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Canada’s last breakup, with Great Britain, took roughly 100 years of painstaking and piecemeal constitutional reform to accomplish. This time, things are moving a little faster. Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war against his closest neighbor shortly after taking office a second time—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier. “Canadian-American relations go back and forth, and they sometimes get fairly bad,” Norman Hillmer, Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University and a leading historian on the subject, told me. This time, however, it feels as though the love is really gone. “They’ve never been like this,” he said. “This is right off the charts.”

While the White House has been issuing a torrent of threats—including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, like forced annexation—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been quietly hunting for new suitors. For over a year, The Wall Street Journal reports, he has been exchanging sweet nothings on long-distance phone calls with the leaders of the Old Continent. Canada, he teases foreign leaders, is open for business. Its huge tracts of land are just waiting to be exploited—its amber grain, pink potash, and hot natural gas overflowing in abundance. And with generous new tax incentives to rival even American corporate giveaways, it’ll even pick up the check. We’re just like America, he hints—only sweeter.

It would seem Europe got the message. In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, if anything, came on too strong. Tearing the corset of EU precedent, she proposed a wholly invented new category of “associate member” for Canada. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world,” she fawned. “And we will now build our shared future as well.”

What, exactly, “associate member” would mean is anyone’s guess; officials on both sides soon played it down with mild embarrassment. In his response, Carney referred only to “an alliance for the future.” Some members of the European Parliament responded with the bitterness of a rejected suitor. “It was an absurd and unrealistic knee-jerk reaction,” Siegbert Frank Droese, a far-right German MEP, lamented. Europe simply wanted “the closest possible” relationship, President of the European Council Antonio Costa clarified. “I don’t think we should get too bogged down with words and labeling,” Mark Camilleri of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association told me, channeling the consummate bachelor.

In Carney’s Don Draper–esque world of jet-setting luncheons and grenadine ties, this was a play well-executed. Just look, he seemed to say. They’re throwing themselves at us. His oblique references to America’s boorishness on the world stage—“economic integration is now being weaponised, and tariffs are being used as a means of pressure”—likewise hit their mark. “Laughable,” Trump huffed, before striking the paternalistic note of the bitter ex. “If it’s a good intention, that’s fine,” he said. “If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.”

For most Canadians, this is all a fantasy worthy of fan fiction. Many Canadians, especially of Carney’s urbane class, have long nurtured the aspirational notion that they are closer in character to Europeans than to their neighbors to the south. They tend to look fondly on a welfare state. Their genteel gradualism, born of their lengthy breakup with Britain, makes them natural partners for slow, set-in-their-ways European institutions; their common-law conventions make them reluctant rebels, studious observers of norms and traditions.

This makes Canada a particularly appealing ally: reliable and rich, not to mention well-resourced. Canada has long vowed that its friendship comes with access to the critical minerals, uranium, and gas Europe sorely needs. Carney has even forsworn his nation’s traditional “ick” regarding militarization as he pours money into defense to spur economic growth. In mid-September, he promised “to produce millions of drones within the next two years,” signing a 100-year pact to arm Ukraine against Russia—offering a deeper commitment to that conflict than anyone in Europe has been able to muster.

A well-armed, well-funded Canada offers Europe more than just resources: It is also strategically positioned to see the continent through the next century of war and warming. As long as it maintains sovereignty over the Northwest Passage (a fact the United States has long denied), it controls the only Arab- and Russian-free route from Europe to Asia, offering secure shipping no matter the EU’s stance on Israel, Ukraine, Iran, or America’s next war.

All to say, it is no surprise Europe leaped so quickly to the idea of Canadian “associate membership.” After all, a diplomatic coup with Canada would also help cover a growing rot at the heart of the European Union: its own ambivalence toward expansion. With a lengthy line of corrupt economies and shaky democracies waiting at its door, the EU’s regulatory bouncers can’t even relax the rules enough to woo the likes of Iceland, which voted down nonbinding negotiations in August in a high-profile rebuke to Eurocrats. For Europe, too, Canada represents something fresh—a new, deeper, more harmonious relationship, free from the baggage of past disappointments.

But what, you might ask, would Canada gain from flirting with a club its own members want to leave? In some conservative corners, news of Carney’s surprise European romance prompted alarm from those fattened on a drip-feed of Brexit-style panic. Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s nonentity of an opposition leader, issued dire warnings of becoming Europe’s “twenty-eighth state” and falling victim to “reckless European-style immigration.”

Those fears are deliberately naïve—any labor mobility agreement would require painstaking negotiations with each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories. But it did not stop Canada’s more affluent and liberal-minded communities from fantasizing about a future of visa-free work and travel, or other supposed fruits of Carney’s flirtation: lower tuition at Europe’s universities, fancier cheese, better wine. The potential dowry was hard to deny—hundreds of billions in European funds and investments, unlocked; a chance, finally, to sell Canada’s family jewels to the right sort of buyer.

Canada had long since signed on to the more feasible aspects of this exchange. It still struggles to fill its quota for some tariff-free European food products under a free-trade agreement signed in 2016 (and still unratified by 10 EU states). Italian wine is already cheaper than Canadian on many liquor store shelves. Canada long ago signed onto Europe’s $106 billion research fund, Horizon Europe, and its defense procurement agreement, SAFE. It remains to be seen what more could actually be done in terms of formal ties with the continent, besides slightly cheaper exchanges to the Sorbonne for the children of Canada’s wealthiest families.

In reality, what Europe offers Canada is something far less tangible: an implication. Europe’s interest in Canada shows there is a new deep-pocketed benefactor willing to slot into the role being vacated by a self-destructing United States. “What happened in Strasbourg this week very much also has to be seen as a sign signaled to an American audience,” Achim Hurrelmann, director of Carleton University’s Centre for European Studies, told me in September. There is a growing realization on both sides of the Atlantic, in no small part prompted by Carney’s repeated calls for a new global order, that the United States will not fully recover after Trump; that this new phase of American bellicosity and dysfunction may be a generational phenomenon. As Carney made clear in his lauded speech at Davos, he sees the solution as an alliance of “middle powers,” a global nonaligned movement of capable, middle-class democracies—a normal kids club, rich and stable enough to stand up to the world’s bullies.

It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list.

It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list. Carney has been explicit: His goal is not to seriously challenge U.S. power by crafting a new “great power rival … with better manners.” Rather, it’s to insulate his country—and, if you take him at his word, the civilized world—from the more insane impulses of America’s increasingly unhinged government—like the sudden defunding of USAID.

In this sense, Carney’s priority areas for collaboration are revealing: AI policy, financial services, and defense are all still overly dependent on rules and systems designed in America. The companies that dominate those fields are, of course, also based in America. As its rules on data protection and its standardization of charging ports show, one thing the European Union can still do is use the weight of its sizable consumer market to dictate the rules of the capitalist game, as it is currently trying to do in several areas, most notably tech regulation. Part of Carney’s calculus is the bet that this can also work in state procurement.

There are reasons to be skeptical. Carney’s bid for closer ties with Europe comes at a time when the continent’s governments—and the EU itself—are struggling to resist a tidal wave of right-wing populism. Any substantial agreement may see Carney shaking hands with Germany’s first far-right chancellor since the last one shot himself in a bunker. While Trump is addled and ineffectual, the far-right in Europe is operating with a genuine democratic mandate—at least, as long as there is any democracy left.

But it’s quite possible that Carney simply doesn’t care. Like a true banker, he has already demonstrated a remarkable agnosticism regarding the origins of the dollars he hopes will build his nation by buying its assets. Attendees at a high-profile investment summit in Toronto just before his trip to Strasbourg included prominent Trump donors, alongside state-backed wealth funds from China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. In the pitch book was the usual offer of mines and pipelines, but also key strategic assets like airports, rocket launchpads, and fiber-optic lines. Carney drew the ire of Canadian progressives for his willingness to sell out the country’s few remaining public assets. But he appears to be a true believer in trickle-down economics: Enriching a class of highly mobile, global investors, he seems to reason, will make Canadians wealthier so long as they are enriched on Canadian soil.

That should offer some consolation to Americans worried about their place in the world, or their special relationship with their neighbors to the north. Get yourself a few billion dollars in assets, and even the debonair likes of Carney will still fling open the doors, lay out the family china, and attempt to woo you from your wallet. It’s also a sad indication that, like many partners in abusive relationships, Canada may not be able to resist crawling back to the United States if it puts on a serious show of being reformed. “That’s a question that I’ve heard Europeans ask,” Hurrelmann told me. “What happens when the trade war is over? Will Canada still be interested in these types of things?”

The answer to that question is hard to discern while Trump continues blustering from the White House. Like many genteel Canadians, Carney likely may have an inclination to lean away from America anyway—from its increasingly crass politics, debased culture, and unrestrained greed. Canadians may be more American than they like to admit, but they are not as American as America is now. Another few years of accelerating decay may simply be too much to come back from. For now, at least, Canada is exploring its options—and it doesn’t seem inclined to wait around. Jilted lovers seldom do.

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week that New York Attorney General Letitia James is assigned to investigate the handling of the Cornell University rape allegation, in which charges were not brought and a lawsuit is now…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Cornell rape scandal proves women’s safety is never the priority…

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When the socialists filed into the pews of a church sanctuary in Texas, there were far more than would have attended just two years ago. But that was before members of the Democratic Socialists of America were winning congressional primaries, and the acronym “DSA” became a fixture on television news chyrons. And before Democrats began arguing about whether to court or rebuke this movement…

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Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. This week’s injustice has both types of Trump judicial appointees: the kind that are unhinged zealots bound for Supreme Court glory and the kind who actually still do their jobs. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ho…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Cornell rape scandal proves women’s safety is never the priority…

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By Dan Gearino for Inside Climate News On Sept. 21, President Donald Trump responded to rising public concerns about artificial intelligence with a post on Truth Social. “The same people that said, ‘We’ll all be dead in twelve years because of Global Warming,’ a name since ‘reborn’ to Climate Change, because the Planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead…

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President Donald Trump is tired but also busy trying to cover up the fact that his policies and approval ratings are terrible. The one thing he has going for him is that the GOP can’t abandon Trump’s sinking ship because his policies are their policies too. And it was all caught on video. Starting last week, C-SPAN began simulcasting MAGA mouthpiece Scott Jennings’ radio show…

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The ICE shooting of a 28-year-old in the Bronx Thursday has provoked an uproar among New Yorkers, who rushed to the streets in protest the night of the shooting, clashing with the New York Police Department. At least five protesters were arrested. And though members of the NYPD were not involved in the shooting, they were involved in arresting protesters and, some witnesses say, protecting ICE vehicles—despite a New York State law that prohibits local police departments from collaborating with the federal agency, as well as local “sanctuary city” laws.

Allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani are now calling on his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to step down if ICE does not leave New York City.

Oscar Belgal, the man who was shot in his car while his five-year-old child sat in the backseat, is being hold in the MDC Brooklyn federal detention facility. He was shot at least seven times, according to police. Some ICE agents at the scene were dressed as construction workers; at least one carried a long gun. Belgal, according to his lawyers, was transported first to a local hospital, then to ICE custody in New Jersey and then to the federal prison in New York City in the hours following his shooting. He still has a bullet lodged in his body, one of his attorneys told a federal judge during a hearing Friday.

Though Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for the abolition of ICE shortly after the shooting, his New York Police Department seemed to coordinate with ICE agents, clearing the way for ICE vehicles to pass through a crowd of protesters at a hospital near the scene that evening.

“We cannot call ourselves a sanctuary city when the NYPD clears the path for ICE but goes after protesters like we saw last night,” Devashish Basnet of the New York Civil Liberties Union said at a rally Friday. “Our city can’t claim to stand up for us against the Trump regime when our police commissioner carries water for Homeland Security and smears the name of Oscar Belgal, like she did last night.”

That police commissioner, third-generation billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, is a holdover from Eric Adams’ mayoral administration who has pushed to expand surveillance infrastructure in New York City. At a press conference Thursday, she highlighted Belgal’s two prior arrests.

Democratic Socialist allies of Mamdani called for Tisch to stop New York police officers from working with ICE either formally or informally—or, failing that, to step down in the aftermath of the shooting. The New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which propelled Mamdani to his upset victory ten months ago, released a statement Friday saying that “ICE is a terrorist agency that must be expelled from New York City and abolished.”

“Jessica Tisch must get ICE out of New York and end NYPD complicity with these terrorists,” the group wrote. “If the commissioner can’t put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired.”

Congressional candidate Darializa Chevalier of the Bronx, who can be seen on video being shoved to the ground by NYPD officers at a protest the night of the shooting, also called for the police commissioner’s resignation on Friday morning, as did State Assemblymember Claire Valdez.

Yesterday, an ICE agent opened fire in Marble Hill. They shot a member of our community in the neck while he was in his car. His five-year-old kid was in a child seat in the back of the car when ICE agents fired at least 7 rounds into it. This was in the middle of the afternoon,…

— Darializa for Congress (@DarializaforNY) October 9, 2026

“The NYPD spent more time protecting a militia that just shot someone than protecting New Yorkers,” Chevalier wrote on social media. “Last night, the NYPD and Commissioner Tisch violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies and fueled the Trump Administration’s attempt to demonize our communities.”

Mamdani reportedly spent hours on the phone with President Donald Trump Friday attempting to negotiate Belgal’s release, but was unsuccessful.

Federal immigration officials, meanwhile, are defending the shooting—and arguing, as they often have in ICE shooting cases, that Belgal was only shot at because he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Marcos Charles, a top ICE official, said in a statement that Belgal “weaponized his vehicle and proceeded to accelerate toward other officers.” In the statement, Charles says that ICE agents transported Belgal to the hospital; NYPD body camera footage shows that police, not ICE agents, did so.

Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security, asserted that it was not ICE agents who put Belgal’s five-year-old son in danger by shooting into the car, but Belgal who put him in danger by putting him in the car in the first place.

“We weren’t aware the child was in the car,” Mullin said Friday, according to NBC News. “I can tell you that, but you know who was? Oscar.”

Flock Safety, the AI-powered traffic camera company that has everyone from Josh Hawley to Bernie Sanders angry, might be feeling the heat financially: Reuters reported Friday that the company is planning to cut roughly 18 percent of its staff, or 270 workers.

Flock, which operates a network of 120,000 cameras nationwide, is the largest maker of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. It’s also, as I previously reported, the target of a massive wave of backlash, in part because so many police officers have been found abusing the technology.

The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026.  (At least three towns have reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.) 

The first signs that Flock might be in money trouble came in September, when the company offered voluntary buyouts to employees. An internal email shared with Wired offered a “generous” severance package to Flock employees willing to quit. Flock, which is worth more than $8 billion, may not meet its revenue goals this year as towns and counties cancel its contracts left and right.

In addition to potential financial problems, Flock is now facing growing legal scrutiny: Earlier this week, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that its technology violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights, after a sheriff’s deputy used ALPRs to search a month’s worth of her location history. This marks one of the first times a judge has ruled on the constitutionality of ALPR searches, but does not create a binding precedent.

“By virtue of how ALPR technology works…officers using these systems have access to a continuously updated location history for all vehicles caught on ALPR cameras within the network,” Judge Sara E. Hill wrote in her ruling. “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.”

The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. Just weeks out from what will hopefully be a blue tsunami in the midterms, Republicans are in panic mode, and it makes for some of the most entertaining reading. I mean, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt crapping the bed in his attempt to “gotcha” former…

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The Texas attorney general’s use of a taxpayer-funded travel security detail stands out when compared with his predecessor and other state officials, our analysis found. By Zach Despart for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump is forcing postal workers to spy on you…

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This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Elijah Washington pushes through wet ferns and branches left by logging, crossing the mossy forest floor on Haida Gwaii. He kneels beside a massive western red cedar stump.

The cedar was felled decades ago during the industrial logging boom that cleared swaths of old growth across the archipelago off British Columbia’s north coast, leaving a hollow, decaying stump.

Its top has since been trimmed with a chainsaw to fit a plywood sheet, capped with weather-resistant roofing material and covered with thick green moss collected from the surrounding woods. Near the base, an opening roughly the width of Washington’s safety helmet leads into a sheltered hollow lined with moss.

“You just want it to be small enough for a mother bear to move in,” said Washington, a stewardship technician with the Haida Nation. “So it’s got to be just right, just like the Goldilocks, [the entrance] can’t be too big, can’t be too wide.”

Haida Nation stewardship technician Elijah Washington explains how crews choose old cedar stumps to turn into bear dens. Video by: Sonal Gupta / Canada’s National Observer

The retrofitted stump is one of seven the Council of the Haida Nation had modified this summer to provide winter shelter for the coastal black bear, known in the Haida language as taan. Found nowhere else in the world, this subspecies of black bear is among the largest in North America. 

A bear’s winter den may bring to mind a rocky cave, but coastal black bears in BC rely heavily on large old-growth trees and the hollow logs and stumps they leave behind. Decades of logging have removed many of those shelters, however—and the younger trees growing in their place have yet to develop hollows large enough for bears, said Helen Davis, a wildlife biologist working with the Haida Nation to identify and restore bear dens.

Cubs are born weighing about a pound, with their eyes still closed. They need a dry, protected place where their mothers can nurse them through the winter, and they stay there for up to 100 days. “The only place where bears can have babies is in a den,” Davis said. “And so these dens are critical to population sustainability.”

The old trees bears need for shelter are also sought-after by the logging industry. BC has expanded protections and temporary logging pauses, but old-growth harvesting continues. In August, BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said stopping it altogether would shut down the sector.

Davis has heard that argument for years. People repeatedly suggested making shelters from melted tires or culverts instead of leaving old-growth trees for bears.

“People would just sort of throw that out somewhat frequently and since nobody seems to want to conserve old growth for them, I was like, ‘Well, fine, then let’s see if we can build them,’” Davis said.

Now, the first-of-its kind program could set a model for bear conservation worldwide. But in providing an alternative to simply protecting old-growth, some worry building dens gives an easy excuse for logging to continue without pause.

Washington stands in front of a natural bear den in a living cedar.Sonal Gupta / Canada’s National Observer

Lisa White, a councillor with the Old Massett Village Council, said the sight of plywood laid over old-growth stumps was difficult to bear. “I actually cried,” she said. The plywood roofs, she said, showed how deeply the land had been damaged: bears now needed people to help provide their shelter. 

White said Haida people had needed wood long before commercial logging. Thousands used it for homes, canoes, clothing and heat, yet the forests appeared virtually untouched to the first newcomers, she said. People selected individual trees, used them fully and left the surrounding forest standing, so animals could continue living there, including northern goshawks, which are at risk of disappearing from the islands. The Haida also were known to pull entire planks from trees without felling them, leaving the tree standing.

White worries about how well the second-growth forests surrounding the modified dens will hold up through winter. She has seen extensive blowdown in those stands and is concerned about placing shelters among trees vulnerable to the islands’ storms.

“It’s also the forest around them that needs to be strong,” she said. 

Old Massett councillor Lisa White reflects on the importance of bears to the Haida and what happens when their home is lost. Video by Sonal Gupta / Canada’s National Observer

Sometimes, loggers discover a bear den only after cutting into it.

Davis, who has been studying coastal black bear dens since the early 1990s, recalled stories from loggers: “They cut into trees and a bear popped out—or worse, they cut into a bear.” 

Those accounts led to a three-year provincial government study with forestry company Canfor to investigate whether black bears needed large trees for dens.

Davis tracked radio-collared bears to roughly 65 dens; her field research confirmed that bears were almost entirely dependent on large, hollow old-growth trees and that second-growth forests left them with virtually no options.

At the time, despite the rate of loss of old-growth forest in the province, the research didn’t set off alarm bells. “I don’t think they thought they’d run out of old growth,” she said.

But building a den meant manually crafting what a living cedar takes centuries to create. As a cedar grows, fungi can slowly rot the wood at its centre, creating a hollow large enough for a bear while the tree remains alive. Forests managed for timber are often logged again before those chambers develop, so the new trees do not replace the dens lost when old growth is cut.

Davis began working with Taan Forest, the Haida-owned forestry company in 2019, teaching staff to identify natural bear dens and convert suitable stumps into new ones. The company was already restoring streamside forests damaged by earlier logging and adding den restoration became a natural extension of that work, said Jeff Mosher, its chief forester.

“Protecting bears is a priority, even if it means a lower dividend,” Mosher said. 

Taan Forest has since created six dens across the Mamin River, Survey Creek and Ghost Creek watersheds on Graham Island, in northern Haida Gwaii, Mosher said.

Mosher said bears usually took about a year to start using the shelters, though they checked out one new den almost immediately. Signs of use at other modified stumps encouraged Taan to build more. Bears used one of the dens through the winter and spring of 2023 and have returned annually since. 

Bears have used and returned to one of Taan Forest’s modified dens each year since 2023. Footage courtesy of Taan Forest and compiled by Sonal Gupta/Canada’s National Observer

Those results also encouraged the nation to expand the effort, Washington said. His crew spent the summer searching previously logged forests for stumps with a hollow large enough for a bear and an entrance leading inside. Davis helped the council secure funding from the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and spent a week in July teaching the crew to scout stumps, assess their suitability and turn them into dens using chainsaws, plywood and moss.

The crew is also trying to make the new shelters smell familiar. When the Haida crew comes across a bear that has died, they respectfully collect some of its hair to place in some of the modified dens, a trick Davis has tested elsewhere in the field with encouraging results. 

By the end of October, the team plans to complete three more dens, bringing the total to 10 modified sites across Haida Gwaii ready for winter monitoring. The exact locations of the sites are being withheld to prevent exposing denning bears to hunters. 

Haida members remain concerned about black bears killed for their gallbladders, which contain bile sought for use in some traditional Asian medicines. BC bans possession of bear gallbladders or bile and prohibits their trade.

Washington said that while the nation’s presence on the land has helped protect bears from such hunting, the killings still occur. Haida members have reported seeing bears left dead on the side of the road with the paws cut off and gallbladder removed. 

Tracing his hand over a living western red cedar in a different part of the forest, Washington points to the distinct tool marks left by a traditional adze. Sometime in the early 1900s, he estimates, Haida ancestors cut into the tree to see if it could be used for a house pole. Finding rot at the core, they left it standing. Bears later widened the opening with their teeth and claws, turning the hollow into a natural den, its floor already lined with soft cedar bedding and green branches still growing above.

This den sits high in the tree, which is among the safest places for a female bear to raise cubs, Washington said. But his crew cannot recreate one at that height.

The modified dens also provide only temporary shelter. “They’re dead stumps and so they’re rotting and they won’t be there forever,” Davis said.

A bear den inside a living cedar tree culturally modified by the Haida in the 1900s. The tree has also been used as a den by bears. Video by Sonal Gupta/Canada’s National Observer

But shelter is only part of what a bear needs. Noel Bellis, an Old Massett member of the Haida Nation and a carver, grew up in a logging family and later worked in cedar forests. After visiting modified dens and attending workshops, he believes bears would move in but questions whether they would find enough food nearby. When bears come out in spring, they feed on green vegetation, including horsetail, fireweed shoots, salmonberry shoots, and grasses.

But in the second-growth forests he has visited, deer have eaten much of the low-growing vegetation, leaving little for bears to forage. “It’s a moss lawn between trees,” he said.

Nearby salmon streams provide a seasonal source of food, but Bellis worries about what bears will find once those runs end each year. He wants den-building accompanied by efforts to restore food plants, using cages to protect young growth from deer until it grows beyond their reach. “It will cost money, but that’s what the costs of clear-cutting are going to be,” he said.

Davis agrees bears need both shelter and feeding areas within their home ranges, where they generally remain to den. “They don’t just pick up and march off to some far-flung patch of remaining old growth and all den there together,” Davis said. 

Taan Forest is opening gaps in the canopy to encourage shrubs to grow, with at least two modified dens in or beside those restoration areas, Davis added. 

Wildlife biologist Helen Davis inside a stump’s hollow chamber in July 2026. Elijah Washington

When Barney Edgars worked along Haida Gwaii’s creeks as a fisheries guardian, his crew carried air horns and flares but rarely needed them. The Elders who raised him had taught him to respect bears and speak to them when their paths crossed: “You go your way, I’ll go my way.”

“We were taught that everything we grew up with had a spirit,” said Edgars, a Haida Elder.

He recalled an older woman fishing for sockeye salmon when a bear and its cub approached her net. She threw the bear a fish and told it to leave the net alone. It never returned, he said.

Earlier generations ate bears and used the whole animal. His grandmother asked him to hunt one for her, though he never did. Travellers also followed bear trails through northern Haida Gwaii, finding routes between waterways on the journey from Massett toward Naden Harbour.

Neither Edgars nor his grandparents had heard of a bear attack on the islands, he said. But he worries that losing forests and feeding grounds will push bears into communities to rummage through garbage, increasing the possibility of conflict. 

Fears about conflict with bears are new to the Haida. “They used to sleep under the trees and there was never any fear of that… I never learned any fear from my grandfather about bears,” White said.

Washington said Haida people want to know whether bears are healthy, have enough food and have places to live. Monitoring the new dens will help answer part of that question.

Cameras facing the den entrances will record activity year-round while their crew stay away from roughly October to April to avoid disturbing bears. After winter, the crew will review the footage to see which shelters bears explored and which they used as dens.

Hair naturally caught at den entrances can be tested for DNA to help show whether the same bears return year after year or others move in.

Even if bears take to the shelters, the crew does not plan to turn every suitable stump into a den. Once one is finished, workers move to another area, leaving space between shelters to limit competition for food and places to raise cubs.

“We don’t want to create a whole community out here,” he said. “We want to have like one bear that’s safe enough to come out here.”

Washington, center, with crew members at a stump den site in July 2026.Elijah Washington

With the midterm elections less than a month away, it would seem to be an absurd time to suffer a thought for the next election cycle and the challenges that any would-be Democratic presidential victor would have to tend to on day one. Unfortunately, sometimes current events intercede with a potent reminder of just how rough the road to recovery and post-Trump renewal will be. One such story broke this week in the pages of The New York Times, which detailed some of the Trumpian luminaries who have recently ascended to important positions at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, run by Trump acolyte Harmeet Dhillon.

The piece wastes no time: In short order, we’re introduced to “a former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents,” a “onetime gambling executive” with a sideline in promulgating “conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017,” and a “Florida activist” whose “activism” included being jailed for several weeks for “hacking a local election system.” The long and the short of it is that the agency, once stocked with skilled professionals, is now chock-full of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pass the smell test for public service. Somewhere, a pool is missing its cess, and they might want to check whether it ended up at the DOJ.

Much has been made of the way the Trump administration, returning to power with Project 2025 as its guiding manifesto and Elon Musk as its chainsaw-wielder, went to war with the civil service in the hopes that it could be ground down by purging the dedicated civil servants who’d previously staffed whatever posts were relevant in keeping us free of cyclospora. This Times story is covering the other side of the equation: The full Trumpian takeover isn’t just about firing people en masse. Frankly, it’s not merely about placing people loyal to the cause in top positions. It’s about stationing borderline lycanthropes in powerful positions.

Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 after suggesting—to the disgust of his bosses—that George Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).

This isn’t going to be a temporary problem by any means. The idea that the Trumpers who’ve come to Washington might take their leave if and when the federal government comes under Democratic control is a hopeful notion, but I worry that some of the true believers aren’t just here visiting; they intend to stay. That’s certainly the sense that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who’s gone to great lengths to stuff the agency under his control with all manner of cranks and quacks—strove to convey at last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. As Mother Jones reported, Kennedy “proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.” “Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he bragged, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

When it comes to government agencies that have suffered the most from this Trumpian takeover, none are as complete or as concerning as the Department of Homeland Security. On its best days, DHS is a walled garden of cops all hotboxing themselves with reactionary politics. Under Trump, it’s essentially become a hive of outlandish herrenvolk propaganda, pumping neo-Nazi memes into the social media bloodstream—the better to recruit the sort of person who might want to inflict terror on the streets of American cities.

As The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant documented, DHS’s tainted origin as a post-9/11 agency with a monomaniacal focus on Muslim extremism—and with a storied history of downplaying the threats of white nationalism—has only grown even more corrupted by the second coming of Trump. “We are doubling back around the same circular path,” Grant observed, “where agencies such as DHS downplay white nationalist violence, both potential and actual, while they draw recruits from those same ranks.”

For a future Democratic president, the challenge of righting the ship of state will not simply be a matter of reviving the federal workforce and bringing competent professionals back to the perches they once occupied. It will be a matter of fumigation, as well—or, to use a better term, lustration, which Yale Law professor Dina Francesca Haynes, writing immediately after the first Trump administration, defined as “the process of vetting and removing from public service those who engage in or support extremism or seek to undermine democracy.”

Lustration, Haynes explained, “has been carried out or proposed in many countries attempting to pull themselves from the wreckage of fascism, genocide, and nationalism.” As Haynes described, the idea is that for a country to successfully “move forward” from its authoritarian past, “it must rid itself of corrupt public servants by vetting them, and potentially dismissing from employment and cancelling pensions of those who harbor such deep bias that it would be impossible for them to fairly and impartially exercise the discretion they have been granted by virtue of their position in public service.”

This is something that those of us at The New Republic have already begun considering as a necessary bridge back to a functioning democracy. In fact, as The New Republic’s Matt Ford pointed out as he gamed out what a future president could do to gut ICE, Trump himself has already provided the working blueprint for a quick and effective purge of any Trumpian fifth column that might remain gummed in the gears of government after the president leaves office. A future president can claim the same “vast powers to decide the fate of federal agencies,” including terminating employees, cutting funding, and transferring staff and programs to other agencies.

Elsewhere, Ford also suggested that a future Democratic president make use of the power Trump claimed for himself to “reduce headcounts through a reduction in force, perhaps by firing every agent hired since 2024.” As Ford opined at the time, the administration’s “decision to drastically reduce hiring standards for incoming ICE agents would more than justify such a sweeping action.” That the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is studded with people who shouldn’t be managing a Pizza Hut, let alone prosecuting civil rights offenders, suggests there is ample room to expand these principles of lustration throughout a Trump-tainted civil service.

As I’ve said before, the right way to think about the Trump administration and its wholesale operations across the federal government is to accept the fact that it is essentially a criminal syndicate, dedicated to self-enrichment and political corruption. The next Democratic administration should have accountability on its mind, and a commitment to rooting out the Trumpian rot that’s infected the civic architecture of this great nation. It might be that the most useful thing the Trump administration has accomplished in its odious lifetime is to provide the playbook to right its wrongs and dismantle Trumpism permanently.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

When the FBI showed up at a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records this past January, County Commissioner Dana Barrett thought it looked less like a criminal investigation and more like political theater. 

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It’s been more than five years since the election, the results already had been investigated multiple times, and the ballots had been counted, recounted, and recounted again.

The lie that the 2020 election was stolen has persisted. And the “Stop the Steal” movement’s most ardent believers now hold unprecedented positions of power, including on the once-sleepy State Election Board in the important swing state of Georgia. A lawyer known for his willingness to take on long-shot election cases went from a little-known private practice attorney to a role in the White House, overseeing the country’s election integrity effort—despite being sanctioned by a court for making “unequivocally false” assertions around voting. And everyday members of the movement are trying to change what they fervently believe is a broken system—at the risk of actually breaking it in the process.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis and Reveal’s Najib Aminy examine how the long shadow of doubt over the 2020 elections is being weaponized and what it means ahead of the 2026 midterms.  

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2026.

Remember Freedom 250? You are forgiven if you’ve already forgotten all the activities that were supposed to celebrate America, but pretty much no one attended because they were so tacky and low-rent. But hey, at least you’re apparently still paying for them! Wait, what? Yep. Despite all the explanations that “Freedom 250” was separate from the official “America 250” celebrations…

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A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | RFK Jr. is more concerned with ‘vaccine injuries’ than measles deaths…

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Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. Thanks to the Trump administration, Minnesota has become a petri dish of polarized political finger-pointing, incendiary racial generalizations, and what could likely pan out to be generations of trauma inflicted on its communities. But before “Operation…

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In June 2025, as the 2026 midterm elections were starting to heat up, a newly formed company named Arizona Land Reserve made a huge donation to the Nevada Republican Party. Its $50,000 contribution instantly made it one of the state GOP’s largest benefactors. Early the next year, the upstart company—which was seeking to build “fly-in luxury home ranches” on a remote tract in northwestern Arizona, part of an investment strategy that aimed to “provide our Investors with a constant 20% annual return for the next 20 years”—cut another $50,000 check, this one to the political action arm of Turning Point USA. In June, Arizona Land Reserve and one of its founders, Robert McDowell, each contributed $50,000 to a political committee for the House Freedom Caucus.

Last week, Arizona Land Reserve turned up again. It was listed as an asset on a hastily drafted and long overdue financial disclosure for Nevada Republican David Flippo, whose congressional campaign received coveted endorsements from both Turning Point Action and the Freedom Caucus Fund. Before winning the GOP primary, Flippo also seemed to benefit from an unusual level of support from Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, who recorded a message endorsing Flippo before Nevada voters went to the polls. A conservative blogger claimed McDonald had also lobbied Donald Trump on Flippo’s behalf. Trump’s crucial backing came through shortly before the primary, helping to seal Flippo’s victory. (Turning Point Action, the Freedom Caucus Fund, and the Nevada GOP did not respond to requests for comment.)

His relationship with Arizona Land Reserve and its political donations to groups that supported him raise new concerns about the personal and campaign finances of the Nevada Republican. The company has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to market $20 million in securities, and its promotion of consistent double-digit investment returns resembles the SEC’s depiction of investments that are “likely a scam,” according to an investing guide published by the agency. Moreover, McDowell, its co-founder, has a record of corporate bankruptcies, business failures, and bad debts. Court records show he has been accused of fraud on multiple occasions. In one case, he and his business partners were accused of operating a “pyramid promotional scheme,” according to Arizona court records. (Their company was found liable for breach of contract in this matter.)

Flippo and McDowell did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

The murky finances of Flippo’s campaign have already come under scrutiny. Mother Jones reported that Flippo, who previously ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2024, had loaned or given his political campaigns more than $2 million, but the source of the money is unclear, since the retired career Air Force lieutenant colonel does not appear to have the financial means to bankroll his political operation to that extent. 

Flippo himself is a licensed financial adviser, who was fired from a previous job because he allegedly “violated numerous company policies and regulatory regulations related to electronic communications, books and records,” according to a disclosure published by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). His involvement with Arizona Land Reserve—which is not just an asset, but one of his biggest—could bring him under the scrutiny of financial regulators.

Flippo’s campaign has been bruised by multiple controversies, including reporting by The Washington Post and other news outlets that he misrepresented his military record by touting a Bronze Star for valor that he did not receive. (Flippo holds a Bronze Star, but not with added valor distinction. In military circles, that is no minor difference.) The Reno Gazette-Journal added to Flippo’s struggles this week, when it reported that Flippo was fired from his role as an Air Force squadron commander in 2008.

Flippo is locked in an unusually competitive race against Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson in a sprawling district encompassing Reno. Flippo’s hard-right candidacy and status as a recent transplant to Reno have divided Nevada Republicans. Mark Amodei, who is retiring from the seat Flippo hopes to win, called him a “fraud” in an article about the Bronze Star claims and refused to back him in both the primary and general election. Due to his vulnerabilities, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently added this deep red district to its “Red to Blue” program, identifying it as a possible flip opportunity.  

Last week, Flippo provided a handwritten financial disclosure to the Nevada Independent after Mother Jones reported that, dating back to 2023, Flippo had repeatedly failed to file the legally required document as a congressional candidate—even as he reported huge personal loans or contributions to his campaigns that do not fit the profile of a candidate who lacks a source of obvious wealth. After retiring from the Air Force, he did preventive maintenance work for BP in Alaska, then joined a company called First Command as a financial advisor. In late 2024, the company fired Flippo for an offense related to “bearer bonds,” according to FINRA. Such bonds are a type of debt security whose trade has been severely restricted in the United States because of their use in money laundering and other illicit activities. (“They found nothing to discipline me for,” Flippo told The Nevada Independent of his firing. “I wasn’t fined for anything. I didn’t lose any licenses.”)

Far from settling questions about Flippo’s finances, his disclosure raised a host of new ones.

Flippo reported retirement assets worth between about $65,000 and $500,000 and brokerage and bank accounts valued between about $315,000 and $1.1 million. He also reported having up to $1 million in debt through a line of credit, as well as up to $200,000 in additional liabilities related to personal and home improvement loans. These debts do not appear to include the more than $400,000 mortgage Flippo took out in 2020 to buy his home in Las Vegas, according to Clark County records. (Congressional candidates are not required to report debt on their home mortgages.) 

Those numbers are striking considering the more than $1.6 million that Flippo has loaned to his current campaign. Flippo has also told the Federal Election Commission that all of his loans come from personal funds and are not linked to other loans.

“There are a lot of questions about this filing at the outset,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of strategic investigations at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “But even taking it at face value, it hardly answers the question of how Flippo came up with $1.6 million to loan to his campaign.” Fischer added that “there are serious questions about the valuation of some of his biggest assets, and the other numbers really don’t add up to somebody who has $1.6 million in extra cash to put into a congressional run.”

Flippo listed two other major assets on his disclosure, both valued at between $1 and $5 million, comprising much of his net worth. One is called America First Home Mortgage. The other Flippo reported as “AZ Land Reserve PPM Meadview AZ.” According to the form, neither of these investments produced any income.  

But a nationwide search of corporate registrations shows no record of an active company in the United States called America First Home Mortgage. The CEO of a similarly named Las Vegas company, America First Mortgage, told me his company has no affiliation with Flippo. He also knows of no business that goes by that name.

Arizona Land Reserve does exist, though it is peculiar for other reasons. It was formed in January 2025 by Robert McDowell and Stephen C. Tuminello, top Flippo fundraisers who co-hosted a Reno fundraiser attended by Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, in August and who also attended an event for Flippo’s 2024 campaign. The mailing address listed for McDowell is an 8-room motel owned by his company, Canyons End, in Meadview, Arizona. Court records show that McDowell has been accused in legal filings of fraud, promoting a pyramid scheme, and repeatedly failing to pay debts he and his companies have incurred. 

“[H]e takes money from investors and never paid [them] back,” the man who sold McDowell the Meadview motel alleged in court filings, calling McDowell a “con.” His comments came in connection with the 2021 bankruptcy of Canyons End, the McDowell LLC that owns the property. Federal court records show McDowell’s motel LLC ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to numerous creditors, including federal and state tax authorities, which the company agreed to pay more than $250,000.

Flippo stands between Tuminello (left) and McDowell (right) at a 2024 campaign event.YouTube

Years earlier, another McDowell-connected enterprise, a gold mining venture named Rock Cabin Mining LLC, was successfully sued for breach of contract by a customer. “Defendants acted with an evil hand guided by an evil mind,” the plaintiff alleged in a fraud claim. Rock Cabin Mining promotional materials filed as part of the case showed that it claimed it could mine about $23 million of gold annually. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2018.

Documents filed in federal court portray the mining venture as a total failure. In response to Rock Cabin Mining’s bankruptcy plan, a United States Trustee wrote, “There is simply no credible evidence that the Debtor will be able to mine any gold at all much less generate over $6 million in one year from what is currently just raw land.” Nor was it the first time that one of McDowell’s companies had failed in a gold mining venture, according to court documents. The bankruptcy case ended disastrously for creditors with the trustee only managing to collect 82 cents, according to court records.

An excerpt of a memorandum written by a United States Trustee as part of Rock Cabin Mining’s bankruptcy case.US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Arizona

Following the bankruptcies of Rock Cabin Mining and Canyons End, McDowell eventually took on a much more audacious project by forming Arizona Land Reserve with Tuminello. McDowell’s history of business failures did not prevent the partners from purchasing a large tract of land in an isolated section of northwestern Arizona.

David Shapiro, the Las Vegas businessman whose company sold Arizona Land Reserve the property and loaned it the $4.8 million to execute the transaction, told me McDowell has always paid him on time but that he hasn’t kept a close eye on his development efforts. Shapiro seemed unsure what to make of the venture when I described how McDowell’s company had raised money for Arizona Land Reserve and another project in Arizona.

According to the company’s website, “The purpose of Arizona Land Reserve is to acquire, develop and manage properties that provide our Investors with a constant 20% annual return for the next 20 years.” The company says that its next step is developing Valle Privado, a “1st class fly-in community catering to the desires of Luxury Home & Ranch Owners in Arizona that prefer to use private aviation to access their property.” In theory, Valle Privado residents will be able to land on a purpose-built mile-long runway.

That would be a major transformation in the section of Arizona where Arizona Land Reserve says it’s planning to build. A contractor who has worked on the project told me that the site is located in a notably poor section of Arizona with a number of “squatters” in the property’s general vicinity. He also said that, as of last year, the site required miles of offroad driving to access. 

“Promises of consistent double-digit returns are consistently frauds,” the SEC warns in a “Five Questions to Ask Before You Invest” guide on its website. But that’s not the only part of Arizona Land Reserve’s investment strategy that raises red flags. In a press release posted on Arizona Land Reserve’s Facebook page, the company said it planned to initially raise $20 million in exchange for a 20 percent equity stake in the company. That would value the venture at $100 million and require annual dividend payments of $4 million to investors.

An operating agreement for Arizona Land Reserve obtained by Mother Jones shows that Tuminello and McDowell took an 80 percent ownership stake, despite having contributed only $50,000 each, according to the document.

To generate revenue while the Arizona land was being developed, the company said it planned to “actively acquire, with $14,000,000 of capital, 3,000 Bank Owned (REO) multi-family apartments located in central and mid-western states.” That works out to a cost of less than $5,000 per unit, unless the company borrowed heavily. I asked Shapiro, whose company holds the debt on Arizona Land Reserve’s property, if he thought it was possible to obtain that many properties with that amount of capital. He provided a one-word response: “No.” 

One of the investors McDowell and Tuminello pitched, and who asked to remain anonymous, recalled being flown by helicopter over the proposed development site. He said that Flippo was present at several meetings with McDowell and Tuminello and appeared to be representing the interests of Arizona Land Reserve. The prospective investor said he grew wary of their company and ultimately declined to invest. (Tuminello did not respond to a request for comment.)

Arizona Land Reserve seems to have had better luck with other prospects. A document filed with the SEC earlier this year states that the company has sold more than $6.8 million of the $20 million in securities it hopes to place. On the form, the company also makes the improbable claim that it recently brought in between $25 and $100 million in revenue.

One person listed in FEC records as a major donor to Flippo’s campaigns told me they had not donated anything to Flippo, let along the thousands of dollars attributed to them. Fischer said that “suggests very serious campaign finance violations.” 

From the outset, Flippo and Arizona Land Reserve appear to have been closely intertwined. Prior to the formation of Arizona Land Reserve, Tuminello spoke at a May 2024 campaign event for Flippo during his first run for Congress, a video from the event shows. In May 2025, as Flippo mounted a new bid for Congress, McDowell and Tuminello became some of his first donors outside of the candidate’s family members. Soon after, Arizona Land Reserve sent its $50,000 to the Nevada Republican Party. The following year came its $50,000 donations to the Turning Point PAC and the Freedom Caucus Fund.

Flippo’s close involvement with the company raises the prospect that he may have used the venture as a vehicle to curry favor with influential Republicans. The congressional candidate may have also helped to provide Arizona Land Reserve with a sense of legitimacy. The company’s public Facebook page includes photos of Flippo at two events. It singles him out as a featured guest at a November 2025 watch party for a Las Vegas F1 race, where Flippo was photographed on a high-rise balcony with a cigar in hand. He also attended a 2025 business aviation conference in Las Vegas with Tuminello, the Facebook page shows.

Flippo at a 2025 F1 watch party promoted by Arizona Land Reserve.Facebook

Flippo has also benefitted from major donations from others in McDowell’s and Tuminello’s orbits, FEC records show. Those donations tended to arrive in the final days of the FEC’s quarterly reporting periods, when candidates are under pressure to demonstrate the viability of their campaigns. (Flippo’s six-figure loans to his campaign followed a similar pattern.) On September 30, 2025, at least five people with ties to McDowell or Tuminello were listed as donating the legal maximum of $7,000 to Flippo’s campaign. 

That included Brenda Lee McGarry, McDowell’s ex-wife. Another donor listed under the first and middle name of a woman who has posted about being McDowell’s current wife was reported as donating $3,500 that day. (Neither McGarry or McDowell’s partner responded to requests for comment.)

One person listed in FEC records as a major donor to Flippo’s campaigns told me they had not donated anything to Flippo, let alone the thousands of dollars attributed to them. Fischer said that “suggests very serious campaign finance violations.” 

“Making a donation in the name of another person is a clear violation of the law,” he explained. “It’s a violation of the straw donor ban, which is one of the most serious violations in campaign finance law, and one that can potentially result in criminal penalties.” 

Outside of Flippo’s own family, federal records show that McDowell’s and Tuminello’s circles have been Flippo’s most important source of fundraising. During key quarters in 2025, his outside fundraising would have been significantly diminished without the money of people they appear to know. 

Along with their business dealings, McDowell and Tuminello have also both been affiliated with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which the Anti-Defamation League considers an “anti-government extremist group.” The group’s central (and unfounded) claim, according to the ADL, is that sheriffs are the ultimate legal authority in their jurisdictions. 

CSPOA placed particular emphasis on efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election. In a September 2022 email obtained by CalMatters, Tuminello, who has acted as a spokesman for the group, emailed Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, California, to say that CSPOA could help assist with “Election Integrity” efforts. “This is our Primary focus at the CSPOA!” he added. 

Flippo has staked out his own right-wing positions, including a pledge to introduce a bill banning Sharia law as his first piece of legislation if elected. This week, Flippo was invited to debate his Democratic opponent, where he would have likely faced questions about his policy stances and about the overlapping controversies that have dogged his campaign. But Flippo declined to attend. 

One question the debate moderator could have posed was whether Flippo had in fact filed the financial disclosure form he recently provided to the media. “All successfully filed records are posted on the Clerk’s website,” Ben Kelley, a spokesperson for the House Clerk’s office, said. No records for Flippo have been posted on that website.

Among the oddities in the Flippo disclosure document provided to the media, Fischer noted, was that a few pages were missing. That includes the page where the candidate must sign the document, under penalty of potential civil and criminal sanctions, and attest that its contents are “true, complete, and correct.”

In light of all the irregularities, Fischer said, “I don’t even know how to describe what this report is.”