EVEN THOUGH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S EFFORTS to bend elections to his will have so far largely failed, don’t mistake defeat for retreat. The federal government’s highest power centers are working overtime to tilt the election in the administration’s favor.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice sued California, accusing the state of harboring noncitizens on its voter rolls. The suit was filed forty-eight hours after DOJ mailed county election officials a password-protected thumb drive purportedly containing a list of alleged noncitizen voters. This item was delivered with an ultimatum: use the list within the next two days to review the names and prepare to separate their mail-in ballots when returned—or get sued. An L.A. County official rejected the thumb drive as an insecure medium for such a list, and the lawsuit against the state followed.

On Friday, the administration escalated from litigation to threats of criminal prosecution. In a letter to Los Angeles County officials, DOJ warned that knowingly counting ballots from people federal agencies had identified as noncitizens could make election workers criminally liable—even though California officials say the administration has provided no evidence to substantiate its claims. Trump amplified the threat on Truth Social: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”

The administration’s tactics in California mirror what the Department of Homeland Security tried in Nevada, where Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls and sent a letter to state officials pressuring them to review each case. Upon scrutiny, that number fell to 185 and then to zero. The pretext for the purge completely fell apart, yet the Trump administration keeps pushing these sorts of voter-fraud narratives and making demands for election officials to go to great lengths to restrict voting access.

While January 6th showed Americans what one vivid form of election subversion looks like, schemes of that sort rarely announce themselves with the clamor of an insurrection. More often, they are carried out through the subtle machinery of government: paperwork, pressure, propaganda. And the authoritarians in the Trump administration are not discouraged by failure. They’re like battering rams, hammering at the system again and again, hoping it will eventually break down in a way that benefits them.

So don’t miss what’s happening now. Trump’s election interference effort is well underway.

Swinging against the system

The falsehood that has been used to provide a basis for all the administration’s actions is simple: They pretend voter fraud is widespread. This initial lie has a natural corollary in turn: The only way to stop the fraud is to put the Trump administration in charge of who gets to vote.

Based on this false framework, Trump has issued a pair of executive orders intended to put his appointees in a position to control who can vote in our elections. The administration has interpreted these orders expansively as an instruction for agencies to create new voter requirements, to compel the states to provide unredacted voter rolls, and to prohibit mail-in ballots unless voters were placed on a new federal voter registry. Those plans faced heavy resistance, even in red states, as the Constitution strictly leaves the power to administer elections to the states.

When those efforts faltered, Trump pivoted. He demanded that Congress pass the SAVE America Act to enact some of these restrictions and requirements, but even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t pass it. At the same time, DOJ tried to get the voter data another way: by suing states to hand it over. But the courts are shutting those efforts down, too; the Trump administration is 0–26 in those cases, with Republican-appointed judges delivering some of those defeats. Additionally, the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the postal rule, keeping mail-in voting safe, secure, and out of Trump’s hands for now.

DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in terrorism preparedness grants unless states and local governments accepted the imposition of FEMA’s de facto nationwide election code. The agency’s demands included stipulations about what kind of voting equipment to use; the means by which voters cast ballots; how post-election audits and ballot reconciliation processes are conducted; and how to make citizenship checks on voters and election workers. A judge recently blocked DHS from withholding the grants, and FEMA has rescinded the unlawful election-related requirements the agency had attempted to impose.

At this point, Trump should have taken the dozens of Nos to amount to a larger No. He didn’t. He keeps pounding away.

Trump gave a primetime speech in July, during which he accused

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Trump said California officials who count ballots of suspected non-citizens 'will all go to jail for a long period of time.'

A recent Bloomberg report has sparked speculation among some players that GTA 6 could be unfinished just weeks before launch. However, comments about Rockstar continuing to make changes to the game have been taken out of context. Here is what the developer actually said about the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.

Rockstar’s GTA 6 Development Comments explained

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier recently published an extensive report about the making of GTA 6. However, a rumor that Grand Theft Auto VI was not completed yet only weeks before launch spread online, after some players took several quotes from the Bloomberg piece out of context.

In the report, Rockstar’s Phil Hooker explained that the studio has continued making changes to the game even months before launch: “The game’s never completely settled. We never have an exact blueprint. Even within the last few months, we’ve changed things.”

The quote doesn’t say that GTA 6 as a whole is unfinished weeks before release. It also doesn’t suggest that Rockstar plans to ship Grand Theft Auto VI with missing features or significant compromises.

The quote was largely talking about Grand Theft Auto VI being so ambitious on a technical level, that they continue to make refinements due to just how complex the game is. It was also explaining why the game took so long to get made.

Rockstar’s GTA 6 Comments Need More Context

One detail being overlooked is that Schreier visited Rockstar North in September. That places the conversation months before the game’s late November launch, rather than in the final days before release.

The wording matters here, too. Hooker said the team had changed things “within the last few months.” That doesn’t establish how significant those changes were or suggest that major features still needed to be completed. It also doesn’t give us context what build they were on, or when exactly those changes were made.

The other aspect I think that should be considered, is the context with which the quote was given. In their conversation with Jason Schreier, Rockstar were talking about just how complex GTA 6 is on a technical level. To demonstrated this, here is an excerpt from Schreier and Rockstar describing how a night club works in GTA 6:

“Designing a club for a typical video game might mean generating a few nonplayable characters in different-colored shirts, says top artist Aaron Garbut. In GTA VI, though, it means animating and scripting each individual patron, creating drinks, adding music, crafting lighting, matching the music to that lighting and composing all the other “layers and layers and layers of detail” that make a virtual club feel as authentic as possible.”

That example helps explain the level of detail Rockstar is working towards with GTA 6 and gives a little more context about the changes they continue to make given how complex the game’s systems are. All this to say, panic around Grand Theft Auto VI being “incomplete” seem to largely be unwarranted and started from a misunderstanding of Jason Schreier’s excellent report on the development of the game.

The post No, Rockstar Didn’t Say GTA 6 Is Unfinished Weeks Before Launch appeared first on VICE.

Magic: The Gathering is preparing to return to the world of Marvel Comics once again with the upcoming Marvel’s History of Heroes product and the full list of all 30 cards has just been revealed.

All 30 Cards in Secret Lair: Marvel’s History of Heroes

Magic: The Gathering has returned to the world of Marvel quite a few times lately and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down its pace. In addition to the upcoming Darkhold-themed set that arrives in April 2027, there is also a new Secret Lair Countdown Kit bringing more Marvel reprints and alternate art to the Secret Lair collection.

Each copy of Secret Lair Countdown Kit: Marvel’s History of Heroes contains 30 individually packaged Magic cards, each of which represents an era or moment from the history of the Marvel Universe. These cards randomly appear in non-foil, foil, or—when the stars and spells align—surge foil.

Marvel’s History of Heroes launches on November 2, 2026. The Secret Lair Countdown Kit: Marvel’s History of Heroes will cost collectors $199.99.

Here is the full list of all cards included in Secret Lair: Marvel’s History of Heroes:

• Fierce Guardianship
• Molten Duplication
• Unbreakable Formation
• Timber Protector
• Devastation
• Heroic Intervention
• Opposition Agent
• Fighter Class
• Vigor
• Biorhythm
• Tainted Pact
• With Great Power
• Mjolnir, Storm Hammer
• Champion’s Helm
• Force of Virtue
• Court of Bounty
• Unholy Heat
• Villainous Wrath
• Damning Verdict
• Primal Might
• Damn
• Genesis Wave
• Fiery Confluence
• Beta Ray Bill
• Doctor Strange, Master of Magic
• Rogue’s Gloves
• Snuff Out
• Titanic Ultimatum
• Collective Effort
• Lightning Bolt

A particularly interesting inclusion in the Countdown Kit is the appearance of two cards from a set that hasn’t been released yet. Doctor Strange, Master of Magic and Beta Ray Bill both appear in Secret Lair Countdown Kit: Marvel’s History of Heroes, representing the arcane and godlike corners of the Marvel Universe.

These are two uncommon cards from the main set of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel: Darkhold Destiny. Both cards will be legal in all formats starting with Magic: The Gathering | Marvel: Darkhold Destiny Prerelease events, which begin on April 2, 2027.

As always, shoppers should keep in mind that Secret Lair products are limited print runs and tend to sell out very quickly. That means that interested Marvel fans will want to act quickly and secure an order as soon as the Secret Lair drop goes on sale.

Be sure to check back soon for more Magic: The Gathering news and updates.

Magic: The Gathering is available now at local game shops and digitally through Magic Arena.

The post Magic: The Gathering Reveals Every Card in Marvel’s History of Heroes appeared first on VICE.

Druids are one of the most versatile classes in World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons is attempting to recreate that flexibility with recommendations for how to play all four different Druid specializations at the tabletop.

D&D: World of Warcraft Character Creation Guide for All Druid Specs

Druids are a fan-favorite World of Warcraft class that allows players to tank, heal, or heal damage. They have a ton of utility and seem very likely to be equally popular for Dungeons and Dragons players as they form their parties for upcoming adventures in Azeroth.

Druids call upon the power of land, sea, and sky to tear their enemies apart and put their friends back together. Skilled shapeshifters, elementalists, guardians, and healers, Druids are versatile and adaptable spellcasters.

Every Druid in World of Warcraft learns new beast forms: Cat Form, Bear Form, and Travel Form (which includes an Aquatic Form and a Flight Form). These forms take on unique stat blocks for Druids with access to Circle Forms. For Druids without the Circle Forms feature, certain Beast stat blocks are made available.

Druids are already a Dungeons and Dragons class, so that gives players an easy place to start. Once their class is selected, players will want to take one of these branching paths, depending on their specialization preference:

• Balance – Leverage the sacred powers of the moons, the sun, and the stars to keep the elemental forces of the cosmos in equilibrium.
  • The Balance Druid selects the Circle of the Stars subclass and uses the versatility of its Starry Form to take on the appearance of moonkin and adapt their magical aptitude to their circumstances.
• Feral – Pursue a visceral connection to the wild—nature’s eternal dance between predator and prey.
  • The Feral Druid represents nature red in tooth and claw, using the Circle of the Moon subclass and a unique Cat Form to rip nearby foes apart.
• Guardian – Commune with the wild to better understand how life perseveres through adversity.
  • Guardian Druids also use the Circle of the Moon to take on a unique Bear Form that stands between their fellow adventurers and danger, converting magical energy into Temporary Hit Points and imposing Disadvantage on enemy attack rolls.
• Restoration – Where there is decay, bring rejuvenation. Where there is devastation, bring regrowth.
  • The Restoration Druid will pick the Circle of the Land subclass to reflect their relationship with nature’s cycle and use new spells to continuously heal allies.

That should be everything Dungeons and Dragons players need at this point to start formulating ideas for their Druids before the Dungeons and Dragons: World of Warcraft book officially arrives in November.

Be sure to check back soon for lots more Dungeons and Dragons news and updates as the World of Warcraft gameplay expansion release date approaches.

Dungeons and Dragons is available now at local game shops and digitally through D&D Beyond, Roll20, and similar online services. The Dungeons and Dragons: World of Warcraft gameplay expansion releases on November 17, 2026.

The post Dungeons and Dragons: World of Warcraft – How To Play a Balance, Feral, Guardian, or Restoration Druid appeared first on VICE.

The Fortnite Power Hour today features boosted Trick or Treat Sprite appearances and an enhanced Freddy’s Nightmare for everyone dropping into a match. Here are today’s Fortnitemares Power Hour start times, all featured Trick or Treat Sprites, and the bonuses available during both sessions.

What Time Is Fortnite Power Hour Today?

The first Fortnite Power Hour today starts at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET on Saturday, October 17, 2026. If you can’t make the first session, don’t panic! A second round begins later tonight at 6 PM PT / 9 PM ET.

Both sessions last two hours, giving players four hours total to hunt for Trick or Treat Sprites. Depending on where you live, some or all of the event will take place on Sunday, October 18 instead.

To make this easier to track, here is a table showing the Fortnite Power Hour schedule for October 17:

Fortnite Power Hour #1 (October 17)

Region	Date	Time
PT (West Coast US)	October 17	11:00 AM–1:00 PM
ET (East Coast US)	October 17	2:00 PM–4:00 PM
UTC	October 17	6:00 PM–8:00 PM
UK (BST)	October 17	7:00 PM–9:00 PM
Europe (CEST)	October 17	8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Brazil (BRT)	October 17	3:00 PM–5:00 PM
Japan (JST)	October 18	3:00 AM–5:00 AM
South Korea (KST)	October 18	3:00 AM–5:00 AM
Australia (Sydney/Melbourne, AEDT)	October 18	5:00 AM–7:00 AM
New Zealand (NZDT)	October 18	7:00 AM–9:00 AM

Fortnite Power Hour #2 (October 17)

Region	Date	Time
PT (West Coast US)	October 17	6:00 PM–8:00 PM
ET (East Coast US)	October 17	9:00 PM–11:00 PM
UTC	October 18	1:00 AM–3:00 AM
UK (BST)	October 18	2:00 AM–4:00 AM
Europe (CEST)	October 18	3:00 AM–5:00 AM
Brazil (BRT)	October 17–18	10:00 PM–12:00 AM
Japan (JST)	October 18	10:00 AM–12:00 PM
South Korea (KST)	October 18	10:00 AM–12:00 PM
Australia (Sydney/Melbourne, AEDT)	October 18	12:00 PM–2:00 PM
New Zealand (NZDT)	October 18	2:00 PM–4:00 PM

All Trick or Treat Sprites Featured in Today’s Fortnite Power Hour

Trick or Treat Sprites will appear more frequently during today’s Fortnite Power Hours. If you’re still missing some of the Halloween variants from your collection, this is a good opportunity to track them down.

More importantly, today is the perfect time to unlock the Trick or Treat One Wish Willow Sprite and Trick or Treat Honey Sprite. Both Sprites recently arrived in the October 15 update, and their Halloween variants are included in today’s featured collection.

There are currently 25 Trick or Treat Sprites to collect, excluding the Trick or Treat Crown Sprite. Here is the full list:

• Trick or Treat 8-Bit Sprite
• Trick or Treat Adventure Sprite
• Trick or Treat Birthday Sprite
• Trick or Treat Blinky Sprite
• Trick or Treat Bush Sprite
• Trick or Treat Crash Bandicoot Sprite
• Trick or Treat Dumpster Dive Sprite
• Trick or Treat Honey Sprite
• Trick or Treat Jackrabbit Sprite
• Trick or Treat Jonesy Sprite
• Trick or Treat Killswitch Sprite
• Trick or Treat Klombo Sprite
• Trick or Treat Morgana Sprite
• Trick or Treat One Wish Willow Sprite
• Trick or Treat Onigiri Sprite
• Trick or Treat Overshield Sprite
• Trick or Treat Pond Sprite
• Trick or Treat Shadow Sprite
• Trick or Treat Sonic Sprite
• Trick or Treat Spooky Dash Sprite
• Trick or Treat Storm Scout Sprite
• Trick or Treat Tails Sprite
• Trick or Treat The Deer Sprite
• Trick or Treat Vampire Sprite
• Trick or Treat X-Ray Sprite

The Trick or Treat Crown Sprite is separate from the list above and isn’t included in the collection count for today’s hunt.

All Fortnite Fortnitemares Power Hour Bonuses Today

Everyone starts today’s Fortnite Power Hour matches with an enhanced Freddy’s Nightmare Mythic item. Freddy Krueger’s weapon lets you move faster while equipped and slash through opponents, so you’ll have a powerful item in hand from the beginning.

Chests also have a chance to drop 1-Up Tokens and Portable Extractors, giving you another reason to keep looting while searching for Halloween Sprites.

Here is everything featured during today’s Fortnitemares Power Hours:

• Enhanced Freddy’s Nightmare: Everyone starts the match with Freddy Krueger’s Mythic item, which boosts movement speed while equipped and lets you slash enemies.
• Boosted Trick or Treat Sprite appearances: The Halloween Sprite variant appears more often during both sessions.
• 1-Up Tokens: May drop from Chests.
• Portable Extractors: May also drop from Chests.

How Long Does Fortnite Power Hour Last Today?

Each Fortnite Power Hour session lasts two hours today. The first runs from 11 AM to 1 PM PT, while the second takes place from 6 PM to 8 PM PT on October 17.

You don’t need to attend both sessions, but the evening round gives you another chance to find any Trick or Treat Sprites you missed earlier. With boosted appearances and Portable Extractors potentially dropping from Chests, today is the perfect time to work on your Halloween collection.

The post Fortnite Power Hour Today (October 17): Start Times and All Trick or Treat Sprites appeared first on VICE.

At 16, I was entrusted with one of the most important pieces of technology at a suburban Chili’s: a wire rack full of restaurant pagers.

The restaurant occupied a sprawling shopping center alongside an Olive Garden, a Cabela’s and a Costco, making it something of a regional mecca for homecoming dinners, birthday parties and Little League victories. The air smelled perpetually of tortilla chips, and the soundtrack was an agreeable mixture of Matchbox Twenty and sizzling fajita platters.

I liked the job. I liked asking people what brought them in, hearing about their celebrations and making small talk while consulting my restaurant map and section list. On busy nights, I’d estimate the wait, scribble down a last name, party size and pager number in black pen, then hand over a pleasantly hefty plastic puck.

“You can wander as far as your car,” I’d explain.

“Ope! Was hoping to make a Costco run,” some dad would inevitably reply. I laughed every time. It was a very reliable joke.

Every five or 15 minutes, another pager returned to the host stand, blinking and vibrating in the hands of a customer whose table was finally ready. I particularly liked watching one go off. A group could be deep in conversation when the puck sprang to life, producing a brief, collective flicker of delight. Dinner!

They were not beautiful objects. One woman who came in weekly after church complained that hers was ugly and bulky, then set it on the red pleather waiting bench so that it would vibrate against the upholstery rather than any part of her body. Occasionally, someone stole one, apparently deciding that a restaurant pager belonged in the same category of souvenir as a pebbled Coke glass. Sometimes the rechargeable batteries flagged, and we’d pull a pager out of rotation.

There was a reason these contraptions belonged to the Chili’s end of the dining spectrum. You wouldn’t mistake one for fine-dining theater. But they had an appealingly limited set of ambitions. They buzzed, they blinked, and when the wait was over, we took them back. The technology stayed at the restaurant.

In retrospect, what a gift. 

I don’t remember exactly when the pagers mostly disappeared. There was no retirement ceremony, no last call for the little plastic puck. I began noticing their absence most acutely when restaurants reopened after the first wave of the pandemic. Minimizing shared surfaces made sense then. Why distribute and disinfect pagers when customers already had phones in their pockets? Digital waitlists predated COVID-19, of course, but for me, that was when the phone began to feel less like an option and more like a condition of dining out.

And it rarely stops at the host stand. Your phone tells you the table is ready. It may supply the menu via QR code, take your order and settle the bill. Hours later, another text arrives asking you to rate the experience.

At some point, the meal has ended, but the restaurant apparently hasn’t finished with you.

None of this is inherently awful. Some of it is useful. But every time I wake my phone to perform one of these little tasks, I’m also opening the door to everything else it contains: emails, notifications, messages I wasn’t planning to answer over lunch. What was supposed to simplify dinner can turn it into another administrative process requiring a charged device and a willingness to look at it.

Restaurants are hardly alone in this. I reach for my phone to ride public transit, pay for parking, produce concert tickets, check in at the doctor’s office and occasionally prove to one website that I am the person trying to sign into another. Each request arrives dressed as a convenience. Together, they have made the phone feel less like a personal possession and more like mandatory civic infrastructure.

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And mandatory infrastructure really ought to work.

For a while, I happily used the Ventra card on my phone to ride Chicago public transit. One less thing to carry! Then, for a miserable stretch, several Red Line stations I frequented seemed to stop recognizing it. One morning, I joined a small congregation of commuters attempting to convince the turnstiles that our phones were, in fact, perfectly legitimate fare payment.

“It worked yesterday!” one man exclaimed.

“The terminals are old! They weren’t meant for this,” a tired CTA employee explained, kindly ushering us through the stroller entrance as the next train rumbled toward the platform.

The backup plan wasn’t faring much better. Around the same time, the ticket machines were proving similarly unreliable about accepting credit cards. A little queue had formed at the station ATM, where commuters were withdrawing cash to buy physical transit cards so they could get on the train.

We had arrived at the future, and it required a trip to the cash machine.

After a few weeks of this, I surrendered. I now carry a physical Ventra card, load $20 onto it when necessary and go about my business. It gets me through the turnstile without involving my phone. A modest pleasure, but one I’ve come to appreciate.

The trouble isn’t that every digital convenience is destined to malfunction. Plenty work exactly as advertised. It’s that we’ve become so accustomed to conducting ordinary life through our phones that we rarely stop to consider whether they’re necessary to the transaction in the first place.

Consider, for instance, a recent brunch in which absolutely nothing went wrong.

Recently, my husband and I went to a brunch spot I love in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. The front-of-house staff always seem to be navigating the aftermath of a complicated breakup between two polycules, but the breakfast sandwich  is truly good enough to make the interpersonal intrigue part of the charm. I wanted to do very little beyond sit somewhere pleasant, eat something delicious and enjoy being newly married. There was a short wait. The host asked for my number; I provided it, then sat with my husband in two lobby chairs. We chatted. We waited. We did not move.

My phone buzzed. Our table was ready.

I looked up. The host stand was approximately two feet away.

The system had worked flawlessly. Somewhere, a piece of restaurant software had facilitated communication between two people who could reasonably have passed each other a saltshaker. The host hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had I. But a moment that might once have involved someone looking up and saying, “You’re all set,” now required me to be reachable by a device I had no particular desire to consult.

I understand the alternative. A digital waitlist lets you wander around the neighborhood, browse the shops, maybe get a head start on another errand. Sometimes that’s a genuine gift. But I’m not convinced that being able to do two things at once means enjoying either one more. And sometimes I don’t want to wander. I want to be there, waiting for brunch, with the reassuring knowledge that the restaurant is handling the details.

That’s part of the pleasure of hospitality, isn’t it? For a little while, someone else tends to the logistics. You don’t need to manage every notification or keep every system running. You can just be a guest.

I don’t expect restaurant owners to read this and order a fresh shipment of vibrating pucks. If texts work best, fine. I’d simply like us to question whether requiring a phone is always an improvement, and remember that convenience isn’t much of a convenience when opting out stops being possible.

Maybe the pager never comes back. I can live with that. I’d just like to be able to let my phone die in my bag and still be called to breakfast.

Though I will say this for those ugly little pagers: At least you could hand one back.

The post I miss the restaurant pager appeared first on Salon.com.

I remember being absolutely amazed that there was a college where I could actually live on campus with my son.

Magic: The Gathering’s next big set officially launches in just about a little less than a month, but it sounds like some of the products may unfortunately be delayed due to production and shipping issues.

Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek Commander Decks Likely Delayed in North America

Reality Fracture just arrived a few weeks ago, but it’s already time to begin looking ahead to the next major Magic: The Gathering set. Spoiler season begins next week for the upcoming Star Trek-themed Universes Beyond set and the set is scheduled to arrive in stores on November 13.

That said, some unfortunately shipping and production issues may impact that release date for some of the products. Luckily, Play Boosters and Prerelease Packs are on track for availability during Prerelease and release events.

Other products may be delayed depending on your region. Some products may arrive after Prerelease events on November 6, while others may arrive after the set’s tabletop release on November 13.

“These delays are fluid, as our logistics teams are working to speed up timelines where possible, so always check with your local game store or retailer for availability information.”

As of today, here is the list of which products are impacted in each region:

• North America
  • Commander decks are delayed and may arrive after the tabletop release date.
• Europe, The Middle East, and Africa
  • Collector Boosters (English, French, and German languages) are delayed and may arrive after the tabletop release date.
  • Commander decks (French and German languages) are delayed and may arrive after Prerelease.
  • Collector’s Edition Commander decks are delayed and may arrive after Prerelease, with additional quantities arriving after the tabletop release date.
  • Commander decks (English language), Draft Night, Scene Boxes, and Beam Me Up Bundles are delayed and may arrive after the tabletop release date.
• Asia-Pacific
  • Collector Boosters, Omega Collector Boosters (single Collector Boosters available at larger retailers), Bundles, Beam Me Up Bundles, and Draft Night are delayed and may arrive after the tabletop release date.
  • For New Zealand, Scene Boxes are delayed and may arrive after the tabletop release date.

Commander is an incredibly popular format in North America, so there will definitely be plenty of players eagerly awaiting the arrival of those preconstructed decks. We’ll be sure to stay posted on the latest updates and share any new schedule details as they become official.

Be sure to check back soon for lots more Magic: The Gathering news and updates as the Star Trek set’s launch date approaches.

Magic: The Gathering is available now at local game shops and digitally through Magic Arena. The Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek products are aiming for a November 13 launch.

The post Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek Commander Decks Are Delayed appeared first on VICE.

Several homes have been damaged as fire crews work to contain the Norte fire in Southern California.

“I can call you whatever the hell I want,” the president said at a campaign rally as polls point to a close Michigan Senate race.

Bulkhead has responded to Wardogs Season 2 backlash, admitting that its progression changes in the new patch were the “wrong call.” Following complaints from players, the studio has promised balance fixes and is even considering releasing Season 3 content early.

Wardogs Developer Apologizes For Season 2 Launch

Wardogs Season 2 recently launched and quickly sparked backlash from players upset that the new content was too easy to complete. Many complained that the update didn’t deliver the fresh start they expected, with some users even unlocking most of the end-game gear within days of the wipe. Now, developer Bulkhead has responded to the criticism in a post on X.

“Season 2 was meant to be a fresh start, and for a lot of you it hasn’t felt like one. We sped up progression on deliberately and tried to balance the game better, as set out in the patch notes, but it was the wrong call. Some players are reaching end game gear like Tier 4 armour and MBTs within days, so the wipe never really landed.”

ANNOUNCEMENT

Season 2 was meant to be a fresh start, and for a lot of you it hasn't felt like one. We sped up progression on deliberately and tried to balance the game better, as set out in the patch notes, but it was the wrong call.

Some players are reaching end game gear…

— WARDOGS (@WARDOGS) October 17, 2026

Bulkhead then admitted that Wardogs Season 2 had balance issues that they plan to fix. “Some things are clearly out of balance and we’ll fix them. Others have the community split, so we want to see how those play out first.”

Will Wardogs Season 2 Get a Reset?

Despite calls for another progression wipe, Bulkhead confirmed that it will not reset Wardogs Season 2 this weekend. According to the developer, doing so would be unfair to players who are already enjoying the progression.

Instead, the studio is considering a significantly earlier launch for Season 3, along with some of its planned content, to give players another fresh start. Bulkhead says it will share more details in its developer vlog next week.

Whether that will be enough to turn around player sentiment remains to be seen. For now, Bulkhead is working on balance fixes, with an earlier Season 3 potentially giving players the fresh start they expected from Season 2.

The post Wardogs Developer Responds to Season 2 Backlash appeared first on VICE.

Kennedy Ward was doing a feeding a group of stray cats in her local neighborhood when, in one moment, her life changed forever.

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

DeLong, 34, was facing capital punishment for five counts of murder. In January 1999, he had killed his ex-girlfriend Erin Vanderhoef—who was shortly due to deliver their child, a daughter they had named Hannah—as well as the three school-age children she’d had with two other men. DeLong had entered their decaying clapboard house in Springfield, Missouri, on the morning of January 19 and strangled each member of the family using scarves and cords, hog-tying Erin and gagging two of the children. When he was arrested several days later, he promptly confessed to each of the murders and immediately became the most hated man in Springfield. Short wished she didn’t have to take the case, but it was her duty as a public defender.

When, after several weeks, she finally forced herself to look at the crime-scene photos, she saw that the bodies of the children were partly hidden by debris—clothes, a plastic lawn chair, an overturned lamp. One of the boys, 10-year-old Chris, was still in bed; the other boy, 11-year-old Jimmy, had been left on the floor. Vanderhoef herself lay on her side on a rug in the living room, her blue top riding up over her pregnant belly. The youngest of the children, 8-year-old Darlene, was found in her sky-blue pajamas, tossed upside down onto a heap of garbage in the corner of her room, a jacket thrown over her face.

Short was then raising two young children of her own, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to hide her revulsion from a jury. “As a public defender, I’d seen all sorts of things, but it was the first time where I thought, I don’t know that I can stand in the courtroom next to him,” she told me when we first spoke by phone, in January. She also doubted that she could do much to help DeLong. He had committed a horrific crime and then admitted to it in a hateful taped confession.

In capital trials in the United States, proceedings are typically split into two phases: The first phase establishes a defendant’s guilt or innocence; if a jury returns a guilty verdict, it then determines in the second phase whether the defendant is sentenced to death or to life in prison. Prosecutors sometimes agree not to pursue capital punishment in exchange for a guilty plea, and on Short’s advice, DeLong did offer to plead guilty and waive all appeals in exchange for life without parole. But the prosecutors had no interest in a deal.

Because DeLong’s guilt was not in question, Short would focus on the sentencing phase. In capital cases, juries are instructed to consider statutorily defined aggravating factors cited by the prosecution—including, for instance, the death of multiple victims or of children, or the use of particularly sadistic methods of killing, all of which applied in DeLong’s case. Juries are told to weigh these aggravating factors against a much broader category of mitigating factors presented by the defense. These may include mental illness, intellectual disability, and a history of significant trauma or abuse. If the jury finds that the aggravators outweigh the mitigators, then it will likely hand down a penalty of death; if the mitigators prevail, then the jury will likely elect a lesser sentence, usually life in prison without parole. DeLong’s fate depended on Short’s ability to investigate his background and determine whether any possible mitigating evidence could be found that might persuade a jury to spare his life.

Despite deep misgivings, Short threw herself into the case. She had inherited her work ethic from her father, who helped manage the Apollo program as NASA’s vice president of space operations. His job took the family all around the country, from New Jersey to California, Virginia to Texas. Both she and her husband were attorneys; she’d earned her degree at Saint Louis University School of Law. Short worked grueling hours, spending six days a week at the office and traveling so often that her children became accustomed to her absence. Once, Short startled her 5-year-old son when she arrived home early from a long work trip. Assuming that she had lost her case, he asked, “Is the man dead?”

Short wasn’t opposed to the death penalty when she first started practicing law, but as she gained experience in capital cases, she came to doubt that the criminal legal system was capable of consistently producing fair and equal outcomes. Capital punishment is inherently arbitrary. Some defendants have money and seasoned legal teams at trial; others do not. Some prosecutors favor the death penalty and others don’t, meaning defendants might be executed not strictly because of the nature of their offense but because of the side of a state or county line on which they happened to commit it. As she came to understand the capriciousness of criminal justice, Short changed her mind about capital punishment. The experience of representing several defendants whom she believed had been wrongly accused strengthened her opposition.

To defend Rick DeLong, Short knew, she didn’t need to make the jury believe that he was a good man or that he shouldn’t receive a terrible punishment. In capital trials in Missouri, as in most states, juries must return a unanimous verdict for a death sentence to be handed down, so Short needed only to introduce a shred of doubt in a single juror’s mind that her client had forfeited his right to live.

But even that seemed daunting, given the repugnance that she, DeLong’s own lawyer, could not suppress. Short may have wished that she didn’t have to take this case, but it would ultimately change her perspective on criminal behavior and set her career on a new path, taking her from the public defender’s office to a field known as mitigation, then still developing but now a central feature of every legal defense in capital cases. Mitigators are investigators whose mission, now mandated by law and precedent, is the granular search for circumstances that might convince a jury that their clients deserve a lesser sentence; in their most crucial cases, these specialists are the final advocates for a defendant’s life. Short would help pioneer the field and become one of its foremost practitioners. But in January 1999, all she had was a guilty client and bad odds.

Doubt is central to mitigation: creating doubt that a person is wholly given over to evil, or doubt that there is no universe—no set of terrible circumstances—in which you yourself might commit a horrific crime. I do believe that there are people who commit acts of perfect evil; a frank appraisal of human nature suggests as much. But those who oppose capital punishment, as I do, oppose the death penalty even for the worst criminals in the worst cases. The reason to stay the executioner’s hand has less to do with the nature of the defendant than it does with the nature of society: Showing mercy is morally beneficial to everyone. The legal system, of course, does not think this way; it needs a solid rationale to hang decisions on, and it must establish that what appears to be abject wickedness, and nothing else, may in fact be more complicated and tragic.

The work of mitigation—searching for reasons a defendant’s life should be spared—is, unsurprisingly, not always well received in the legal community or by the public. As a society, we like to believe that our choices and actions are entirely within our control. Mitigators introduce an element of uncertainty. Their investigations routinely produce information that calls into question whether defendants would have, in better circumstances, committed their crimes at all. To some, this seems like making excuses for criminals.

For Short, now 65, mitigation isn’t about rationalizing crimes. “It is about telling the truth,” she told me. “The crime is real. The harm is real. Nothing I do changes that.” She does not wish to downplay suffering or to pretend that something awful did not happen. The goal of a mitigator, she said, is to understand how a person becomes a criminal. “Every life leaves a trail. Abuse, neglect, poverty, brain injury, trauma, addiction, resilience, acts of kindness, moments of courage—all become a part of that person’s story,” Short told me over email. “Mitigation is not the art of making people less guilty. It is the discipline of making sure we judge them as a whole human being.”

When Short was preparing for the DeLong case, mitigation had only just begun to emerge as a routine component of a legal defense in capital cases. It became formalized not long afterward, with the case of Kevin Wiggins. In September 1988, Wiggins, a Maryland construction worker, was charged with the murder of 77-year-old Florence Lacs. He had been arrested while driving her car and had already used her credit cards and pawned her jewelry. A jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. But Wiggins, who was intellectually disabled and had been sexually abused as a child, appealed the sentence on the grounds that his attorneys had not presented sufficient evidence of extenuating circumstances in his defense. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in Wiggins v. Smith in 2003.

The Wiggins decision held that capital defendants have a right to an effective defense, including an investigation into circumstances that might explain their crimes—a ruling that fueled the rise of mitigation work. In 2008, the American Bar Association revised its guidelines to direct defense teams in capital cases to include both an investigator, who conducts an independent inquiry into the crime itself, and a mitigation specialist, who is responsible for producing information that might convince a jury that there is something more to a client than their crime suggests.

Mitigators sift through the past and familiarize themselves with all elements of a defendant’s personal history. Fragments of clients’ lives may be strewn across the country or around the world, hidden among scattered documents and scattered memories. Mitigation specialists conduct scores of in-person interviews for each case—with extended family, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, co-workers—to put the pieces together. The Marshall Project estimates that there may be fewer than 1,000 mitigation specialists nationwide; the majority of them deal with capital cases. About twice that number of people are currently on death row.  

Because mitigation specialists often have little time to prepare their cases for trial, they frequently continue their investigations during the long death-penalty appeals process. Legal teams involved in capital cases are typically reluctant to discuss their findings if judicial processes remain ongoing, but at the Mwalimu Center for Justice, a law office in New Orleans that handles capital appeals, mitigation specialists on staff agreed to share information they had uncovered about some of their clients. Benjamin Cole, an Oklahoma man who murdered his infant daughter a few days before Christmas 2002, was found by specialists on his defense team to be schizophrenic; a brain scan revealed a severe lesion. Cole spoke in riddles and frequently broke into song while interacting with his defense team, until his disease became so advanced that he chose to sit in his dark prison cell hoarding religious pamphlets and rotting food while his hair grew matted and his mind decomposed. The mitigators argued that he was too sick to be subject to execution under the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, but state authorities were undeterred. Oklahoma executed Cole in 2022.

Sometimes mitigation, no matter how legitimate, cannot overcome people’s inherent disgust with horrific crimes. Cynthia Short was facing that very possibility.  

Short still hadn’t looked at the crime-scene photographs when she first met Rick DeLong, a few days after he was taken into custody in January 1999. But she had watched his maniacal taped confession, which would later be played at trial and shared with the Springfield News-Leader. “Now laugh,” he had reportedly said to 8-year-old Darlene Vanderhoef’s lifeless body as she lay thrown over a piece of bedroom furniture with an electrical cord around her neck. Even so, Short insisted on speaking with DeLong in person, with no partition between them and no shackles to hold him in place. He was much smaller than she had expected, thin and balding, and had a scraggly mullet and a dirty-blond beard.

In Short’s experience, clients facing capital charges sometimes open a first conversation by declaring suicidal intent: The path ahead otherwise leads to either death in a prison cell or death in an execution chamber. But DeLong clearly wanted to live. And surprisingly, he was obsessed with the well-being of another person: Stacie Leffingwell, his long-term partner and the mother of his youngest child. Leffingwell had helped him kill Erin Vanderhoef and her children. And she was dying from AIDS. “Everything in that first conversation was what could I do for Stacie?” Short recalled. “How could I help Stacie?”

In a photograph Short has seen, Leffingwell kneels next to DeLong and their infant son on a sunlit lawn, a mischievous smile flashing across her face. They had met in the early 1990s when DeLong was barbecuing in a friend’s backyard in Springfield and Leffingwell, a neighbor, dropped by and struck up a conversation.

Leffingwell was dark-haired, petite, and funny. Born in California in 1967 to a teenage heroin addict, she had dropped out of high school and never learned to read. DeLong and Leffingwell both used drugs, especially methamphetamines. When they met, Leffingwell was HIV-positive, but she didn’t tell DeLong. He himself was the child of a teenage mother. Born in Springfield in 1964, he grew up in poverty and was subjected to vicious assaults by his stepfather. He began using drugs at the age of 15 and was eventually snorting or smoking meth several times a week. He got by on intermittent jobs as a mechanic and manual laborer.

These details and more were revealed as Short worked with a mitigation specialist and former welfare caseworker named Kathy Schneider. The pair traveled six hours from Kansas City to Springfield and back each week to interview everyone they could find who knew DeLong. They interviewed people in parks and churches, and once went into a drug house in the middle of a snowstorm. Every month, Schneider went to see DeLong in jail, where she also interviewed his mother and sisters. Schneider created a history of DeLong’s family going back three generations, documenting the life of his biological father, a man known as Howard Littles, and his stepfather, Buzz, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill and institutionalized.

DeLong was a twice-divorced father of four when, in 1996, he was introduced to Erin Vanderhoef, who worked at a McDonald’s in Springfield. Vanderhoef had also suffered a life marked by poverty and loss, and she took a liking to DeLong right away, confiding in others that she was interested in him romantically, even though he was already involved with Leffingwell. They formed a close friendship.

DeLong had a child with Leffingwell, a son born in 1997 whom they named Lyle. Leffingwell had tried to stay clean during her pregnancy, but she resumed using drugs after the baby was born. She disappeared for a time, leaving DeLong alone to care for their newborn. Vanderhoef stepped in to help. When Leffingwell came home, she was in treatment for depression. DeLong and Vanderhoef by then were sleeping together. DeLong’s place was often in a state of chaos and frequented by drug users. Despite the infidelity and the strangeness of the arrangement, Leffingwell and Lyle moved in with Vanderhoef and her three children. A volatile love triangle developed.

In February 1998, DeLong and Leffingwell abruptly moved into a motel in Joplin, roughly 70 miles west of Springfield, near the Kansas border. But DeLong still saw Vanderhoef, and by summer she knew she was pregnant. The news sent Leffingwell into a bout of jealousy and deeper into addiction. That July, she was admitted to a hospital for pancreatitis and stayed for three weeks. She weighed less than 90 pounds. Leffingwell and DeLong told family and friends that she had stomach cancer. In fact, she was dying of AIDS. In September, DeLong himself was diagnosed with HIV. He began using meth every day.

In the days leading up to the murders, DeLong and Leffingwell went on a meth binge. On the night of January 18, 1999, Leffingwell was high and distraught, racked with fear that Vanderhoef was going to replace her. DeLong, for his part, was furious with Vanderhoef for messing up his relationship with Leffingwell. The couple came to the shared belief that Vanderhoef presented a problem, and Leffingwell demanded that DeLong fix it—permanently. Early the following morning, DeLong drove from Joplin to Springfield to kill Vanderhoef. Leffingwell rode with him, as did Harold “Bobby” Lingle, a friend and neighbor who had agreed to help carry out DeLong’s plan in exchange for an eight ball of meth.

At around eight that morning, they pulled up to Vanderhoef’s three-bedroom house. Lingle, who had met Vanderhoef before, lured her out of the house on the pretext of a grocery errand so that DeLong and Leffingwell could wait and catch her by surprise when she returned. Then DeLong slipped inside, where he found Vanderhoef’s three children getting ready for school. Wired on meth, DeLong killed them one by one. When Vanderhoef came back, Lingle told her that the children had been sent to their rooms. Then he and Leffingwell helped DeLong subdue and murder Vanderhoef. It was a cold mercy that she died thinking her children were still alive.

DeLong, Leffingwell, and Lingle were quickly apprehended. Leffingwell died of AIDS before the year was out. The lead Greene County prosecutor, Darrell Moore, decided not to seek the death penalty against Lingle, who was said to have an IQ of 72; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Moore was adamant about bringing capital charges against DeLong.

A series of delays pushed DeLong’s trial to June 2001. Public furor in Springfield ran hot, and press coverage was intense. When Short stood before the jurors, the first thing she said was that DeLong was unquestionably guilty. She acknowledged the horror and disgust that they were surely feeling. “There are things that we need to do in this courtroom,” she recalled telling the jury. “And one of those things that you’re going to need to do is, you’re going to need to really look closely at his mental state. That will be your job.”

But it would have to be a job mainly for phase two—the sentencing phase—rather than phase one, the guilt-or-innocence phase. No one was surprised when, on June 28, after a week and a half of testimony and less than four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Rick DeLong on all five counts of murder.

Short knew that the sentencing phase would be difficult. She knew this in part because she had used her own extended family and friends—some of whom were highly conservative and generally skeptical of the defendants she represented—as test subjects, a kind of informal focus group.

When Short and her team had finished their mitigation work, well before DeLong’s trial was scheduled to begin, they collated the findings into spiral-bound books, each more than 100 pages long. Inside were detailed descriptions of DeLong’s crimes, a DVD of his confession, photographs of the crime scene, and a photograph of Vanderhoef and her three children, young and bright and beautiful, posed on a bench in front of their mother, who is holding Lyle in her arms. The books also contained a detailed account of the mitigating factors in DeLong’s case, including his abusive stepfather, his drug addiction, and his HIV status. Scattered throughout were questionnaires asking readers for their reactions at various stages. The prompts had a clinical feel, as though Short were asking for opinions on a company’s new logo or a politician’s campaign slogan, not the killing of three children and a pregnant woman. If you did choose to look at the photographs, please describe what you learned from them. But it was the best simulation of a jury’s deliberation that Short could create.

The responses from her family and friends were not encouraging. At the beginning of the book, readers were asked to gauge their support for capital punishment in general. One reader put her support at a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, but after reading through the mitigation evidence, this same woman put her support for executing DeLong specifically at a 6. Her views were aligned with those of the prosecutor, Darrell Moore, who told reporters in advance of the sentencing phase that he and the judge had received numerous phone calls from angry citizens who wanted DeLong to die for his crimes. In front of the jury, Moore read a letter written by Vanderhoef’s brother in which he told DeLong, “You do not deserve the right to live, in a prison or any other place. You are not a man, you are a coward and an animal.”

On DeLong’s behalf, Short introduced the array of mitigating information that she and Kathy Schneider had compiled. Some of the material had been presented in phase one—a tactic known as front-loading. The idea was not to try to sway jurors on the question of guilt or innocence—in this instance, there was nothing to be done—but to prepare the jury for arguments that would be presented again, and enhanced, later on. Short was aware that much of the information could be seen as all too familiar: When it comes to defendants facing the death penalty, a life like DeLong’s is normal; very few people guilty of aggravated first-degree murder have peaceful, healthy backgrounds. But two aspects of his story had taken Short by surprise. First, as she combed through the police files, Short had noticed a coincidence: Mark Deeds, the officer who had coaxed the confession out of DeLong and emerged as the hero of the investigation, had encountered her client before.

In 1991, when DeLong was 27, he was arrested for selling cocaine and marijuana to Deeds, who was then working undercover for the Springfield Police Department. DeLong was so deeply enmeshed in the local drug culture that Deeds saw an opportunity. According to the testimony of DeLong’s former defense attorney, who negotiated a plea deal, Deeds threatened DeLong with decades in prison unless he began working as an informant. DeLong agreed. Police and prosecutors paid DeLong for information and granted him leniency on subsequent drug-related charges. At one point, his bond on arrest was reduced from $75,000 to $2,500. At another point, he received a sentence of five years’ probation for charges that ought to have resulted in prison time.

The policies of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole specifically prohibited offenders on probation from serving as police informants, but the department kept working with him anyway. Because of his protected status, DeLong continued to get little to no prison time when he was caught using. His addiction deepened. By the time of the murders, DeLong had helped Deeds and the Springfield Police Department clear a number of high-profile narcotics cases, even as he himself disintegrated from years of dependence. His career as a police informant came at the expense of any attempt at rehab—the one had simply precluded the other. Given all of this, Short asked, did the police bear any responsibility for DeLong’s condition?

The second discovery that Short and her team made came while going through DeLong’s medical records. A week before the murders, he had begun taking Sustiva, an experimental drug that can help slow the progression of HIV but whose side effects include dizziness, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, amnesia, agitation, and hallucinations. Patients abusing drugs or who have preexisting mental illness are at increased risk of developing neurological symptoms. And the drug’s side effects tend to be most severe when a patient is just starting to use the drug, as DeLong had been.

The witnesses for the defense included an addiction specialist who testified that DeLong’s meth use easily could have contributed to a shattered mental state; a medical specialist who confirmed that Sustiva is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis, and that the drug combined with meth could have disastrous results; and a psychiatrist who testified that DeLong had likely been in the grip of a psychotic episode when he carried out the murders.

Short did not know what to expect when the jury began to deliberate. The new information had raised provocative questions about a case whose conclusion had once seemed preordained. In the end, the jury declined to impose the death penalty. It instead sentenced DeLong to life without parole.

In 2003, Short left her job with the Public Defender’s Office due to a round of funding cuts, and decided to become a full-time mitigation specialist. In the 23 years since then, she says that she has worked with approximately 200 clients, none of whom has received the death penalty. Her attitude toward the field, as a practical matter, can be simply put: If mitigators are able to present a full picture of a defendant’s life, then no reasonable jury will return a verdict of death, not even for the most brutal killer. Her job is to persuade jurors to bestow something that she feels everyone deserves. “Mercy is not something that is earned,” she said to the jury during DeLong’s trial. “Mercy is something that is given.” Her words were printed in large display type in the Springfield News-Leader’s front-page story about DeLong’s sentencing.

Short is well aware that much of the public—including thoughtful citizens and community leaders—finds mitigation not only unjustifiable but incomprehensible. Still, she cannot set aside her principles or her obligations: Every defendant deserves a full measure of effort, even if onlookers deem it a waste of time and money for people who deserve nothing. She is sustained by some of those she encounters along the way. Several weeks after DeLong’s sentencing, Short received a note from James Spindler, the Greene County medical examiner. She had cross-examined him on the stand, and had probed him about his own struggles with drugs. Addiction, she suggested, was not something that happens strictly to evil and hopeless people. That resonated with Spindler, who wrote that although he had come across a number of dangerously antisocial defendants in his career whose executions he would by no means oppose, Short had convinced him that DeLong was not a “sociopath beyond redemption.”

The past few years have been among the busiest in Short’s career as a mitigator. After a federal moratorium on new death sentences during the Biden administration—and the mass commutation of most federal death sentences already handed down—the Trump administration has reinstated the federal death penalty. Trump’s former attorney general Pam Bondi encouraged states to aggressively pursue capital punishment and take advantage of foreshortened appeals processes that would fast-track executions. Mitigation specialists have seen their workload increase in volume and urgency.

Short’s determination to try to see beyond the worst of what her clients have done struck me as rare and admirable, and I kept it in mind when I picked up the phone to call the Missouri prison where Rick DeLong is incarcerated. I have spoken with many people who have committed murder, and many people on death row. Capital punishment, and the victims and perpetrators of capital crimes, have long been a focus of my reporting. But I had never spoken with a child killer before.

A prison receptionist answered, and after a pause put DeLong on the phone. His voice was both hoarse and soft; his disease is advanced now, and he has had several heart attacks. He told me what his life had been like before he committed the murders, how he loved working as a mechanic—“There was nothing I couldn’t do to a car,” he said. He recalled his stepfather, and how abusive he was, and how the meth had made the bad moments more bearable. Meeting Leffingwell had made things better, too, because she came from the same world, and for once he felt understood. They had loved going to rodeos and carnivals together, a kind of fantastic escape.

DeLong talked about his five children, only three of whom will speak with him. He also talked about his grandchildren, though he has seen them only in photos. His son Lyle is in prison, convicted of murder in 2022 and now serving a 32-year sentence. DeLong told me he had loved being a father to Lyle—“That’s my joy,” he said. “I took him everywhere.” He recalled bringing him on fishing trips, and once, in a misguided display of devotion, buying a heavy-duty backpack, cutting holes in it for arms and legs—a makeshift infant carrier—and taking him for rides on his motorcycle. Now the boy was a man, and had followed his father behind bars.

As for his own crimes, DeLong told me that he was glad he’d been caught, and that he knows he deserves the sentence he received. I could not forget that the thin voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man who had taken five lives. It was also the voice of a frail 61-year-old slowly dying in prison. DeLong remembered Cynthia Short fondly, though he told me that he had initially doubted that a woman would be able to see past what he had done to a mother and her children. But Short, he admitted, had understood everything: the crime, his life, how he might appear in the eyes of a jury. And she knew what it would take to save him. He didn’t have much of a life anymore, but thanks to this woman, he was alive. “You couldn’t ask for better,” he told me. “There’s no way.”

© Sky Maggiore for The Atlantic

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

DeLong, 34, was facing capital punishment for five counts of murder. In January 1999, he had killed his ex-girlfriend Erin Vanderhoef—who was shortly due to deliver their child, a daughter they had named Hannah—as well as the three school-age children she’d had with two other men. DeLong had entered their decaying clapboard house in Springfield, Missouri, on the morning of January 19 and strangled each member of the family using scarves and cords, hog-tying Erin and gagging two of the children. When he was arrested several days later, he promptly confessed to each of the murders and immediately became the most hated man in Springfield. Short wished she didn’t have to take the case, but it was her duty as a public defender.

When, after several weeks, she finally forced herself to look at the crime-scene photos, she saw that the bodies of the children were partly hidden by debris—clothes, a plastic lawn chair, an overturned lamp. One of the boys, 10-year-old Chris, was still in bed; the other boy, 11-year-old Jimmy, had been left on the floor. Vanderhoef herself lay on her side on a rug in the living room, her blue top riding up over her pregnant belly. The youngest of the children, 8-year-old Darlene, was found in her sky-blue pajamas, tossed upside down onto a heap of garbage in the corner of her room, a jacket thrown over her face.

Short was then raising two young children of her own, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to hide her revulsion from a jury. “As a public defender, I’d seen all sorts of things, but it was the first time where I thought, I don’t know that I can stand in the courtroom next to him,” she told me when we first spoke by phone, in January. She also doubted that she could do much to help DeLong. He had committed a horrific crime and then admitted to it in a hateful taped confession.

In capital trials in the United States, proceedings are typically split into two phases: The first phase establishes a defendant’s guilt or innocence; if a jury returns a guilty verdict, it then determines in the second phase whether the defendant is sentenced to death or to life in prison. Prosecutors sometimes agree not to pursue capital punishment in exchange for a guilty plea, and on Short’s advice, DeLong did offer to plead guilty and waive all appeals in exchange for life without parole. But the prosecutors had no interest in a deal.

Because DeLong’s guilt was not in question, Short would focus on the sentencing phase. In capital cases, juries are instructed to consider statutorily defined aggravating factors cited by the prosecution—including, for instance, the death of multiple victims or of children, or the use of particularly sadistic methods of killing, all of which applied in DeLong’s case. Juries are told to weigh these aggravating factors against a much broader category of mitigating factors presented by the defense. These may include mental illness, intellectual disability, and a history of significant trauma or abuse. If the jury finds that the aggravators outweigh the mitigators, then it will likely hand down a penalty of death; if the mitigators prevail, then the jury will likely elect a lesser sentence, usually life in prison without parole. DeLong’s fate depended on Short’s ability to investigate his background and determine whether any possible mitigating evidence could be found that might persuade a jury to spare his life.

Despite deep misgivings, Short threw herself into the case. She had inherited her work ethic from her father, who helped manage the Apollo program as NASA’s vice president of space operations. His job took the family all around the country, from New Jersey to California, Virginia to Texas. Both she and her husband were attorneys; she’d earned her degree at Saint Louis University School of Law. Short worked grueling hours, spending six days a week at the office and traveling so often that her children became accustomed to her absence. Once, Short startled her 5-year-old son when she arrived home early from a long work trip. Assuming that she had lost her case, he asked, “Is the man dead?”

Short wasn’t opposed to the death penalty when she first started practicing law, but as she gained experience in capital cases, she came to doubt that the criminal legal system was capable of consistently producing fair and equal outcomes. Capital punishment is inherently arbitrary. Some defendants have money and seasoned legal teams at trial; others do not. Some prosecutors favor the death penalty and others don’t, meaning defendants might be executed not strictly because of the nature of their offense but because of the side of a state or county line on which they happened to commit it. As she came to understand the capriciousness of criminal justice, Short changed her mind about capital punishment. The experience of representing several defendants whom she believed had been wrongly accused strengthened her opposition.

To defend Rick DeLong, Short knew, she didn’t need to make the jury believe that he was a good man or that he shouldn’t receive a terrible punishment. In capital trials in Missouri, as in most states, juries must return a unanimous verdict for a death sentence to be handed down, so Short needed only to introduce a shred of doubt in a single juror’s mind that her client had forfeited his right to live.

But even that seemed daunting, given the repugnance that she, DeLong’s own lawyer, could not suppress. Short may have wished that she didn’t have to take this case, but it would ultimately change her perspective on criminal behavior and set her career on a new path, taking her from the public defender’s office to a field known as mitigation, then still developing but now a central feature of every legal defense in capital cases. Mitigators are investigators whose mission, now mandated by law and precedent, is the granular search for circumstances that might convince a jury that their clients deserve a lesser sentence; in their most crucial cases, these specialists are the final advocates for a defendant’s life. Short would help pioneer the field and become one of its foremost practitioners. But in January 1999, all she had was a guilty client and bad odds.

Doubt is central to mitigation: creating doubt that a person is wholly given over to evil, or doubt that there is no universe—no set of terrible circumstances—in which you yourself might commit a horrific crime. I do believe that there are people who commit acts of perfect evil; a frank appraisal of human nature suggests as much. But those who oppose capital punishment, as I do, oppose the death penalty even for the worst criminals in the worst cases. The reason to stay the executioner’s hand has less to do with the nature of the defendant than it does with the nature of society: Showing mercy is morally beneficial to everyone. The legal system, of course, does not think this way; it needs a solid rationale to hang decisions on, and it must establish that what appears to be abject wickedness, and nothing else, may in fact be more complicated and tragic.

The work of mitigation—searching for reasons a defendant’s life should be spared—is, unsurprisingly, not always well received in the legal community or by the public. As a society, we like to believe that our choices and actions are entirely within our control. Mitigators introduce an element of uncertainty. Their investigations routinely produce information that calls into question whether defendants would have, in better circumstances, committed their crimes at all. To some, this seems like making excuses for criminals.

For Short, now 65, mitigation isn’t about rationalizing crimes. “It is about telling the truth,” she told me. “The crime is real. The harm is real. Nothing I do changes that.” She does not wish to downplay suffering or to pretend that something awful did not happen. The goal of a mitigator, she said, is to understand how a person becomes a criminal. “Every life leaves a trail. Abuse, neglect, poverty, brain injury, trauma, addiction, resilience, acts of kindness, moments of courage—all become a part of that person’s story,” Short told me over email. “Mitigation is not the art of making people less guilty. It is the discipline of making sure we judge them as a whole human being.”

When Short was preparing for the DeLong case, mitigation had only just begun to emerge as a routine component of a legal defense in capital cases. It became formalized not long afterward, with the case of Kevin Wiggins. In September 1988, Wiggins, a Maryland construction worker, was charged with the murder of 77-year-old Florence Lacs. He had been arrested while driving her car and had already used her credit cards and pawned her jewelry. A jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. But Wiggins, who was intellectually disabled and had been sexually abused as a child, appealed the sentence on the grounds that his attorneys had not presented sufficient evidence of extenuating circumstances in his defense. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in Wiggins v. Smith in 2003.

The Wiggins decision held that capital defendants have a right to an effective defense, including an investigation into circumstances that might explain their crimes—a ruling that fueled the rise of mitigation work. In 2008, the American Bar Association revised its guidelines to direct defense teams in capital cases to include both an investigator, who conducts an independent inquiry into the crime itself, and a mitigation specialist, who is responsible for producing information that might convince a jury that there is something more to a client than their crime suggests.

Mitigators sift through the past and familiarize themselves with all elements of a defendant’s personal history. Fragments of clients’ lives may be strewn across the country or around the world, hidden among scattered documents and scattered memories. Mitigation specialists conduct scores of in-person interviews for each case—with extended family, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, co-workers—to put the pieces together. The Marshall Project estimates that there may be fewer than 1,000 mitigation specialists nationwide; the majority of them deal with capital cases. About twice that number of people are currently on death row.  

Because mitigation specialists often have little time to prepare their cases for trial, they frequently continue their investigations during the long death-penalty appeals process. Legal teams involved in capital cases are typically reluctant to discuss their findings if judicial processes remain ongoing, but at the Mwalimu Center for Justice, a law office in New Orleans that handles capital appeals, mitigation specialists on staff agreed to share information they had uncovered about some of their clients. Benjamin Cole, an Oklahoma man who murdered his infant daughter a few days before Christmas 2002, was found by specialists on his defense team to be schizophrenic; a brain scan revealed a severe lesion. Cole spoke in riddles and frequently broke into song while interacting with his defense team, until his disease became so advanced that he chose to sit in his dark prison cell hoarding religious pamphlets and rotting food while his hair grew matted and his mind decomposed. The mitigators argued that he was too sick to be subject to execution under the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, but state authorities were undeterred. Oklahoma executed Cole in 2022.

Sometimes mitigation, no matter how legitimate, cannot overcome people’s inherent disgust with horrific crimes. Cynthia Short was facing that very possibility.  

Short still hadn’t looked at the crime-scene photographs when she first met Rick DeLong, a few days after he was taken into custody in January 1999. But she had watched his maniacal taped confession, which would later be played at trial and shared with the Springfield News-Leader. “Now laugh,” he had reportedly said to 8-year-old Darlene Vanderhoef’s lifeless body as she lay thrown over a piece of bedroom furniture with an electrical cord around her neck. Even so, Short insisted on speaking with DeLong in person, with no partition between them and no shackles to hold him in place. He was much smaller than she had expected, thin and balding, and had a scraggly mullet and a dirty-blond beard.

In Short’s experience, clients facing capital charges sometimes open a first conversation by declaring suicidal intent: The path ahead otherwise leads to either death in a prison cell or death in an execution chamber. But DeLong clearly wanted to live. And surprisingly, he was obsessed with the well-being of another person: Stacie Leffingwell, his long-term partner and the mother of his youngest child. Leffingwell had helped him kill Erin Vanderhoef and her children. And she was dying from AIDS. “Everything in that first conversation was what could I do for Stacie?” Short recalled. “How could I help Stacie?”

In a photograph Short has seen, Leffingwell kneels next to DeLong and their infant son on a sunlit lawn, a mischievous smile flashing across her face. They had met in the early 1990s when DeLong was barbecuing in a friend’s backyard in Springfield and Leffingwell, a neighbor, dropped by and struck up a conversation.

Leffingwell was dark-haired, petite, and funny. Born in California in 1967 to a teenage heroin addict, she had dropped out of high school and never learned to read. DeLong and Leffingwell both used drugs, especially methamphetamines. When they met, Leffingwell was HIV-positive, but she didn’t tell DeLong. He himself was the child of a teenage mother. Born in Springfield in 1964, he grew up in poverty and was subjected to vicious assaults by his stepfather. He began using drugs at the age of 15 and was eventually snorting or smoking meth several times a week. He got by on intermittent jobs as a mechanic and manual laborer.

These details and more were revealed as Short worked with a mitigation specialist and former welfare caseworker named Kathy Schneider. The pair traveled six hours from Kansas City to Springfield and back each week to interview everyone they could find who knew DeLong. They interviewed people in parks and churches, and once went into a drug house in the middle of a snowstorm. Every month, Schneider went to see DeLong in jail, where she also interviewed his mother and sisters. Schneider created a history of DeLong’s family going back three generations, documenting the life of his biological father, a man known as Howard Littles, and his stepfather, Buzz, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill and institutionalized.

DeLong was a twice-divorced father of four when, in 1996, he was introduced to Erin Vanderhoef, who worked at a McDonald’s in Springfield. Vanderhoef had also suffered a life marked by poverty and loss, and she took a liking to DeLong right away, confiding in others that she was interested in him romantically, even though he was already involved with Leffingwell. They formed a close friendship.

DeLong had a child with Leffingwell, a son born in 1997 whom they named Lyle. Leffingwell had tried to stay clean during her pregnancy, but she resumed using drugs after the baby was born. She disappeared for a time, leaving DeLong alone to care for their newborn. Vanderhoef stepped in to help. When Leffingwell came home, she was in treatment for depression. DeLong and Vanderhoef by then were sleeping together. DeLong’s place was often in a state of chaos and frequented by drug users. Despite the infidelity and the strangeness of the arrangement, Leffingwell and Lyle moved in with Vanderhoef and her three children. A volatile love triangle developed.

In February 1998, DeLong and Leffingwell abruptly moved into a motel in Joplin, roughly 70 miles west of Springfield, near the Kansas border. But DeLong still saw Vanderhoef, and by summer she knew she was pregnant. The news sent Leffingwell into a bout of jealousy and deeper into addiction. That July, she was admitted to a hospital for pancreatitis and stayed for three weeks. She weighed less than 90 pounds. Leffingwell and DeLong told family and friends that she had stomach cancer. In fact, she was dying of AIDS. In September, DeLong himself was diagnosed with HIV. He began using meth every day.

In the days leading up to the murders, DeLong and Leffingwell went on a meth binge. On the night of January 18, 1999, Leffingwell was high and distraught, racked with fear that Vanderhoef was going to replace her. DeLong, for his part, was furious with Vanderhoef for messing up his relationship with Leffingwell. The couple came to the shared belief that Vanderhoef presented a problem, and Leffingwell demanded that DeLong fix it—permanently. Early the following morning, DeLong drove from Joplin to Springfield to kill Vanderhoef. Leffingwell rode with him, as did Harold “Bobby” Lingle, a friend and neighbor who had agreed to help carry out DeLong’s plan in exchange for an eight ball of meth.

At around eight that morning, they pulled up to Vanderhoef’s three-bedroom house. Lingle, who had met Vanderhoef before, lured her out of the house on the pretext of a grocery errand so that DeLong and Leffingwell could wait and catch her by surprise when she returned. Then DeLong slipped inside, where he found Vanderhoef’s three children getting ready for school. Wired on meth, DeLong killed them one by one. When Vanderhoef came back, Lingle told her that the children had been sent to their rooms. Then he and Leffingwell helped DeLong subdue and murder Vanderhoef. It was a cold mercy that she died thinking her children were still alive.

DeLong, Leffingwell, and Lingle were quickly apprehended. Leffingwell died of AIDS before the year was out. The lead Greene County prosecutor, Darrell Moore, decided not to seek the death penalty against Lingle, who was said to have an IQ of 72; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Moore was adamant about bringing capital charges against DeLong.

A series of delays pushed DeLong’s trial to June 2001. Public furor in Springfield ran hot, and press coverage was intense. When Short stood before the jurors, the first thing she said was that DeLong was unquestionably guilty. She acknowledged the horror and disgust that they were surely feeling. “There are things that we need to do in this courtroom,” she recalled telling the jury. “And one of those things that you’re going to need to do is, you’re going to need to really look closely at his mental state. That will be your job.”

But it would have to be a job mainly for phase two—the sentencing phase—rather than phase one, the guilt-or-innocence phase. No one was surprised when, on June 28, after a week and a half of testimony and less than four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Rick DeLong on all five counts of murder.

Short knew that the sentencing phase would be difficult. She knew this in part because she had used her own extended family and friends—some of whom were highly conservative and generally skeptical of the defendants she represented—as test subjects, a kind of informal focus group.

When Short and her team had finished their mitigation work, well before DeLong’s trial was scheduled to begin, they collated the findings into spiral-bound books, each more than 100 pages long. Inside were detailed descriptions of DeLong’s crimes, a DVD of his confession, photographs of the crime scene, and a photograph of Vanderhoef and her three children, young and bright and beautiful, posed on a bench in front of their mother, who is holding Lyle in her arms. The books also contained a detailed account of the mitigating factors in DeLong’s case, including his abusive stepfather, his drug addiction, and his HIV status. Scattered throughout were questionnaires asking readers for their reactions at various stages. The prompts had a clinical feel, as though Short were asking for opinions on a company’s new logo or a politician’s campaign slogan, not the killing of three children and a pregnant woman. If you did choose to look at the photographs, please describe what you learned from them. But it was the best simulation of a jury’s deliberation that Short could create.

The responses from her family and friends were not encouraging. At the beginning of the book, readers were asked to gauge their support for capital punishment in general. One reader put her support at a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, but after reading through the mitigation evidence, this same woman put her support for executing DeLong specifically at a 6. Her views were aligned with those of the prosecutor, Darrell Moore, who told reporters in advance of the sentencing phase that he and the judge had received numerous phone calls from angry citizens who wanted DeLong to die for his crimes. In front of the jury, Moore read a letter written by Vanderhoef’s brother in which he told DeLong, “You do not deserve the right to live, in a prison or any other place. You are not a man, you are a coward and an animal.”

On DeLong’s behalf, Short introduced the array of mitigating information that she and Kathy Schneider had compiled. Some of the material had been presented in phase one—a tactic known as front-loading. The idea was not to try to sway jurors on the question of guilt or innocence—in this instance, there was nothing to be done—but to prepare the jury for arguments that would be presented again, and enhanced, later on. Short was aware that much of the information could be seen as all too familiar: When it comes to defendants facing the death penalty, a life like DeLong’s is normal; very few people guilty of aggravated first-degree murder have peaceful, healthy backgrounds. But two aspects of his story had taken Short by surprise. First, as she combed through the police files, Short had noticed a coincidence: Mark Deeds, the officer who had coaxed the confession out of DeLong and emerged as the hero of the investigation, had encountered her client before.

In 1991, when DeLong was 27, he was arrested for selling cocaine and marijuana to Deeds, who was then working undercover for the Springfield Police Department. DeLong was so deeply enmeshed in the local drug culture that Deeds saw an opportunity. According to the testimony of DeLong’s former defense attorney, who negotiated a plea deal, Deeds threatened DeLong with decades in prison unless he began working as an informant. DeLong agreed. Police and prosecutors paid DeLong for information and granted him leniency on subsequent drug-related charges. At one point, his bond on arrest was reduced from $75,000 to $2,500. At another point, he received a sentence of five years’ probation for charges that ought to have resulted in prison time.

The policies of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole specifically prohibited offenders on probation from serving as police informants, but the department kept working with him anyway. Because of his protected status, DeLong continued to get little to no prison time when he was caught using. His addiction deepened. By the time of the murders, DeLong had helped Deeds and the Springfield Police Department clear a number of high-profile narcotics cases, even as he himself disintegrated from years of dependence. His career as a police informant came at the expense of any attempt at rehab—the one had simply precluded the other. Given all of this, Short asked, did the police bear any responsibility for DeLong’s condition?

The second discovery that Short and her team made came while going through DeLong’s medical records. A week before the murders, he had begun taking Sustiva, an experimental drug that can help slow the progression of HIV but whose side effects include dizziness, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, amnesia, agitation, and hallucinations. Patients abusing drugs or who have preexisting mental illness are at increased risk of developing neurological symptoms. And the drug’s side effects tend to be most severe when a patient is just starting to use the drug, as DeLong had been.

The witnesses for the defense included an addiction specialist who testified that DeLong’s meth use easily could have contributed to a shattered mental state; a medical specialist who confirmed that Sustiva is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis, and that the drug combined with meth could have disastrous results; and a psychiatrist who testified that DeLong had likely been in the grip of a psychotic episode when he carried out the murders.

Short did not know what to expect when the jury began to deliberate. The new information had raised provocative questions about a case whose conclusion had once seemed preordained. In the end, the jury declined to impose the death penalty. It instead sentenced DeLong to life without parole.

In 2003, Short left her job with the Public Defender’s Office due to a round of funding cuts, and decided to become a full-time mitigation specialist. In the 23 years since then, she says that she has worked with approximately 200 clients, none of whom has received the death penalty. Her attitude toward the field, as a practical matter, can be simply put: If mitigators are able to present a full picture of a defendant’s life, then no reasonable jury will return a verdict of death, not even for the most brutal killer. Her job is to persuade jurors to bestow something that she feels everyone deserves. “Mercy is not something that is earned,” she said to the jury during DeLong’s trial. “Mercy is something that is given.” Her words were printed in large display type in the Springfield News-Leader’s front-page story about DeLong’s sentencing.

Short is well aware that much of the public—including thoughtful citizens and community leaders—finds mitigation not only unjustifiable but incomprehensible. Still, she cannot set aside her principles or her obligations: Every defendant deserves a full measure of effort, even if onlookers deem it a waste of time and money for people who deserve nothing. She is sustained by some of those she encounters along the way. Several weeks after DeLong’s sentencing, Short received a note from James Spindler, the Greene County medical examiner. She had cross-examined him on the stand, and had probed him about his own struggles with drugs. Addiction, she suggested, was not something that happens strictly to evil and hopeless people. That resonated with Spindler, who wrote that although he had come across a number of dangerously antisocial defendants in his career whose executions he would by no means oppose, Short had convinced him that DeLong was not a “sociopath beyond redemption.”

The past few years have been among the busiest in Short’s career as a mitigator. After a federal moratorium on new death sentences during the Biden administration—and the mass commutation of most federal death sentences already handed down—the Trump administration has reinstated the federal death penalty. Trump’s former attorney general Pam Bondi encouraged states to aggressively pursue capital punishment and take advantage of foreshortened appeals processes that would fast-track executions. Mitigation specialists have seen their workload increase in volume and urgency.

Short’s determination to try to see beyond the worst of what her clients have done struck me as rare and admirable, and I kept it in mind when I picked up the phone to call the Missouri prison where Rick DeLong is incarcerated. I have spoken with many people who have committed murder, and many people on death row. Capital punishment, and the victims and perpetrators of capital crimes, have long been a focus of my reporting. But I had never spoken with a child killer before.

A prison receptionist answered, and after a pause put DeLong on the phone. His voice was both hoarse and soft; his disease is advanced now, and he has had several heart attacks. He told me what his life had been like before he committed the murders, how he loved working as a mechanic—“There was nothing I couldn’t do to a car,” he said. He recalled his stepfather, and how abusive he was, and how the meth had made the bad moments more bearable. Meeting Leffingwell had made things better, too, because she came from the same world, and for once he felt understood. They had loved going to rodeos and carnivals together, a kind of fantastic escape.

DeLong talked about his five children, only three of whom will speak with him. He also talked about his grandchildren, though he has seen them only in photos. His son Lyle is in prison, convicted of murder in 2022 and now serving a 32-year sentence. DeLong told me he had loved being a father to Lyle—“That’s my joy,” he said. “I took him everywhere.” He recalled bringing him on fishing trips, and once, in a misguided display of devotion, buying a heavy-duty backpack, cutting holes in it for arms and legs—a makeshift infant carrier—and taking him for rides on his motorcycle. Now the boy was a man, and had followed his father behind bars.

As for his own crimes, DeLong told me that he was glad he’d been caught, and that he knows he deserves the sentence he received. I could not forget that the thin voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man who had taken five lives. It was also the voice of a frail 61-year-old slowly dying in prison. DeLong remembered Cynthia Short fondly, though he told me that he had initially doubted that a woman would be able to see past what he had done to a mother and her children. But Short, he admitted, had understood everything: the crime, his life, how he might appear in the eyes of a jury. And she knew what it would take to save him. He didn’t have much of a life anymore, but thanks to this woman, he was alive. “You couldn’t ask for better,” he told me. “There’s no way.”

© Sky Maggiore for The Atlantic

Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.

President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone. 

Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections. 

They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?

It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.

And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.

You’re saying this is a historic edge.

In 2024, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump significantly in the general election. In 2020, Joe Biden significantly outspent Donald Trump in the general. In 2016, Hillary Clinton. And in the midterms along the way, same story. 

This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.

Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?

Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.

So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.

I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?

There’s a lot of tech. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively [tech]. And Musk, by the way, is like an extra pot of money. Musk, the world’s richest person, is said to be spending at least $200 million. So that’s a bigger chunk. He has given some money directly to the Trump super PAC. He’s given some money to these congressional super PACs. 

Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?

It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.

And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.

The Texas Senate race is the most expensive race in the country right now, and Republicans are pouring $200 million to save the nominee there. So a big chunk of that advantage is going to Texas. And the Democrats have put very little money from outside groups into Texas. 

Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle. 

You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?

Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years. 

If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.

I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.

Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?

I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.

There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.

On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?

Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years. 

[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.

What should we ascribe that to?

I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?

It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.

By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.

Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?

Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.

One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.

My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?

One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.

Not JD Vance? 

I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.

There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

There’s a lot to love about fall: the changing leaves, the crisp air, the return of cozy sweaters, and, of course, pumpkin-spice everything. As the days grow shorter and the weather cools, the season offers plenty of reasons to slow down and indulge in life’s little comforts.

Although fall has its familiar rituals, there are always new ways to enjoy it. Maybe you’re looking for your next great read, a recipe to try on a chilly afternoon, or an excuse to spend more time outdoors before winter arrives. To help you get into the autumn spirit, explore some of our favorite Atlantic stories and recommendations for the season.

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Fall Favorites

Six Books to Read by the Fire

Each of these titles is a perfect companion while the days grow imperceptibly longer.

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

Read the article.

Six Movies to Get You in the Fall Mood

From cozy classics to unlikely favorites, The Atlantic’s writers and editors share their seasonal picks.

By Rafaela Jinich

Read the article.

How Starbucks Perfected Autumn

The pumpkin spice latte has defined fall for 20 years. (From 2023)

By Ian Bogost

Read the article.

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Still Curious?

• What the falling leaves taught Thoreau: His autumnal observations held a lesson for him in his final years, Jake Lundberg writes.
• No one knows how big pumpkins can get. A decade ago, the world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight, Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2024.

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Other Diversions

• Can Elizabeth Holmes drop the act?
• The rise of the IRL influencer
• What three gene-therapy deaths have in common

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PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “We were lucky to head East before the storm because the foliage is incredibly colorful,” Lynn D. from Moretown, Vermont, shared. “This photo was taken from the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire.”   

We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Rafaela

© Owen Humphreys / PA Images / Getty

Several winters ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to confession. The parish close to work was hosting a reconciliation service, meant to prepare the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ. A dozen or so priests were scattered across the cathedral. Penitents lined the aisles. Whispers of contrition and pardon filled the air.

The Catholic Church counsels believers to seek confession regularly—at the very least, once a year. I hadn’t been back in a few. So in addition to feeling spiritually unmoored, I was worried about how the priest would react to hearing about my hiatus. But when I told him, he simply smiled and said, “Welcome back.” His response put me at ease then, and it helped change how I approach the sacrament now: less as a nerve-racking ordeal, more as a moment of mercy.

Sacraments such as confession are central to Catholicism. Through them, the Church teaches that simple actions—having a conversation with a priest, eating bread and drinking wine—are, with grace, tangible encounters with God. For the past year, the Trump administration has been making it harder for Catholics at migrant-detention centers to have those encounters.

The most recent example came to light this month, when the Archdiocese of St. Louis filed a federal lawsuit over the visitation policy at Saint Genevieve County Jail in eastern Missouri. According to the claim, the 10 priests who minister at the jail aren’t allowed to celebrate Mass. The suit also alleges that priests are permitted to visit migrant detainees just once a week, during a four-hour period, and that the jail’s “no contact” security policy lets the clergy speak with detainees only over the phone, through a glass partition. As a result, the approximately 150 migrants at the jail at a given time—most of whom are Catholic, according to the archdiocese—have been going without their religious needs for weeks. Since the middle of 2025, according to the lawsuit, Saint Genevieve has housed approximately 3,000 people.

[Read: The Catholic Church’s new schism]

This isn’t the first time that Catholic clergy have complained that the government is preventing them from ministering to detained migrants. Last year, the Florida detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” kept priests from visiting or offering Mass to detainees for a month, until an agreement was reached between the Archdiocese of Miami and state authorities. In May, after a six-month legal fight, a Catholic nonprofit won a preliminary injunction to let Catholic priests celebrate Mass and administer sacraments at the Broadview ICE processing center outside Chicago. And the administration’s immigration crackdowns seem to be hurting the Church more broadly. Dioceses across the country have reported decreased Mass attendance among Spanish-speaking parishioners who fear detention. ICE has reportedly conducted raids near Catholic churches during Mass hours.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied allegations of wrongdoing at Saint Genevieve. In a statement to multiple outlets, the agency said that the jail is not an ICE facility—although Saint Genevieve is listed as a detention facility on ICE’s website—and that it “ensures detainees are accommodated with religious services.” As described in the lawsuit, however, those accommodations disregard the religious significance of the Catholic sacraments.

Consider confession. The suit claims that at Saint Genevieve, conversations between detainees and priests are not private, and the phone lines that they use to talk may be monitored. These policies may be in place for security reasons, but confession is meant to be a private exchange between penitent and priest, who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ. Confession is “one of the most intimate, profound acts that someone can do,” David Inczauskis, a Jesuit priest who ministers at the Broadview ICE facility, told me. He added, “To state very specifically the sins that they have committed and to ask humbly for pardon and for peace” requires a “level of vulnerability” that is “very high.”

An even bigger problem comes up with the sacrament of the Eucharist, or Communion. The complaint includes an email from a deputy at the local sheriff’s office suggesting that priests “provide an unopened, individually wrapped Communion wafer” to a member of the detention center staff, who could then hand it to a detainee. This way of distributing the Eucharist would be “sacrilegious,” as Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis recently told Reuters. The Church teaches that the Eucharist is the “Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity” of Christ—not a symbol, but God’s real presence. For that reason, Inczauskis said, the Church distributes the Eucharist through either ordained ministers or specially trained laypeople.

[Read: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]

For much of the past quarter century, many conservative figures have taken up religious liberty as an essential cause. The Trump administration purported to continue these efforts when it established a commission last year meant to identify “emerging threats” to the exercise of faith. In June, the commission released a draft report claiming that “in recent years, Americans from all religious backgrounds have faced increasing persecution for their religious beliefs.” Some of the issues discussed in the report include rising anti-Semitism, how gender and sexuality is taught in schools, and conscience protections for health-care workers who object to participating in abortions or assisted suicides. The report said nothing about the administration’s migrant-detention practices.

When the commission was announced, my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote that “Christians shouldn’t conclude” that it would “necessarily defend their interests.” That warning seems prescient a year and a half later. At Alligator Alcatraz, Broadview, and Saint Genevieve, the Catholic Church has shown that it believes that detainee access to the sacraments matters deeply. Given the choice between restricting immigration and protecting the religious liberty of migrants, the administration, too, has demonstrated where its values lie.

© Andrew Aitchison / Corbis / Getty

Elon Musk revealed, in a dramatic demonstration on Thursday night at SpaceX’s rocket-testing facility near Waco, Texas, a new “flying” Tesla Roadster prototype. The car hung upside down on a curved track, then performed aerial stunts—including jumping over a Tesla semi, Evel Knievel–style—using air-powered thrusters designed in collaboration with SpaceX. The demo was impressive despite Musk’s awkward manner, which in the context of a supposed literal flying car came off as nerdy charm.

After revealing the car, Musk paraphrased a quote from Peter Thiel, his former PayPal partner: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The line, which was part of a 2011 “manifesto” published by Thiel’s venture-capital firm Founders Fund, was intended to indict the feeble ambition of the technology industry. Instead of solving big, important challenges, the world’s smarts—and money—had been devoted to small-potatoes social-internet start-ups such as Twitter.

One obvious oddity of the line—which has since been removed from the manifesto—is that Founders Fund’s most important investment at the time was Facebook, a social-network platform. But another is the idea that anyone actually wanted a flying car for real. That ambition may never have represented an actual dream. Like a jet pack, a flying car represents not just the future but the idea of individual freedom delivered through technological conquest.

Taken at face value, a flying car is not an impressive dream—or at least it hasn’t been since the Wright brothers more or less attained it. Automobiles have always moved on the ground by rolling via motor. The earliest practical airplanes also rolled until they flew (and hopefully landed again). An airplane is, in a way, merely a car with wings.

[Derek Thompson: Why flying cars are an impossible dream]

In 1917, Glenn Curtiss built literally that: His Curtiss Autoplane was an automobile with detachable wings and a propeller. It never really flew effectively, but the idea persisted. Waldo Waterman’s 1937 Arrowbile was more successful at flying, though it wasn’t commercially viable. Many more actual realizations of the supposed dream of flying cars appeared in the ensuing decades. The most famous might be the Taylor Aerocar, which was certified by the federal government in 1956 but was never mass-produced.

Around that time, future-oriented science-factual magazines such as Popular Mechanics frequently rehearsed the vision of the personal aircraft. By then, cars were ordinary and mainstream in America, having displaced collective transportation such as trains and streetcars. The automobile had become a more abstract kind of vehicle, one that embraced and extended personal autonomy through the power to move, without effort, anywhere else—and to do it alone.

But one thing still cramped the automobile’s capacity to deliver that freedom in full: roads. Cars needed them. The open road, of which America had a seemingly endless frontier, somehow was never enough. The best way around those roads was through the air above them; as Emmett Brown told Marty McFly inside one of fiction’s most memorable flying cars, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

The stifling oppression of the ground, traversed at any speed, was also an old vexation. In 1923, Hugo Gernsback—sometimes called the father of science fiction thanks to his founding Amazing Stories, an early magazine devoted to the genre—imagined a gyroscopic Helicar that would release travelers from the tyranny of New York City’s newly car-congested streets. A few years later, in 1927, Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis colonized the city’s airspace with small flying vehicles. By 1962, the children’s cartoon The Jetsons had fused those precursors with mid-century Popular Mechanics populism, making the flying car a ubiquitous commuter vehicle.

Over the decades, many attempts to engineer, manufacture, and market a flying car have been undertaken, though none has succeeded. In 1973, Henry Smolinski created the AVE Mizar by attaching Cessna wings to a Ford Pinto; it killed Smolinski during a failed test flight. From the 1960s until the company went dormant in the mid-2010s, Paul Moller made numerous attempts to develop the Skycar, a personal airplane that took off and landed vertically. Around that time, Terrafugia began promising a flying car called the Transition, which remained only a few years away for years—until the company shut down in 2021. “We enter production in 2028,” Musk said of the Tesla Roadster in this week’s Texas demo, before adding, “Actually.”

By all appearances, the Roadster is not a flying car of the same sort as its real and fictional precursors. The vehicle’s air-fan system seems first and principally designed to give the car’s wheels better traction on the ground, which is part of why it can go so fast—it went from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than a second during the unveiling. (Rocket thrusters attached to the back of the thing also help.) The car does not fly so much as it performs aerial acrobatics such as barrel rolls and standing jumps.

Those deeds were impressive as heck. The car certainly appeared to fly, if only for a moment, in the manner of a daredevil. Whether or not it can or is intended to fly in the manner of a traveler or commuter is not yet clear. Watching the Roadster do its thing—unpiloted, to make sure the demonstration didn’t “kill anyone,” as Musk put it—I imagined wealthy gearheads wreaking havoc via ill-fated jumps and spins on suburban blocks instead of salarymen conveying themselves to work and back.

[From the November 2026 issue: Choose your overlord]

Subdued by decades of failed automobile-airplane hybrids, and perhaps exhausted by Musk’s dubious intentions, some coverage of the Tesla demo has observed, rightly, that substantial regulatory hurdles await any vehicle that leaves the road and enters airspace. But bureaucratic red tape isn’t the main reason the flying-car dream hasn’t come to pass.

Rather, it’s because the dream works better as fantasy than reality. When urban modernism began to feel cramped, the skies rising above it offered the possibility of new freedom. After the continent was settled, the roads that traversed it became new prisons from which airspace might allow escape. Once the individual freedom of the automobile became universal, and the roads clogged with thousands of varmints in the rat race, the blue sky above looked like liberty. George Jetson is a cog in the proverbial machine who rises above insignificance by flying to work unfazed, where he revels in the meaninglessness of his job pressing a button to make actual machine cogs. Even Thiel’s mention of the flying car was symbolic, a paradigmatic example of the kind of dream worth dreaming, not an actual one worth waking up to.

Despite the Tesla Roadster’s truly spectacular capabilities, at least as a one-off demo, it fulfills the century-old flying-car ambition on a technicality—as a vehicle for a trick driver rather than a motorist aviator. Perhaps the dream this car truly realizes is not yours or mine, but Elon Musk’s: to claim to have delivered what a century of his forebears could not.

© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: USA Today / Reuters.

Several winters ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to confession. The parish close to work was hosting a reconciliation service, meant to prepare the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ. A dozen or so priests were scattered across the cathedral. Penitents lined the aisles. Whispers of contrition and pardon filled the air.

The Catholic Church counsels believers to seek confession regularly—at the very least, once a year. I hadn’t been back in a few. So in addition to feeling spiritually unmoored, I was worried about how the priest would react to hearing about my hiatus. But when I told him, he simply smiled and said, “Welcome back.” His response put me at ease then, and it helped change how I approach the sacrament now: less as a nerve-racking ordeal, more as a moment of mercy.

Sacraments such as confession are central to Catholicism. Through them, the Church teaches that simple actions—having a conversation with a priest, eating bread and drinking wine—are, with grace, tangible encounters with God. For the past year, the Trump administration has been making it harder for Catholics at migrant-detention centers to have those encounters.

The most recent example came to light this month, when the Archdiocese of St. Louis filed a federal lawsuit over the visitation policy at Saint Genevieve County Jail in eastern Missouri. According to the claim, the 10 priests who minister at the jail aren’t allowed to celebrate Mass. The suit also alleges that priests are permitted to visit migrant detainees just once a week, during a four-hour period, and that the jail’s “no contact” security policy lets the clergy speak with detainees only over the phone, through a glass partition. As a result, the approximately 150 migrants at the jail at a given time—most of whom are Catholic, according to the archdiocese—have been going without their religious needs for weeks. Since the middle of 2025, according to the lawsuit, Saint Genevieve has housed approximately 3,000 people.

[Read: The Catholic Church’s new schism]

This isn’t the first time that Catholic clergy have complained that the government is preventing them from ministering to detained migrants. Last year, the Florida detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” kept priests from visiting or offering Mass to detainees for a month, until an agreement was reached between the Archdiocese of Miami and state authorities. In May, after a six-month legal fight, a Catholic nonprofit won a preliminary injunction to let Catholic priests celebrate Mass and administer sacraments at the Broadview ICE processing center outside Chicago. And the administration’s immigration crackdowns seem to be hurting the Church more broadly. Dioceses across the country have reported decreased Mass attendance among Spanish-speaking parishioners who fear detention. ICE has reportedly conducted raids near Catholic churches during Mass hours.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied allegations of wrongdoing at Saint Genevieve. In a statement to multiple outlets, the agency said that the jail is not an ICE facility—although Saint Genevieve is listed as a detention facility on ICE’s website—and that it “ensures detainees are accommodated with religious services.” As described in the lawsuit, however, those accommodations disregard the religious significance of the Catholic sacraments.

Consider confession. The suit claims that at Saint Genevieve, conversations between detainees and priests are not private, and the phone lines that they use to talk may be monitored. These policies may be in place for security reasons, but confession is meant to be a private exchange between penitent and priest, who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ. Confession is “one of the most intimate, profound acts that someone can do,” David Inczauskis, a Jesuit priest who ministers at the Broadview ICE facility, told me. He added, “To state very specifically the sins that they have committed and to ask humbly for pardon and for peace” requires a “level of vulnerability” that is “very high.”

An even bigger problem comes up with the sacrament of the Eucharist, or Communion. The complaint includes an email from a deputy at the local sheriff’s office suggesting that priests “provide an unopened, individually wrapped Communion wafer” to a member of the detention center staff, who could then hand it to a detainee. This way of distributing the Eucharist would be “sacrilegious,” as Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis recently told Reuters. The Church teaches that the Eucharist is the “Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity” of Christ—not a symbol, but God’s real presence. For that reason, Inczauskis said, the Church distributes the Eucharist through either ordained ministers or specially trained laypeople.

[Read: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]

For much of the past quarter century, many conservative figures have taken up religious liberty as an essential cause. The Trump administration purported to continue these efforts when it established a commission last year meant to identify “emerging threats” to the exercise of faith. In June, the commission released a draft report claiming that “in recent years, Americans from all religious backgrounds have faced increasing persecution for their religious beliefs.” Some of the issues discussed in the report include rising anti-Semitism, how gender and sexuality is taught in schools, and conscience protections for health-care workers who object to participating in abortions or assisted suicides. The report said nothing about the administration’s migrant-detention practices.

When the commission was announced, my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote that “Christians shouldn’t conclude” that it would “necessarily defend their interests.” That warning seems prescient a year and a half later. At Alligator Alcatraz, Broadview, and Saint Genevieve, the Catholic Church has shown that it believes that detainee access to the sacraments matters deeply. Given the choice between restricting immigration and protecting the religious liberty of migrants, the administration, too, has demonstrated where its values lie.

© Andrew Aitchison / Corbis / Getty