The “fire in a crowded theater” case involved neither a fire, nor a theater, nor a crowd, and resulted in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever reached. But the phrase fire in a crowded theater was repeated by both vice-presidential candidates during their debate on Tuesday, demonstrating an ongoing misunderstanding of free speech.Toward the end of the debate, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, pointed out that former President Donald Trump tried to overturn—first by fraud and later by force—the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. J. D. Vance, the Republican who was selected to replace former Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket precisely because he is the sort of quisling lapdog who would participate in such a scheme, retorted that Walz supported “Facebook censorship.”“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said.“Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks,” Vance replied.[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]The equivalence that Vance draws between social-media moderation and Trump trying to stage a coup is ridiculous, but revealing in terms of how conservatives have come to conceive of free speech: They believe that right-wing speech should be sacrosanct, and liberal speech officially disfavored. Walz is simply wrong about the Supreme Court standard for what kind of speech can be outlawed, but the invocation of that archaic test does illustrate how safety can become an excuse for state censorship. It just so happens that social-media moderation is not state censorship, because social media is not the government.In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of socialist anti-war protesters under the Espionage Act in Schenk v. United States. The accused, Charles Schenk and Elizabeth Baer, had been passing out flyers urging people to resist the draft during World War I. The Court ruled unanimously in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that the convictions were constitutional, with Holmes writing, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.” (The next time someone tries to tell you that “words are violence” is something left-wing college students came up with, remind them that the U.S. Supreme Court said it first.)The cultural context here is as important as the legal one. As the legal scholar Geoffrey Stone writes in Perilous Times, the country was in the throes of the first Red Scare, and the Supreme Court was “firmly in conservative hands. The values and experiences of the justices led most of them to hold anarchists, socialists, and other ‘radical’ dissenters in contempt.” As Stone notes, Schenk and Baer’s pamphlets urged political support for repeal of the draft, not even unlawful obstruction of it. The justices, however, did not consider the political beliefs of those they were judging to have value, and therefore they had no problem seeing people thrown in jail for those beliefs, no matter what the First Amendment said. After all, it was wartime.So there was no fire, no crowd, and no theater. What actually happened was that some people had unpopular political beliefs and the government wanted to throw them in jail, and the Supreme Court said that was fine. That also happens to be the kind of thing that Trump wants to do as president, the kind of thing that the arch-conservative Supreme Court has decided he should have immunity for doing.The Schenk standard, however, was repealed in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, a case involving Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted under a state law that prohibited advocating political change through terrorism. The Supreme Court—then a liberal court, something that had not existed before and has not since—overturned his conviction, ruling that that government can only bar speech advocating “imminent lawless action” that is “likely to incite or produce such action.” Stone writes that the Court was trying to tie its own hands to prevent the government from acting under the spell of “fear and hysteria” that can be brought on by wartime. It’s a much better standard than the kind that gets you imprisoned for handing out pamphlets. (Vance, a Yale Law graduate, is probably aware that Trump’s speech working up a mob that went on to ransack the Capitol and try to hang Pence could meet that much higher standard, known as the “Brandenburg test.”)But the fact that the government can put you in prison points to how matters of free speech are different for social-media companies. Social-media companies can’t put you in prison, because they are not the government. They can ban users for not adhering to their standards, but this in itself is a form of speech: Just as the right-wing website Breitbart does not have to publish my writing, social-media companies do not have to publish the content of users who violate their rules. Social-media moderation is not state censorship, and it should not be treated as such. Conservatives understand this when the moderation decisions land in their favor, which is why the union-busting billionaire Elon Musk’s favoritism toward conservative speech and attempts to silence his critics on the social-media platform X have not drawn the attention of the Republican majority in Congress. Nor should they—he owns the place; he can do what he wants with it. The point is that conservatives fully get the distinction when they want to.[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]Vance’s implicit position is that conservatives have a state-enforced right to the use of private platforms; that the state can and should force private companies to publish speech that those companies disagree with, as long as that speech is right-wing. Such a policy really would be a form of censorship.Immediately after Trump’s disastrous September debate, conservatives, including Trump himself, began calling for ABC News to lose its broadcast license for fact-checking Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These threats of state retaliation against media outlets—or anyone who speaks out against Trump—illustrate that what conservatives mean when they talk about free speech is a legal right to use private platforms as venues for right-wing propaganda, whether or not those platforms wish to be used that way. That is a form of censorship far more authoritarian than private social-media platforms deciding they don’t want to carry rants about COVID shots putting microchips in your blood that can receive signals from alien invaders. As for Walz, he foolishly cited an archaic standard that the Supreme Court has thankfully abandoned, one that in actuality shows how dangerous it can be for the government to pick and choose which speech is acceptable. Walz has previously asserted that “misinformation” and “hate speech” are not protected, a mistaken belief that is unfortunately popular among some on the left. The flawed standard he cited last night explains why such speech is and should be protected—because the window for state power to police what individual people say should be as small as reasonably possible.His opponents Trump and Vance, however, do not think that such an approach is dangerous at all. A government that chooses which speech to punish and which to promote is their ideal situation, provided that they are the ones in charge.

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA show that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”[David Frum: The Vance warning]The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.

About half an hour into last night’s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,” she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn’t go to Asia until months later. “Can you explain that discrepancy?”“Look,” Walz began, “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies ’til the street lights come on.” He went on to explain how, as a teacher, he’d taken young people on educational visits to China. “I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”Kamala Harris chose Walz, most observers have agreed, for his Everyman aesthetic and fluency in retail politics. And so far, the affable former high-school football coach and hype man for Menards has mostly received glowing reviews. He is much more adept than his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance, at engaging with voters as a regular guy.Which is why he should have had a better answer last night. And Walz’s failure to provide a coherent, succinct correction for an entirely predictable inquiry about one of his flubs suggests ill-preparedness for a spotlight that is only going to get brighter—and harsher—in the weeks to come.Vance delivered a slick debate performance, though it would be a mistake to call it a “win” when he engaged in so much sinister revisionist history. In what would turn out to be the most striking moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The senator from Ohio also mischaracterized Trump’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Vance claimed, falsely, that he’s never supported a national abortion ban.Walz, for his part, deployed a few effective jabs. “That’s a damning nonanswer,” he said simply, after Vance’s election-denial tap dancing. Another time, in an exchange about gun-violence prevention and mental-health care, Walz looked right at the camera and said, “Sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns.”But when you’re running a campaign against liars and bloviators, it becomes all the more important not to lie or bloviate. And the Walz fumble on China was sloppy enough—and early enough in the proceedings—to feel significant. After his first answer, CBS’s Brennan gave him another chance to clarify. “All I said on this was, I got there that summer—and misspoke on this,” Walz said, before taking a long pause. “So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”The bungled response made the moment worse than it needed to be. And calling himself a “knucklehead” came off more cringeworthy than charming. But it wasn’t the first time Walz has been ensnared by his own nonanswers. In August, a video surfaced on social media in which Walz referred to weapons “that I carried in war” to explain his support for an assault-weapons ban. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, but was never deployed to a combat zone. Asked about it in a sit-down interview, Walz had an exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash that followed a now-familiar pattern.“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed, actually, in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.“I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about our children being shot in schools and around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am,” Walz said.Bash pressed. “Did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?”“I said we were talking about—in this case, this was after a school shooting—the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,” Walz replied, “and my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.”Some Democrats dismiss these fumbles. “So he had a bad answer to something that happened 35 years ago. Next!” the political strategist James Carville told me. That’s right in the sense that Walz’s remarks seem more slippery than nefarious. He isn’t obfuscating, as Vance is, about the results of the 2020 election.Still, Walz’s sloppiness highlights a bigger problem with media accessibility and versatility for the Harris campaign. Both Democratic principals have been reticent, seemingly reluctant to engage with the press; lately, Walz especially has been tightly bubble-wrapped. Unlike the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Walz does not regularly appear on cable-news programs or spar with reporters at campaign events. He is out of practice, and it shows.This morning, perhaps as an attempt at post-debate cleanup, the Harris campaign announced that Walz is expanding his schedule. The governor will travel to several swing states in the next few weeks, and do a lot more media appearances, including a podcast, a late-night-TV hit, and two national-TV interviews. That will surely help Walz get in some badly needed reps. Perhaps he’s kicking himself that he didn’t before last night.

In the lead-up to last night’s vice-presidential debate between J. D. Vance and Tim Walz, CBS’s decision not to have moderators provide live fact-checking became a minor controversy. One pundit argued that this amounted to giving the truth-challenged Vance “license to lie,” and many of the Democratic faithful voiced similar complaints on social media. Mother Jones went so far as to precheck the debate. The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign declared: “JD Vance is going to lie tonight. A lot. So we are going to give you the facts.” It then fact-checked the event in real time, pointing out Vance’s dodges and deceptions.At one moment early in the debate, the moderators seemed to struggle to suppress their journalistic impulse to correct the record. Contradicting Vance’s talking points about “illegal immigrants” in Ohio, CBS’s Margaret Brennan said, “Just to clarify for our viewers: Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status,” earning an irritated objection from Vance. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he protested.Other than that one “clarification,” the moderators mostly didn’t. But contrary to what liberals might believe, the lack of fact-checking probably didn’t help or hurt Vance (and by extension, Donald Trump). The uncomfortable truth is that if, journalistically, news outlets like CBS have a duty to contest lies, politically, fact-checking is less magic bullet and more magic beans.[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]Since Trump rode down his gaudy tower’s escalator to announce his presidential bid nearly a decade ago, the public has been inundated with a deluge of his lies. And as the media, voters, and Trump’s opponents attempted to figure out how to rein in a politician of unprecedented perfidy, fact-checking and combatting disinformation found new salience in public life. In the intervening years, fact-checking has transformed from a necessary piece of journalistic due diligence into a fetish object for Trump-weary Democrats. Some Democrats came to expect too much from fact-checking, and often seem to accord debunking a kind of political power to beat back Trumpism.The 45th president has been subjected to a sustained fact-checking campaign for the better part of a decade. I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say that no politician in American history has been fact-checked more thoroughly than Donald Trump. And yet, all those years of myth-busting have had next to zero impact on his electoral viability. He managed to attract new voters in the last election. And even as he spouts racist nonsense about immigrants—thoroughly myth-busted by journalists—he is increasing his share of non-college-educated voters of color in this election.My point isn’t that Democrats should give up on fact-checking, but that they need to remember that debunking is not a substitute for politics. At the presidential debate last month, when Trump repeated the conspiracy that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the moderator duly corrected this bit of xenophobic fearmongering. For her part, Harris seemed to revel in Trump’s lies being called out live on air. “Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing, seeming to enjoy the moment.What Harris didn’t do was take the opportunity to articulate anything about her worldview or policy positions on immigration, or point out that Springfield had welcomed immigrants as a way to combat the economic toll of decades of deindustrialization, which was itself the result of conservative trade policies that helped offshore manufacturing. Basking in the glow of the freshly checked fact, she forgot to outline a positive agenda, as though beating Trump were a game of whack-a-mole in which you win by smacking down all the fibs that pop up.Does anyone really believe that the kind of voter who hears Trump blather about cat-barbecuing immigrants—and isn’t immediately disgusted—is likely to be moved by a CNN moderator tsk-tsking him and explaining that, actually, that isn’t true? Is any right-leaning swing voter or nose-holding Republican actually going to rethink their vote when they log on to the CBS website—if they even bother—and discover that Vance lied when he claimed that Harris is not invested in clean air or that she had been appointed “Border Czar”? For that matter, is any Harris-pilled Democrat going to rethink their vote when they find out that Walz lied about being in China during Tiananmen Square?[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]Arguably, CBS should have fact-checked the debate, because it is a news outlet, news outlets provide journalism, and journalists fact-check. But journalists should also be honest about the limits of the practice. Because calling out every falsehood is impossible, journalists are forced to make judgment calls about which lies are significant enough to merit dispelling. Republicans distrust that selection process, rolling their eyes at misinformation-wrangling, which they believe is unfairly directed at their co-partisans, while Democratic dishonesty is given a pass. And all too often, journalists call out brazen lies while committing lies of omission themselves. Many journalists spent months ignoring the truth that Joe Biden was deteriorating before their eyes, and had the audacity to tell the American public that videos of the octogenarian president looking visibly confused were something called “cheap fakes.”Pinning political hopes on fact-checking isn’t just bad for journalism, which gets reduced to a partisan instrument. It’s also bad for Democrats, causing them to forget to make a clear case to the American public that they have better policies. Donald Trump remains a fixture in American life not because of insufficient fact-checking—everyone, including his supporters, knows that he’s a bullshit artist—but because politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, have failed to make a convincing case that they have truths on offer that are better than his lies.

Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.The first is that Vance truly is no friend of Israel’s.The evening opened with a question about yesterday’s Iranian missile barrage. This question presented Vance with a trap. On the one hand, Vance’s party wants to criticize the Biden-Harris administration as weak on defense, soft on Iran. On the other hand, Vance is himself intensely hostile to U.S. alliances. He has led the fight to deny aid to Ukraine. He keeps company with conspiracy theorists who promote anti-Semitism. Vance managed that contradiction in the debate mostly by evading the question about what the U.S. might do to support Israel. Israel’s actions, he said, were a matter for Israel to decide; beyond that, he had nothing to say.[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]But the trick in evading a question is that the evasion works only if it goes unnoticed. This evasion does not. If you care about Israel, what you heard was nothing where there needed to be something. He offered no solidarity with the Israeli families who had spent the evening in bomb shelters because of the most massive country-to-country ballistic-missile attack in the history of the world. No friendship, no sympathy, for the state of Israel. Above all, what Vance delivered—Israel will do what Israel will do—was a message of abandonment, not a message of support. If you wondered what kind of voice Vance would be in the Situation Room when Israel is under threat, now you know: not a friend.The second enduring impression is that Vance has thoroughly analyzed the Republican problem on abortion and decided that the only option is to lie his way out.When the Trump Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, it opened the door to a new regime of state-level policing and punishment of American women. After this year’s election, Republicans may or may not have the votes in Congress to pass a national abortion ban. That’s not the most important question, however. The most important question is: Will a Republican administration use executive power to aid Republican states in their surveillance of American women? Vance’s own record on that is emphatic: Yes, he will, and, yes, he has.Onstage, Vance disavowed his record. He professed support for generous investment in maternal health and child nutrition. But his record has not disappeared because he denied it. Vance’s actual preferred health policy is to restore to health insurers the right to treat people with preexisting conditions differently—to do less risk-sharing, not more, even if that leaves many Americans without affordable insurance. Women and children face more health risks than able-bodied men. Vance’s policies are the direct opposite of Vance’s slogans.American women have had their privacy and autonomy ripped away from them—and Vance offered nothing to protect them. He was able to purr his way past his own cat-lady comments. But if American women were wondering, What happens to us under a Trump-Vance administration?, they have their answer: Your sex life and reproductive rights will be subject to government control in a way it has not been for half a century.[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]The third enduring impression is that Vance remains all in on Trump plots to overthrow the election. At the podium last night, Vance refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. That’s not just a lie about history. It’s a threat to the future.Right now, Republicans in key states are working to bend the law to convert voting defeats into Electoral College victories. They hope to disenfranchise unwanted voters, to disqualify unwanted votes, to use a bag of old Jim Crow tricks and some new ones to defeat the people’s verdict in 2024. Vance’s answer about Trump’s violent coup after the last election expresses his willingness to support and assist his party’s stealthier subversion of the coming election.You have been warned.

Joe Biden’s presidency is ending sooner than he hoped, but he can still cement his legacy by accomplishing something no other president has: the commutation of every federal death sentence.In 2020, Biden ran partly on abolishing the federal death penalty. His campaign website promised that he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example,” adding that death-row prisoners “should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole.” The Democratic Party platform that year also provided for the abolition of the death penalty, and shortly after Biden’s inauguration, a White House spokesperson confirmed that the president was indeed opposed to capital punishment.But the actual practice of his administration has been mixed. In July 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on executions. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Garland wrote in a memo. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.” Asked for comment on Garland’s announcement, a Biden spokesperson said, “As the president has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions.”[Read: Can America kill its prisoners kindly?]Biden’s administration has not carried out any federal executions, but neither has he instructed Garland to stop pursuing new death sentences, or to stop defending ongoing capital cases. Biden’s Department of Justice has continued pursuing death sentences for mass murderers and terrorists, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Dylann Roof, the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter. And Biden has declined to advocate for legislation that would eliminate the federal death penalty. Opponents of the death penalty have criticized Biden for failing to honor his campaign promises concerning capital punishment.So far, Biden has approached federal executions in the same way Barack Obama did: leaving the architecture for carrying out capital sentences in place but benevolently neglecting to use it. Donald Trump’s example, however, demonstrates how easy it is to resume executions even after a long gap. From 2003 to 2020, the federal government did not carry out executions. Then the Trump administration put to death 13 prisoners in a few months. Garland’s defense of current federal death sentences and pursuit of new ones has laid the groundwork for adding new prisoners to federal death row.Perhaps Biden is hoping to leave abolition up to his successor. But that, too, would be a mistake. His successor could well be Trump, and his vice president is unlikely to act boldly in this area, as she isn’t reliably opposed to capital punishment. In 2004, when Kamala Harris refused as San Francisco district attorney to seek a death sentence for the murderer of a police officer, Democratic politicians skewered her decision publicly. Then-Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as well as then–Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown all called for the death penalty. The experience was apparently formative for Harris, who reportedly became much more politically cautious as a result. Since then, Harris’s position on the death penalty has shifted several times. Right now, Harris won’t clarify whether she intends to authorize her DOJ to seek death sentences or advance current ones, and the 2024 Democratic platform has been stripped of references to capital punishment. I doubt Harris intends to resume federal executions, but neither does she seem primed to commute every sentence on death row, or to advocate vigorously for abolition.So the opportunity is in Biden’s hands. If he really does abhor capital punishment as he has claimed, then he has several avenues through which to act with the last of his executive power. He could instruct his DOJ to withdraw its pending notice of intent to seek capital punishment in the 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooting case; rescind a Trump-era letter saying the FDA has no right to regulate the distribution of lethal drugs; and commute the death sentences of the roughly 40 prisoners on federal death row. The president no longer has to worry about the political ramifications of decisive work on capital punishment, and therefore has the freedom to act on his values and save dozens of lives. He ought to take this opportunity to keep his campaign promises, and to honor the dignity of human life.

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.And then things went off the rails.In the final question of the debate, moderators asked the Ohio senator about threats to democracy, and in particular his statement that as vice president he would not have certified the 2020 election. In his response, Vance tried to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, riot and Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, revealing why he would be a dangerous vice president.Vance claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20” and said, “I believe we do have a threat to democracy in this country, but it’s not the threat that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It’s the threat of censorship.” This strange misdirection requires Americans to disbelieve what they saw and what Trump said in favor of an extremely online conservative talking point.[David A. Graham: Don’t let them pretend this didn’t happen]Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, sniffed blood and asked Vance point-blank whether he believed Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance refused to answer, and instead rambled again about censorship. “You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook,” he said, as though that allegation was worse than stealing an election.A vice-presidential debate is important not because it is likely to shift the polls—it isn’t—but because it tells voters something about the policies of the two people who could become president. Although both candidates dodged the moderators’ direct questions, voters may well have gained a more complete understanding of the two parties’ platforms on climate change, the economy, and immigration, and how widely they diverge. Both candidates were civil, even polite. But Vance’s answer on fundamental issues of democracy—or rather, his refusal to commit to it—suggested that such a basic question should have arisen far earlier in the night.[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]For most of the 90 minutes, Walz was clearly struggling. Ahead of the debate, both sides tried to set expectations, with Democrats warning that Walz was historically a shaky debater and the Trump campaign insisting he was great at it. The Democrats were closer to the mark. Walz came out seeming nervous, and though he calmed down, he never looked comfortable. He frequently sounded like he was spinning his wheels, with none of the casual conversationalism that has been his trademark in his brief time in the national spotlight. He was somber and effortful.The Minnesota governor’s worst moment came when he was asked why he’d said he was in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when in fact he’d arrived later that summer. Vance gave a circuitous answer about his personal biography, copping to occasionally being a “knucklehead.” Only when pressed in a follow-up did he finally just admit he’d misspoken, falling short of the image of the plainspoken plainsman he’s cultivated so carefully. Walz’s best moments came when he was most personal, such as when he talked about Minnesota farmers experiencing the effects of climate change or how meeting the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting shaped his views on gun control.[Mark Leibovich: Tim Walz is too good at this]The best evidence of Walz’s poor performance was the fact that Vance, who has been a gaffe machine and can seem wooden and impersonal—“weird,” in Walz’s parlance—came across well by comparison. He seemed relatively smooth and competent even though he tried to change the subject or twist the context when asked to defend Trump’s past actions. For example, rather than defend Trump’s family-separation policy at the border, Vance said that “the real family-separation policy in our country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s open southern border.” (You would never have known from Vance’s answers that Harris is vice president or that Joe Biden even exists.) Pressed on Trump’s bogus claim that climate change is a “hoax,” Vance gave a misleading answer about Harris’s energy policy. When moderators clarified details about legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance complained that debate rules banned fact-checking.On subjects such as abortion, where Vance’s past statements have been controversial, he was able to appear thoughtful and reasonable. Explaining why he had supported a national ban on abortion in the past but no longer did, he cited the results of a 2023 referendum in Ohio that supported abortion rights. “What I learned from that, Nora, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Vance said. Notably, this isn’t the same as taking a clear position on abortion. Trump has waffled on his position, but has boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade.[Read: The next Republican leader]This kind of spin, however misleading, is a bit of a throwback to politics the way they used to be practiced. For much of the night, the debate was strikingly boring, in the best way—unlike the NASCAR vibe that we’ve become accustomed to since 2016, where viewers are watching to see if there’s a fiery crash. Vance’s final, appalling answer about January 6, though, was a reminder that Trump is a destructive force, which his running-mate, of all people, can’t hope to escape.

In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in Heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”That is how four days under the tent would end—with words that could be taken as hyperbolic, or purely metaphorical. And on the first day, people were not necessarily prepared to accept them. But getting people ready was the whole point of what was happening in Eau Claire, an event cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, only not the kind involving Nilla wafers and repentance. This one targeted souls in swing states. It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.Although Murillo headlined the Eau Claire revival, the chief organizer is the influential prophet Lance Wallnau, who exhorted his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, casting efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.” Kindred events in the coming weeks include a series of concert-style rallies called “Kingdom to the Capitol,” aiming to draw crowds to state capitals in Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, with a final concert in D.C. just days before the election. A march called “A Million Women” is planned for the National Mall in mid-October. Every day, internet prophets are describing dreams of churches under attack, Christians rising up, and the start of World War III, acclimating followers to the prospect of real-world violence.And this is what awaits people under the tent: leaders waging an intentional effort to move them from passivity to action and into “God’s army.” It involves loudspeakers. It involves drums and lights and a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high. It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”This was on a warm Sunday evening, the first day of the process. Volunteers were smiling and waving cars into a gravel parking lot, ushering people toward the tent on the grass. The mood was friendly. The crowd was young and old and mostly white, people wearing khaki pants and work boots, gold crosses and Bible-verse tattoos. They were locals and out-of-towners from as far away as Texas.Into the tent they went, past a gantlet of tables that left no doubt that the great spiritual battle they believed to be under way included politics, and that God had chosen sides. People could sign up to be “patriots” with America First Works, which is linked to the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. They could sign up for something called the Lion of Judah, which aims to place Christians inside election offices, a strategy that the group’s founder would refer to on day two as “our Trojan horse.”Now the sun was setting, and the video screen was glowing blue with drifting stars. A praise band blasted one surging, drum-pounding song after another until Murillo arrived to set expectations for the days to come, starting with establishing his own authority.“God has chosen to speak through men—men and women—who are anointed,” he began.“My father and my God … you have orchestrated for them to hear the words I’m about to speak,” he continued. Then, step by step, he framed the moment at hand. “Something evil is at work in America,” Murillo said, describing a country of lost souls, decaying cities, and drug addiction, and a degenerate culture preying on children. “Any culture that surgically alters the gender of children is a sick, perverted society.”People began clapping. “I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “If you want equality? If you want women’s rights? If you want freedom from drugs? You want Jesus Christ.” More clapping and amens.“But we chose, in America, a philosophical approach,” Murillo said, proceeding to argue against 400 years of Enlightenment thought underpinning the concepts of individual rights, religious pluralism, Church-state separation, and American democracy itself. The problem, he said, was a wrong turn in the Garden of Eden, followed by a wrong turn in the 17th century, when people replaced God with their own reason. “The philosophical elephant in the room for America is very simple,” he said. “To the degree that we took God out, we brought misery in. If we want the misery to get out, we’ve got to bring God back into our schools, back into our government.”People cheered, and soon, Murillo introduced Wallnau, a slightly disheveled man in jeans and a sweat-soaked shirt, a fast-talking former pastor whom some modern-religion scholars consider the most influential theologian of the 21st century.When mainstream evangelicals were rejecting Trump during the 2016 GOP primary, it was Wallnau who popularized the idea that God had anointed Trump for a “special purpose,” activating a fresh wave of so-called prophecy voters. By now, he was a Mar-a-Lago regular. He had about 2 million social-media followers. He had a podcast where he hosted MAGA-world figures such as the political operative Charlie Kirk, and frequently spoke of demonic forces in U.S. and global politics. He was a frequent guest on a streaming show called FlashPoint, a kind of PBS NewsHour for the prophecy crowd, where he’d implied that the left was to blame for the July assassination attempt against Trump. Lately, he’d been saying that Harris represented the “spirit of Jezebel.”“America is too young to die. It has an unfinished assignment,” Wallnau told the crowd now.“Tomorrow,” he went on, “I want to talk to you about your unfinished assignment.”For the moment, though, he described a battle scene from the film Gladiator, one that takes place in an arena in ancient Rome, where a group of enslaved warriors comes under attack. The film’s hero, Maximus, rallies them to join forces, at which point they decapitate, bludgeon, and otherwise defeat their enemies in a bloody fashion. Wallnau wasn’t merely entertaining the crowd, but also suggesting how real-life events might play out.“How many of you would like to be activated in your Maximus anointing?” Wallnau said. People in the crowd cheered. “Put your right hand up in the air!”They did.Day two. By 10 a.m., the drums were pounding, the band was blasting, and Wallnau was at the podium holding up a small brown bottle. It was frankincense oil.“We’re adding to this wild army!” he told the crowd, calling people up to the stage.“Lord, they are hungry,” he prayed. “Now, Lord, they want more. They believe this is real. They believe something is happening.”He cued the praise band, then walked up and down the line of people streaming to the stage, pressing his oiled hand to their foreheads. He said the Lord was filling them with “mighty power.” Then he sent them back to their chairs, ready to hear what they were meant to do with it. People took out notebooks and pens.“I daresay a lot of us are nobodies on Earth who are somebodies in the spirit,” Wallnau said, explaining how good Christians like them had allowed themselves to become something God never intended them to be: victims. He said that they had been naive. That they’d misplaced their faith in a government of “elites” and “oligarchs” who wanted world domination. He said the worst part was that Christians had allowed this to happen. “You either have God, or you’ve got government,” he said. “Only one person can be supreme.”And this is when he explained the assignment he’d promised the day before. He set up a whiteboard. He drew seven mountains. Above them he drew a stick figure, representing Jesus Christ looking down on the world. He explained that each mountain was a sphere of society—education, business, government, and so on—and that believers’ job was to assert authority over each sphere. The point was not just individual salvation but societal reformation, the Kingdom. He said democracy would not work without the flourishing of Christian conscience. He said Christians are called to be “the head and not the tail.”“I’m tired of people thinking Christianity is just some kind of a backwoods, redneck religion,” he continued. “It’s not. It’s the force that produced the Reformation in Europe. That formed the United States!”After 30 minutes of this, Wallnau led the crowd in a declaration. “Father, I am ready,” came the sound of 2,000 voices repeating his words. “To be a part. Of a new move of God. In the United States. And I will occupy. The territory you give me. For the glory of God.”Next came a man in a blue suit. This was Bill Federer, a former congressional candidate from Missouri and the author of a book called Socialism: The Real History From Plato to Present. He took out a laser pointer. “You are important people,” he said. “God has chosen you.”Then he pointed his laser at the big screen, and began clicking through a slideshow illustrating human history as a bloody struggle between godly forces that want democracy and free-market capitalism, and demonic forces that want world domination and are currently working through Democrats. He clicked to a Bible verse. He clicked to a quote from the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety,’” it read.“In other words,” Federer told them, “don’t be afraid of the world ending. Be afraid of the people that promise to save you from the world ending.” He clicked to the last slide, a cartoon of a golden-walled Kingdom in the clouds. “Someday, you’re going to be dead,” he said, telling people to imagine heaven. Gold streets. Mansions. Also, a hypothetical gathering in the living room of Moses, where all the great Christian heroes would tell their stories. Moses would tell about facing a government “trying to kill us.” David would tell about chopping off Goliath’s head.“Then everyone’s going to look at you,” Federer said. “Tell us your story … What did you do when the whole world was against you, when the government was trying to kill you?” He paused so they could imagine. “Guess what? We’re still on this Earth,” he said, smiling. “You can still do those courageous faith-filled things that you will be known for forever. This is your time.”Wallnau returned to the stage. He told the crowd that 50,000 more people were watching online, a number that was not verifiable. Then he introduced a Polish Canadian preacher named Artur Pawlowski, who calls himself “The Lion” and “a convicted felon just like your rightful president of the United States.”Pawlowski was known in Canada for protesting Pride Month, railing against Muslim immigrants, and leading anti-lockdown protests during the pandemic, including one involving tiki torches—activity that gained him notoriety in the U.S., where he turned up as a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He was later convicted for “inciting mischief” for encouraging truckers who staged a blockade at the U.S.-Canadian border.Now the audience watched the big screen as a video showed scenes of Pawlowski cast as a martyr, being arrested, on his knees, in jail, all set to a pounding rock song that included the lyric “Once they grab the pastors, they come for the common man.”And this was the point. Pawlowski told people that the government would be coming for them next. He spoke of “the venom of lies and poison of falsehoods that have been spreading through the veins of our society,” and “sexual perversion,” and politicians working for “the globalists,” calling them the modern-day Philistines, the biblical enemies of God’s chosen people, who are “under attack.”He told them that Christians had been too timid, too “gentle” and “loving.”“Here is what God is saying,” he said. “It is time to go after the villains. It is time to chase the wicked. The time has come for justice, and justice demands restitution.” People cheered. “It’s time to move into offense,” he said.Like Federer, Pawlowski left things vague. “You want to be promoted in the Kingdom of God?” he said. “How many of you would like to see Jesus face-to-face? Then you have to go into the fire, my friends. He always comes to the fire. He is the fire. He is in the fire. And in the fire, he sets you free.” Pawlowski never explained to the people under the tent what the fire was, or what going into it meant, only that a time would come when each of them would have to make some sort of sacrifice.Then Wallnau dismissed people for lunch. The anointed gathered their Bibles and hand fans and headed for Panera and McDonald’s to process what they’d heard. “It’s a little overwhelming,” a woman named Melanie Simon, a member of Oasis Church, said. “I’m praying for God to remove fear from our spirit,” a man in camouflage shorts said. He gave only his first name, Steven, because he had gotten fired from his job and was in a legal dispute with his former employer. “We’re going to have to go to extremes,” a 63-year-old Wisconsin man named Will Anderson said. He’d driven two hours to hear all of this. He said he was bracing for some kind of “clash” in November. He said it was possible that people like him would have to take “steps and measures,” but he was not sure what they might be. “I’m not into passivity, and neither is God,” he said.Later, he and the others came back for more. In the hot afternoon, Wallnau introduced a young political operative named Joshua Standifer, who gave people one concrete idea of what they might do. He was the founder of the Lion of Judah, whose homepage includes the slogan “Fight the fraud.” Standifer flashed a QR code on the screen, explaining that it would connect people to their municipality, where they could apply to become an actual election worker—not a volunteer; a worker.“Here’s the difference: At Election Night, what happens is, when polls start to close or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out,” he said. “You’re actually going to be a paid election worker … I call this our Trojan horse in. They don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country with spiritual believers.”He flashed on the video screen the photo of Trump raising his fist after the July assassination attempt, blood streaking down his face. “Our enemy is actively taking ground and will do everything they can to win by any means necessary,” he said. “Our hour of action has arrived.” He added that he meant not only November but “what’s coming after that.” He did not elaborate on what that might be.“The Lord is with you, valiant warrior,” Standifer said at one point. “Everyone say ‘Warrior.’”“Warrior,” the crowd repeated.Day three didn’t start until evening, and what happened felt familiar, normal, more like the old-fashioned tent revival that Murillo had promised in his ads. As the sun was setting, people streamed across the green grass and back into the white tent, now lit up under a deep-orange sky, the giant screen once again glowing blue with drifting stars. The band started, and the singer spoke of people “tormented by thoughts of premature death” as Murillo took his place in front of an audience full of diseased hearts, bad livers, arthritic hands, worn-out knees, and minds disturbed by depression. “Hallelujah,” he said as people clapped. “We are the only movement in the history of the world where the founder attends every meeting. He’s here!”This, too, was part of the radicalization effort, an exercise in building trust and shoring up group identity. People waved colored flags, believing that the same Holy Spirit that would save America was swirling through the tent at that very moment. Murillo promised that the “power of God is going to fall on all of you.” He said that he didn’t want to get political tonight, but that the power was going to fall on the entire state of Wisconsin on Election Day, too. Then he launched into a barn burner of a sermon. Murillo spoke of souls in “spiritual danger,” and the death of the “brittle fairyland” of the self, and the power of surrendering that self wholly to the Lord. Soon he cued the band and called people to the stage.“Lord, I believe the pain in their soul is greater than their fear of embarrassment,” Murillo said as people came forward, old men with canes, fresh-faced young women, young men crying. “Every step you take is a step toward freedom. Every step is toward power. What you’re doing is wise.”He led them in a prayer about being washed in the blood of Jesus, then told them to turn around and look at the back of the tent. A line of volunteers smiled and waved, ready to welcome them with prayers, and take down their phone number and email address. “Ladies and gentlemen, they are saved,” Murillo declared as the crowd applauded and cheered for the new recruits. “The devil has lost them!”The evening went on like that, the band playing gospel, Murillo moving onto the faith healings, the people willing to believe.“People who are deaf, ears are opening,” he said.“The lady in the orange—there is a growth that will vanish,” he said.“God is healing your spine.”“I rebuke cancer in the name of Jesus.”Murillo looked out at the crowd of people crying, fainting, raising hands, closing eyes, walking when he said walk, dancing when he said dance. “Nothing will stop the will of God,” he said.“How many of you believe we need a miracle in America?” Murillo began on the final day. By now Wallnau was gone and the Canadian preacher had left; it was just Murillo and a crowd that was the largest of all four nights, filling the folding chairs and spilling outside the tent onto the grass, where people had brought their own lawn chairs.Murillo said that he’d had a sermon planned, but that God had “overruled” him and given him another message to deliver. “I want you to listen like you’ve never listened to me before,” he began. If there was any confusion about what the past four days had been about, Murillo himself now clarified. It was about November. It was not just about defeating Kamala Harris, but about defeating the advance of Satan.“I don’t want a devil in the White House,” Murillo said.“God is saying to the Church, ‘Will you wake up and realize that I’m giving you the authority to stop this thing?’” he said. “You have the authority.”He said that the Secret Service had deliberately failed to protect the former president from an assassination attempt in July. “They wanted him dead.”He said, “It is the job of every shepherd to get up in his pulpit … and say to the people, ‘We are going to prepare for war.’”He said, “I didn’t pick a fight; they picked the fight,” he said.He said what leaders of groups say when they are attempting to justify violence, and if people thought he was speaking only of spiritual warfare, Murillo clarified with a story.[Tim Alberta: The only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism]“Say you’re in your backyard grilling,” he said. “You got a fence. And somebody jumps that fence, comes after your wife. You’re not going to stand there and say, ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ No. Right now, brother, it’s in my hands. And my hands are going to come on you real strong right now. I’ll stop you any way I can. And we gotta stop the insanity going on in the United States.”He went on like that, telling people to “quit feeling sorry for yourself” and to see themselves as an “absolute lion of God.” And as the process came to its final minutes, Murillo delivered the last message that he’d been preparing people to hear.“I am not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.” He went on: “I am not on the Earth to feel good. I’m not on the Earth to do my own thing. I’m on this Earth as a God-appointed warrior in a dark time.”That is what four days of carefully choreographed sermons and violent imagery had come to with only weeks to go before the presidential election. And just as the crowds had in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, people in Eau Claire cheered. They said amen, and then 2,000 Christian warriors headed into the Wisconsin evening, among them a young man named Josh Becker, a local who’d attended all four days. He said he felt inspired. He said he wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do, only that “we have to do something—we have a role.”“I believe the father is going to lead us through a dark time,” he said, referring to the election and whatever God might require of him. “The Kingdom of God is now.”