Leadership at the Census Bureau has ordered staff to halt all external events related to the 2030 Census amid the agency’s release of a controversial, unprecedented rule proposal aimed at excluding immigrants from the U.S. population count, according to a copy of an email obtained by TPM.

President Donald Trump painted a terrifying picture during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Standing on stage at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Trump offered a dramatic retelling of a brutal murder that took place in the state last August. Iryna Zarutska’s death made headlines around the country, but the killing that Trump weaved into the Republican Party’s midterm pitch has also emerged as a persistent fixation and rallying cry for racist extremists on the far right. 

As he told Zarutska’s story, Trump spared no gory or dramatic details.

This week I asked 28 current and former Republican Party officials in Florida whether they would denounce an unrepentant white supremacist in their ranks, a man who will appear on the ballot this November as a member of the GOP.

The FBI has tapped employees from across federal law enforcement to crack down on dissent, including agents and analysts with the Internal Revenue Service, documents shared with TPM show.

International companies are getting tariff refunds — with added, taxpayer-funded interest. People in America who have paid higher prices as a result of President Donald Trump’s relentless tariff maneuvering are stuck footing the bill.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the Trump White House’s memo directing federal law enforcement to consider progressive beliefs as indicators of domestic terrorism, has done a lot of things. It’s brought a broad conspiracy case against nonviolent protestors in Minneapolis, netted half-century sentences on terrorism charges for a Texas anti-ICE protest that turned violent, and sparked what one former counterterrorism prosecutor described to TPM as a COINTELPRO-like law enforcement war on opposition protestors.

It’s also causing trouble for those extremely aggressive and extremely online people who might be inclined to make extremely inadvisable social media posts.

The Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new Talking Points Memo investigation can reveal.

A version of a federal rule proposing to exclude certain noncitizens from being counted in the 10-year Census was published to the federal register this morning, and is more aggressive in several ways than the draft version first revealed in full last month by TPM. The final version explicitly proposes a question about immigration status on the census, excludes refugees and asylees from the count, and changes how members of the military are to be tallied.

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The Sept. 11 attacks came during a boom time for conspiracy theories. A vast industry of radio talkers, book writers, and cranks was finding new audiences on the nascent internet and using new technology to spread their messages faster and farther.

This was a new generation of media savvy personalities who knew how to tap into the fears of white evangelicals, revenge-seeking militia members, anti-tax activists, libertarians, Clinton haters, and paranoids on both the far left and far right. Many believed a traumatic event, whether real or “false flag,” was imminent. Some even claimed that the government would perpetrate it, then blame a convenient figure around whom the country could rally its bloodlust and need for revenge.

When it finally happened, though, they were just as baffled and desperate for answers as the rest of us. And they turned to the gurus helping them shape their world views — who were also baffled. 

Three major figures in the conspiracy theory world broadcast live on the radio in those first hours after the Twin Towers went down. They started to solidify narratives that would drive the next two decades of conspiracy theories and myths about the attacks — even as basic facts about what had happened were hard to come by.