see some potential red flags. What’s more, the IRS has issued guidance that deems similar-sounding strategies “abusive” and says it views them as “tax avoidance transactions.”

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris regularly asks Americans to imagine Donald Trump without guardrails. Well, imagine Roths without guardrails—larger contributions, no income cap, and no rules about how the funds can be invested. Roth IRAs in particular cost US taxpayers relatively little—about $14 billion a year—mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and in doing so, cost the government a pretty penny.

But this isn’t just about tax revenues. The bigger problem is how wildly inequitable America’s wealth and income distributions have become over the past four decades, a shift that started with the wealth-friendly tax cuts of the Reagan era. Just this week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the average 2021 household income for the top-earning 1 percent of taxpayers was more than $3.1 million—42 times the average for the bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis of the data by Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting on the data in 1979. Back then, the income disparity was 12 to 1.

America has ceased to be recognizable as a land of opportunity—or rather, one must now ask, a land of opportunity for whom?

USAs would be worth considering if Congress limited them to people with few assets who earn less than $100,000, for example, and imposed strict rules to prevent wealthy investors from gaming them for tax avoidance. As proposed by that nonprofit Trump knows nothing about, they would make our class divisions even worse. And that would truly be unaffordable.

The most striking thing about Lauren Chen, in hindsight, is how she managed to be everywhere. Until earlier this month, when the Department of Justice alleged that Chen, a Canadian influencer and self-described “Christian nationalist” with ties to the far right, had been secretly funded by Russia, she wasn’t much of a mainstream figure. But, through a remarkable number of platforms, podcasts, spinoffs, guest appearances, and side hustles, she was undoubtably prolific in conservative spaces.

Chen, now 30 years old, began her public career around 2016 and had since managed to build remarkably diverse ties across the right-wing spectrum, courting conservative media, white nationalists like Richard Spencer, likeminded podcasters, “paleo conservatives,” comedians turned aggrieved libertarians, and many others. She even dipped her toe into lifestyle influencing, peddling both ivermectin and a chintzy soap line she co-owned with her mother. She appeared as a commentator on The Blaze’s TV channel, as a “contributor” for conservative activist group Turning Point USA, and made appearances on Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and in videos from The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, and PragerU. With a young daughter and a home in Nashville that she shared with husband Liam Donovan, who served as president of their video-making company, Tenet Media, it appeared to be paying off. 

Chen’s career raises questions about mercenary personalities willing to amplify any message. 

All of that came to an abrupt end earlier this month, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that Tenet was secretly funded by RT, the Russian state media company that functions as a Kremlin propaganda arm. The department said Chen had received money from RT’s parent company since 2021, billing them for videos that she posted without any kind of disclosure of that financial relationship on her personal YouTube channel. (Chen has not been personally indicted or accused of criminal wrongdoing; the filing only charges Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, two RT employees, for their alleged role in the scheme.) A “reporter” for Tenet announced the following day that the company was shutting down.

The well-known conservative and far-right commentators who worked for Tenet—including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern—have all described themselves as unwitting victims in a scheme the DOJ alleges was meant to promote pro-Putin talking points and deepen partisan divisions within American society. But the indictment explains that at least one of them had suspicions. When one (who appears to be Rubin or Pool) began asking questions about the supposed French funder of the company, a French banker and philanthropist named “Eduard Grigoriann,” Chen sent that commentator a fake resume, which the indictment alleges was provided to her “by another fictional persona.” The resume claimed that Grigoriann had “held various positions in Brussels and France at a multinational bank,” and featured a stock photo of a model peering out a private jet’s window. That, apparently, was enough to quell concerns.

But while Chen and Donovan allegedly worked hard to conceal the source of the funding for Tenet from the commentators they were paying, they also continued building her brand outside of the company. She appeared at a Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA earlier this year, on a borderline-ludicrous number of podcasts, and made a constant string of videos on YouTube and elsewhere, mocking feminism, gender non-conforming people, migrants and anyone who might need welfare—standard conservative targets. In the course of doing so, she barely mentioned Tenet at all, focusing much more on her roles at The Blaze and Turning Point USA. 

But Chen’s motivations for allegedly partnering with Russia, if they go beyond simply making a buck, are still hazy. The indictment depicts her and Donovan as mainly preoccupied with money—how quickly “the Russians,” as they called their funders, would pay their invoices. Chen’s career seems to show someone of ideological flexibility, willing to promote a range of ideas across the conservative spectrum—if it comes with time in the spotlight: anti-feminism, fearmongering about migrants, barely-concealed racism. If the allegations are proven true, Chen’s career could be read as a cautionary tale not just about the dangers of foreign influence peddling, but about the kinds of mercenary domestic personalities who—out of self-interest, a lack of curiosity about how their actions might affect the world, or simple greed—are all too willing to help amplify any message. 

Chen was born Lauren Yu Sum Tam in Hong Kong in 1994, but was raised in Canada and came to the US for college, eventually graduating from Brigham Young University. (Unlike most of BYU, Chen is not Mormon and said in 2018 that she “wouldn’t recommend” the school to other Christians.) Beginning in 2016, Chen (a stage name she adopted at the start of her career) began making YouTube videos, calling herself Roaming Millennial. It was a time, as NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny points out, that YouTube was incentivizing engagement above all else: “Political and algorithmic incentives amplified the most extreme and entertaining voices and reactionary takes, making stars of creators on the ideological fringe.” 

In her videos, Chen was all too willing to platform people even more radical than herself, earning her first taste of true notoriety in May 2017 with a jaunty three-part interview featuring white supremacist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer. She seemed thrilled when the series earned a response video from YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who makes intelligent cultural commentary under the name ContraPoints; Chen joked on Twitter that she was releasing the next installment of the series early, just for Wynn. 

“No one (Richard Spencer included) is advocating people be killed,” she told one person on Twitter who objected to the series. “Calm down.” (Spencer would participate in the violent Unite the Right rally three months later, in which counter-protestor Heather Heyer was murdered by white nationalist James Alex Fields.) 

Chen hawked ivermectin, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” 

A quest for attention, whether positive or negative, seemed to drive many of Chen’s next moves, as did branding herself as a young woman in opposition to mainstream feminism. She began writing for the anti-feminist women’s site Evie Magazine in late 2018, contributing pieces deriding hookup culture, careerism in women, and, in early 2020, a column that argued it wasn’t racist to call Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and derided Chinese state media’s “propaganda” covering the disease. Later in the pandemic, Chen hawked ivermectin as a cure for Covid, entering into a partnership with an anti-vaccine, Florida-based company called The Wellness Company, whose “medical board” includes Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist famous for promoting bad information about Covid. Chen’s page on the retailer’s site is still live, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” (TWC did not respond to a request for comment about whether their partnership with Chen is ongoing.)

As the indictment lays out and her internet footprint makes clear, Chen worked directly for RT prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By 2021, Chen was writing op-eds for RT serving the same fare she produced everywhere else, although with more overt pro-Russian messaging. In February 2022, for instance, argued that Americans who opposed “mounting calls for war”—she named Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and Tucker Carlson—“can expect to be smeared as unpatriotic.” 

While that was the last of dozens of pieces she wrote for RT, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chen tweeted and posted to Telegram in opposition to US funding for the Ukrainian military. The Canadian citizen positioned her stance as an America-first approach, writing in February, “Neither Ukraine nor Israel should be allowed to loot the coffers of the American taxpayers. Especially when America’s borders are in such neglected disarray.” 

Donovan kept far less of a public presence than his wife. When Donovan did tweet about foreign policy, he presented himself as simply too naive to have an opinion about Russia. “I approach Russia (and some other topics) with complete agnosticism,” he posted in June 2023. “It would take far too much effort to gain reliable knowledge about something I can have very little to no impact on. I just hope for the best and leave it at that.”    

But according to the indictment, about two years before that tweet, Donovan and Chen had exchanged messages on Discord in May 2021 discussing payments from “the Russians” for her RT op-eds. “Also, the Russians paid,” she wrote. “So we’re good to bill them for the second month I guess.”

That money was only a prelude to the sums that the indictment pictured at play since August 2023, when Chen and Donovan began sending bimonthly invoices to a UK shell entity that would eventually total more than $10 million, including both payments to commenters and Chen and Donovan’s own “fees and commissions.” 

RT did not respond to a request for comment; the closest they’ve come to issuing a statement is an unbylined, English-language story about the indictments, which states that “Producing videos that highlight social and political divisions in the US is not a crime.”

Chen’s overt Putin boosterism attracted little attention or outrage among her conservative peers, where it stood out little from what others were also saying. In November 2023, more than a year into the invasion, she called him “pretty reasonable in regard to Ukraine.” In praising a rambling interview he did with Carlson, she called his performance “a two-hour dissertation on Russia’s history and its place on the world stage,” comparing him to President Biden, who she said, “could not finish a cohesive sentence in a five-minute carefully choreographed setting.” On Ukraine, her politics resemble not only those of people like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s made attacks on Ukrainian military aid a cornerstone of her public policy, but those of JD Vance, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee.

Nor did anyone who appeared with Chen at public events seem to notice anything amiss. “I knew nothing about Lauren’s business endeavors,” says Erin Elmore, a Trump surrogate who featured alongside Chen earlier this year at the Turning Point women’s summit. “We only spoke briefly and this topic never came up. She was always cordial and we kept things very surface.” 

The end, when it did come, was exceedingly swift. After the DOJ indictment was unsealed, Pool, Rubin and Southern all quickly declared themselves to have been unaware of the ultimate source of their paychecks, with Pool announcing he would be “offering [his] assistance” to the FBI. Chen’s YouTube account and TikTok were both deleted within a week, while her Instagram, Twitter, Rumble, GETTR and Telegram accounts remain online, but silent. 

The reaction from the conservative galaxy, whose every planet Chen worked so hard to visit, has been muted. One of the only visible defenses came from far-right personality Candace Owens, who appeared many times with Chen on one another’s podcasts, and whose work was reshared multiple times by Tenet Media.

“Just pathetic to see what the conservative movement has become,” Owens tweeted. “Lauren Chen was always nice to everybody. At the first hint of trouble, everyone is throwing her under the bus and believing the DOJ.”

Through a spokesperson, Owens elaborated to Mother Jones: “In the limited capacity that I knew Lauren Chen, she was always very kind to me. While I have nothing to do with the case at hand, as someone who believes in due process, I will never enjoin myself to the media culture of ‘guilty until proven innocent.'”

Tayler Hansen, a self-described “field reporter” for Tenet, said on Twitter that the allegations against the company came as “a complete shock,” and that he has always been free to report whatever he wanted. Before his association with Tenet, Hansen was best known for filming drag performances and posting them online as part of a purported crusade for child safety, telling the Texas Tribune, “Drag queens do not belong around children. Neither does gender ideology.” Hansen has claimed that YouTube shut down his personal channel following the indictment; the Daily Dot reported that YouTube says Hansen shut it down himself, a version of events he denied. 

Hansen told Mother Jones in an email that he had not been contacted by the FBI, and that he learned that Tenet was no more in a message from Tenet’s ownership: “Hosts received a message from the owner explaining that due to the ongoing investigation we would not be able to continue with TENET Media.” He didn’t respond to questions about how he’d met Chen, and why the arrangement with Tenet didn’t strike him as suspicious. 

In contrast to Chen’s well-lit trail of podcasts and public appearances, the paths of the two RT employees accused of secretly funding Tenet are murky. One of the few English-language traces of either is a Twitter profile appearing to belong to Astafaneya, which she used to ask people posting on the platform about hot-button issues to come on TV. (When pursing such guests—someone who blamed a loved one’s Covid death on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, say, or Afghans seeking to flee after the US withdrawal—she identified herself only as a “producer,” not identifying the outlet.)

While Chen has nuked any chances of a career with a more credible outlet, the people paying her did a far better job covering their trail. And it seems exceedingly likely that, should someone in the Russian government want to further shape US conservative opinion to their benefit, there are more influencers who, for the right price, will be willing to act as eager salespeople for whatever they’re trying to peddle.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism— but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed American Reformer was funded in part by venture capitalist Chris Buskirk. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”