The Christian Group Quietly Installing Poll Workers in Swing States

A group of Christian nationalists will be working the polls across the country this election season.

A group called “Lion of Judah,” led by self-described Republican opposition researcher Joshua Standifer, is traveling the nation to recruit Christians to “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers.” The group plans to stop what they believe will be widespread election fraud in November as “the first step on the path to victory this Fall.”

The Guardian obtained the Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, featuring a series called “Fight the Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in 4 Easy Steps!” In it, the group asks poll workers to report “suspicious activities or irregularities” to the Lion of Judah’s “fraud hotline” first, and then tell their local authorities.

To spread the gospel during his “Courage Tour,” Standifer has traveled with Christian nationalist preachers and pro-Trump figures to sow fear about election fraud in swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan.

The group’s work has gone largely unnoticed, even as local officials in those states make it easier to challenge election results. Last month, for example, the Georgia state election board made it simpler for county election officials to delay or refuse to certify election results.

“Just imagine: it’s election night. Chaos is happening. The polls are closing—they go and volunteers are getting kicked out,” said Standifer on one of his Courage Tour stops. “But what if we had Christians across America, in swing states like Wisconsin, that were actually the ones counting the votes?”

In the same speech in Wisconsin, Standifer described the strategy to train Christians as election workers as “a Trojan horse.”

“They don’t see it coming.”

For the past week, Donald Trump has been repeating the same story about a Venezuelan gang supposedly taking over a residential building in Colorado—but everyone, from the residents to the police, says that the story is complete fiction.

Residents of The Edge at Lowry Apartments in Aurora, Colorado, held a press conference Tuesday to hit back at right-wing claims that their building has been taken over by a violent Venezuelan gang.

Last week, a video that appeared to show armed gang members speaking Spanish and storming into an apartment complex began circulating online. The video was boosted by City Council member Danielle Jurinksy and Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, who took to Facebook to call for an emergency court order to clear the building. The story was promptly picked up by conservative media outlets and then dutifully regurgitated by Trump as an anti-immigrant talking point.

During his chaotic messaging event in Potterville, Michigan, on Friday, the Republican presidential nominee referred to the “skit” video as evidence of a worsening immigration crisis, which he argued has led to an increase in violent crime. In reality, violent crime is at its lowest levels in five years.

“You haven’t seen even the beginning of this migrant crime,” Trump said, according to KFOX14. “And you know, they have a hat that said, ‘Trump was right about everything,’ and I have to say, I pretty much was right about everything.”

The Aurora Police Department posted a video statement Saturday that debunked the outrageous story.

“We’ve been talking to the residents here, and learning from them to find out what exactly’s going on, and there’s definitely a different picture,” said Interim Chief Heather Morris.

“I’m not saying that there’s not gang members that don’t live in this community, but what we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex.”

Morris said she’d also been told that residents were not paying rent to gang members, as some on the right had speculated.

On Monday, Coffman, following up on his blatant fearmongering, also visited The Edge and said that although conditions were bad, residents weren’t afraid of gang violence. Instead, they just wanted the building to be maintained. He baselessly suggested that the building was run down because management had been “chased” off the premises.

During their press conference to set the record straight, Edge residents disputed the right-wing claims that their building had been taken over by a Venezuelan gang. Residents said that they were living in uninhabitable conditions as a result of neglect from CBZ Management, which was also responsible for another Aurora building where there was a mass eviction last month, according to Denver7.

Oscar Rojas, a tenant who is from Venezuela, told Denver7 that the right-wing firestorm made him feel targeted. “I’m scared to go out. They’re accusing all of us at the complex of being in gangs, and this is completely false,” Rojas told the outlet. “It’s completely false. There are good people here, families. There’s always going to be crime everywhere.”

Even though the story has proved to be false, there is little indication that Trump will stop telling it. Even after the police came out with their statement, Trump referred to “tough young thugs” who were “taking over buildings” with their “big rifles” during a conspiracy theory–laden podcast interview on Tuesday.

“We’re not going to let this happen,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let them destroy our country.” He then seamlessly transitioned into his stand-by line about immigrants coming from foreign prisons, jails, and mental institutions.

The same day, Trump started pushing another story that turned out to be fake. On Monday, a 911 call alleged that 32 Venezuelan gang members had overrun an apartment building in Chicago, bringing motorcycles into the courtyard, filling the stairwells, and flashing firearms at residents. Several far-right social media accounts boosted the outlandish call, including Libs of TikTok and Elon Musk.

When officers arrived at the building, they found no migrants with guns or motorcycles, a source told The Chicago Tribune’s Armando L. Sanchez. Residents in the area and migrants living at the building confirmed to the Tribune that the claims in the call were completely unfounded.

Trump’s wild, ultimately baseless stories about migrant crime are likely to continue, and reproduce into more and more unsupported claims to fit the former president’s anti-immigrant narrative.

Representative Lauren Boebert did not have a good debate with her Democratic opponent, Trisha Calvarese—and Calvarese has video to prove it.

Calvarese posted a statement to X (formerly Twitter) after the debate, which was held Tuesday afternoon in Littleton, Colorado, calling out Boebert for “disrespecting veterans,” opposing lower prices for prescription drugs, and skipping critical votes. She replied to the post with videos from the debate that quickly went viral and caused Boebert’s name to trend on the social media site.

At the debate, Calvarese mentioned her father who had cancer, and said that lifesaving medication covered by his union benefits allowed her to spend four extra years with him. Calvarese pointed out that Boebert voted against allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs, putting high-cost medicines out of reach for millions.

Calvarese also attacked Boebert for voting against the PACT Act, which expanded benefits and health services to military veterans who were exposed to toxic substances, particularly from burn pits, during their service.

“You voted against care for veterans exposed to cancer-causing toxins and burn pits during war,” Calvarese said. “So we definitely have different priorities because I believe we should take care of our veterans, always.”

Boebert tried to justify her vote by saying that she couldn’t suggest amendments for the bill and was unwilling to spend “a billion dollars forever because we couldn’t get a couple of pieces of language right in the legislation.”

Calvarese fired back by calling out Boebert’s votes to cut funding to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which Boebert weakly tried to claim were due to the VA’s unresponsiveness.

Tuesday’s debate was the only one scheduled between the two candidates, and it was held at a country club with an entry fee and not televised. Calverese told reporters after the debate concluded that there should be two more televised debates, to which Boebert responded that Calvarese “had her debate today.”

“I debate Democrats on a daily basis,” Boebert said. “It is my job.”

Boebert’s reelection campaign hasn’t gone smoothly, as she switched districts to have an easier time staying in office and didn’t receive an initial warm welcome from the new constituents she was running to represent. She also had a rough time at earlier debates during the Republican primary, and has had struggled to defend her poor record in Congress. Her son’s criminal trial has undercut her attacks against Hunter Biden, and her efforts in Congress to seem like an effective legislator have backfired. And of course, there was her lewd behavior at a Denver theater’s showing of Beetlejuice that was caught on camera.

It seems that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will do anything to prevent Texas from flipping for Kamala Harris—including preventing eligible citizens from registering to vote.*

Paxton threatened legal action against Bexar and Harris counties if they proceed with sending out mail-in voter registration forms, which the counties have proposed doing via third-party vendors. Paxton argues that it could encourage noncitizens to register to vote.

Of course, Bexar and Harris aren’t like other counties in Texas. They’re urban and populous, and have a majority or even plurality of Latino voters, according to The Hill. And in 2020 both counties overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden.

Paxton’s office announced Wednesday that he’d filed a lawsuit against Bexar County Commissioner Court after it approved a proposal that funds the production and mailing of voter registration forms “to unregistered voters in location(s) based on targeting agreed to by the county,” according to KENS-5. Paxton claimed the program was unlawful because it “could induce ineligible people—such as felons and noncitizens—to commit a crime by attempting to register to vote.”

Earlier this week, Paxton had sent a letter to Bexar and Harris county commissioners warning them off of proceeding with any such programs. The threats were nearly identical.

“At best, this proposal is ill-advised because it potentially confuses residents of Harris County about whether they are eligible to vote. At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” Paxton wrote in the letter to Harris County. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”

Specifically, Paxton argued that the state had no right to distribute registration forms unsolicited, and pointed to a similar lawsuit he’d filed against Harris County in 2020 when it had tried to push a similar proposal. Paxton previously gushed to Steve Bannon that had he not blocked more than two million ballot applications from being distributed by the state, Texas might have become a battleground state and Donald Trump “would’ve lost the election.”

In reality, there is little to no evidence to demonstrate that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the United States. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Still, it’s a nonissue that Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, and of course Trump, have continued to tout baselessly throughout the election cycle.

Paxton’s offensive goes even further, to conflate unregistered, but eligible, voters with noncitizens.

His newest action is part of his larger campaign to actively disenfranchise Latino voters in Texas who might support Harris.

Last month, Paxton’s office announced raids and undercover actions against organizations in Texas it accuses of illegally registering noncitizens to vote. In practice, though, the raids have taken place against members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., as well as several prominent Democrats in south Texas.

The raids took place shortly after LULAC had endorsed Harris, the organization’s first presidential endorsement in its nearly 100-year history.

* This story originally misstated Paxton’s office.

Despite efforts to bury the story, the Trump campaign’s New Hampshire scandal is still developing.

A top volunteer with the Trump campaign issued an internal message Sunday notifying fellow volunteers that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state,” adding that the campaign has no New Hampshire surrogates and no advertising expenditures there. He also wrote that internal polling indicated Donald Trump could lose New Hampshire by a wider margin than he did to Joe Biden in 2020.

That volunteer, Tom Mountain, is reportedly no longer with the campaign, and Trump himself has made it apparent that he intends to keep courting New Hampshire voters through November. But Mountain’s message was, apparently, not a one-off. Instead, other New Hampshire Republicans have also signaled that the race is a done deal, according to CNN correspondent Steve Contorno.

Speaking with Erin Burnett on CNN’s OutFront Tuesday night, Contorno argued that the tides have turned for the Trump campaign among New Hampshire voters.

“When I talked to other Republican operatives in the state, they said that this volunteer is painting a pretty clear picture that’s really illustrative of what’s happening there,” Contorno said.

One such Republican was GOP strategist Mike Dennehy, who said that Trump could lose New Hampshire by six to eight percentage points.

“Now Mike and others have said that there’s still two months left in this race that has already had a lot of twists and turns,” Contorno continued. “So the momentum could shift again. But, Erin, he’s running out of time. And I will point out that he has no advertising reserved for the fall.”

A right-wing religious rights group is fighting Supreme Court reform, and Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is secretly one of its top supporters.

The First Liberty Institute has a budget of $25 million per year and calls itself “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

On July 31, the head of the institute, litigator Kelly Shackleford, held a private call with his organization’s top donors and read out an appreciative email from Thomas, according to ProPublica, which obtained a recording.

“YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH,” Thomas’s email read in all caps, Shackleford said. Shackleford added that Thomas also recently met with a First Liberty Institute staffer.

“Great to meet through the meetings today,” Thomas wrote, according to Shackleford. “I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court.”

“Many were so depressed at the lack of response by R’s and conservatives” to recent court-reform proposals, Thomas’s email reportedly continued.

Shackleford told the donors that he saw the email as proof that judges who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight” appreciated the organization’s efforts.

“It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” Shackleford said.

Later, Shackleford attacked liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who supports enforcing ethics reforms on the court, as “treasonous” and “disloyal” and said that an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.”

The conference call came days after President Biden announced his support for Supreme Court reforms, including term limits for the court’s justices and a binding code of conduct. Shackleford attacked these and other proposals in the call, calling them “a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court” led by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases.”

Shackleford and Thomas seem to ignore the fact that her husband’s ethical lapses spurred the calls for judicial reform, particularly the many gifts the justice received from conservative megadonor Harlan Crow that he failed to disclose, including luxury vacations and the renovation of the home where Thomas’s mother lives. 

Ginni Thomas, for her part, is a longtime conservative activist who played a suspicious role in the January 6 Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. This latest revelation seems to indicate that she and her husband have no remorse for their ethically questionable behavior.

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants Donald Trump to stop hurling lame insults at Kamala Harris. 

In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, the South Carolina Republican urged the former president to see the error of his shallow ad hominem attacks.

“Every day that the candidates trade insults is a good day for her because it’s one less day that she has to defend the failures of the Biden-Harris administration,” Graham wrote. “Far more worthwhile for Mr. Trump is his record of success. The road to the White House runs through a vigorous policy debate, not an exchange of barbs.” 

He then laid out the arguments he would use in a debate, comparing Trump’s policies favorably to Harris’s. 

Graham spent a significant portion of his word count bashing Harris, using a pared-down version of the Trump campaign’s talking points, for instance blaming her administration’s federal spending for booming inflation, although it’s not entirely clear that those two things are connected. 

Graham called immigration the “cornerstone of her portfolio” and criticized Harris for her too-little-too-late support for an aggressive bipartisan border bill—ignoring the fact that Trump had ordered congressional Republicans to kill the measure.

Graham also criticized Harris for doubling back on hydrofracking, and being the “last person in the room” with President Joe Biden before he put the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan into action. 

Trump also has been attacking Harris for these issues, but it’s been buried in the torrent of other meaningless comments about bacon and windmills, false claims that Harris had been the leader of the “defund the police” movement, and gratuitous self-praise for being a “great speaker.” And all of that was just in one day. 

While Trump’s avid fans may enjoy his ridiculous comments, Graham seemed not so impressed. 

To be sure, he also spent inches praising Trump, painting him as the strongman on the international stage, though recent descriptions show he was more like a kid whose lunch got taken for nothing. But laced into Graham’s argument was a strong criticism that Trump needs to get serious if he actually wants to win a debate—not just triumph by default.  

Will Trump take any of this to heart? Outlook not so good. Earlier this month, Graham remarked that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Trump responded with a harsh dismissal of his longtime ally, saying, “Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, OK?”

Perhaps Lindsey is hopeful that while Trump doesn’t listen to him, maybe he does read the Times? Not likely? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. 

“Average Joe” J.D. Vance has “no doubt” that he and Donald Trump are going to be elected in November—even as polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris’s “politics of joy” are overtaking them on the national stage.

Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, the Republican vice presidential pick—who might be best known for his uncanny ability to turn scripted, funny bits into uncomfortable moments that sit and stay with people—brushed off his dismal favorability ratings.

“How do you go to the undecideds at this point, this shrinking pool of people, and convince them that not only are you serious—and you’re seriously smart, but you’re a regular person, I’ve known you for a long time—you’re really fun, you’re really funny, versus the giggle and vibe show that seems to work for a lot of women voters out there?” prompted Ingraham, comparing the Trump-Vance strategy to the Harris-Walz ticket.

“You know, Laura, my approach to this is just to get out there and meet as many people as possible, and I know this is Donald Trump’s approach too,” Vance said. “That’s what I’m going to keep on doing, Laura. I don’t put much stock in the polls, even the polls that show us ahead, and there are a lot of those these days.”

Except, polls seem to consistently show that Harris has either pulled even with Trump or edged ahead.

And actually going out and meeting the American people hasn’t gone so well for Vance. Last week, the Ohio senator had a disastrous P.R. stunt at a donut shop in Valdosta, Georgia, where he couldn’t accomplish one normal human interaction with any of the bakery’s employees. On Thursday, Vance was intermittently booed by a large crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters conference.

“What I put stock in is the wisdom of the American people, and the fact that if we go out there, make our case, don’t hide behind a teleprompter but get out there and meet people, the American people are going to elect me and Donald Trump,” Vance continued. “I have no doubt about that.”

The son of the late Republican Senator John McCain has criticized Donald Trump for his campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, and announced he plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November.

1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, a 17-year military veteran, told CNN that he changed his voter registration weeks ago from independent to Democrat, and called Trump’s cemetery visit a “violation.”

“It just blows me away,” McCain said. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” whether they wanted to be in Trump’s campaign video or photographs.

“I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently—that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country,” McCain added.

McCain also told CNN that he “would get involved in any way I could” to help Harris’s campaign, making him the first McCain family member to leave the Republican Party, even as his mother, Cindy, and sister Meghan have criticized Trump. (In response to her brother’s interview, Meghan McCain said she isn’t voting for Harris or Trump.)

The Republican presidential nominee and convicted felon infamously said that John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War, and he remained at odds with the Arizona senator until McCain’s death in 2018.

The younger McCain told CNN that Trump’s seeming disrespect for veterans stems from the former president’s lack of military service.

“Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves. They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up, and they chose to serve their country,” McCain said. “And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.”

Harris has secured endorsements from several Republicans opposed to Trump, including elected officials in Arizona, as well as 200 former staffers who worked for President George W. Bush, the late Senator McCain, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, Trump’s high-profile endorsements from outside of his party seem limited to people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard.

Last month’s tiff between Donald Trump and Joe Rogan over the podcaster’s mock endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was, apparently, no biggie.

In an interview with Lex Fridman released Tuesday, Trump attempted to brush off the “bit of tension.”

“I don’t think there was any tension,” Trump said. “I’ve always liked him, but I don’t know him. I only see him when I walk into the arena with Dana and I shake his hand. I see him there and I think he’s good at what he does, but I don’t know about doing his podcast. I guess I’d do it but I haven’t been asked and I’m not asking them. I’m not asking anybody.”

Still, Trump insisted that he “likes” Rogan, even if he’s “sort of liberal.” His endorsement of Kennedy—whom Trump described as a “different kind of guy”—supposedly didn’t bother him.

That’s a starkly different tone from the one the Republican presidential nominee took in the immediate aftermath of Rogan’s Uno-reverse endorsement of Kennedy, in which he posted to Truth Social that he was looking forward to Rogan getting “booed” at a UFC tournament.

Attacking Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the country with independents and people on the right, was an eyebrow-raising decision for the waning candidate. Trump has rushed to pander to younger audiences in recent weeks in an effort to recoup the younger vote, hitting a youth podcast circuit that included speaking with comedian Theo Von and livestreamer Adin Ross.