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To understand the contemporary meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag, it’s necessary to enter a world of Christian extremism animated by modern-day apostles, prophets, and apocalyptic visions of Christian triumph that was central to the chaos and violence of Jan. 6. Earlier this year we released an audio-documentary series, rooted in deep historical research and ethnographic interviews, on this sector of Christianity, which is known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The flag hanging outside Johnson’s office is a key part of its symbology.

It’s not just that the congressional plan replaces a politically balanced map (7-7 in the current Congress) with one that will produce a Republican advantage of at least 10-4 in 2024, and likely 11-3 within a few years. It’s also the ruthless efficiency with which the plan achieves this feat.

The map packs Democratic and Black voters heavily into three urban districts in the Research Triangle and Charlotte, while spreading Republican voters evenly across the rest of the state. In redistricting terms, it maximizes wasted Democratic votes and minimizes wasted GOP votes.

In less than a week, the New York Times has posted more than 50 articles, newsletters, podcasts, and whatever else it is the Times publishes these days mentioning a presidential horse-race poll conducted a year before Election Day. Fifty! Individually, none is more absurd than that train funding article — but the total number might be.

And Taylor Taranto? The New York Times still hasn’t told readers Donald Trump inspired his armed visit to Barack Obama’s house. Hasn’t mentioned Taranto a single time, in fact, since its initial report on Taranto’s arrest in June. Not once.

The press must get across to American citizens the crucial importance of this election and the dangers of a Trump win. They don’t need to surrender their journalistic independence to do so or be “in the tank” for Biden or anyone else.

It’s now clearer than ever that Trump, if elected, will use the federal government to go after his political rivals and critics, even deploying the military toward that end. His allies are hatching plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one.

A new study published on Thursday and led by my colleague Chelsey Davidson found that since the 2012–13 term, more than 80 percent of election-related cases on the Supreme Court’s hand-picked docket could move the law only in a direction that degraded fair elections.

In that time, the Supreme Court accepted 32 cases involving core democracy issues such as redistricting, ballot access, campaign finance, and VRA enforcement. In 26 of them, the lower court had issued a pro-democracy ruling. This means that the best-case scenario at the court was affirmation of the status quo, while a reversal of the lower court would restrict voter participation. By contrast, the justices picked just six cases where they might reverse anti-democracy rulings.

Voters see that the MAGA assault on democracy is manifesting itself personally in their daily lives. The right has shown that they are serious about using the power of the state to take away people's rights and intrude on people's personal lives. It's no longer an abstraction, it's become an immediate threat.

Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives expect to release a stopgap spending measure on Saturday, aimed at averting a partial government shutdown by keeping federal agencies open when current funding expires next Friday.

Experts say a campaign of legal and political pressure from the right has cast efforts to combat rumors and conspiracy theories as censorship. And as a result, they say, the tools and partnerships that tried to flag and tamp down on falsehoods in recent election cycles have been scaled back or dismantled. That's even as threats loom from foreign governments and artificial intelligence, and as former President Donald Trump, who still falsely claims to have won the 2020 contest, is likely to use the same tactics again as he pursues the White House in 2024.

Despite Comer's criticism of Biden for loaning his brother $200,000 in 2018, The Daily Beast has since claimed the Republican committee chair engaged in a similar practice, swapping land with his brother related to their family farming business with one loan for $200,000 involving a shell company.

Internet service providers and their lobby groups are fighting a US plan to prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. In particular, ISPs want the Federal Communications Commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory.

In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last month released her draft plan to comply with the congressional mandate and scheduled a November 15 commission vote on adopting final rules.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is at least a modest victory for special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which had vigorously rejected efforts to push off the trial beyond its scheduled start date of May 20, 2024. Trump’s lawyers had argued that they needed more time to review the large trove of evidence with which they’d been presented and cited scheduling challenges resulting from the other legal cases against Trump, including three additional criminal prosecutions for which he is awaiting trial.

Obviously, Trump’s premise that he is being prosecuted by Joe Biden because he is running against him is false. Trump is being prosecuted because he is a career criminal, and there is no evidence any of the prosecutors taking him to court have communicated with President Biden.

But beneath this first lie, there’s a second lie: Trump only intends to prosecute his political enemies because they did it to him first. In fact, Trump has been planning to lock up his political opponents since he first ran for office, well before any of the current prosecutions began.