This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

In February, the United States Department of Defense threatened to designate the AI firm Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” after a dispute over the military’s use of the company’s Claude models.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In an early sign that evangelical leaders are planning for a post-Trump future that doesn’t include Vice President JD Vance, Christian Broadcasting Network reporter and well-known evangelical whisperer David Brody is planting some seeds for 2028 on behalf of Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Writing at All Israel News, a site run by Joel Rosenberg, a fervent Christian Zionist known for his apocalyptic-minded books and right-wing television broadcasts, Brody gives some oxygen to the presidential prospects of the 70-year-old former pastor, Arkansas governor, Christian broadcaster, and twice-failed presidential candidate. Brody writes that he was inspired to explore a Huckabee candidacy by the Christian nationalist organizer David Lane, who wrote in a newsletter he sends to 70,000 pastors: “We’ll throw Mike Huckabee’s name in the hat for 2028.” Based on that suggestion, Brody proceeds to make the case that Huckabee, for reasons of political experience, affable temperament, and theological commitment to America’s relationship with Israel, might just be the one to bring MAGA’s anti-Israel contingent together with its zealously pro-Israel Christian Zionists.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when Indiana Jones is asked how he intends to single-handedly stop a Nazi caravan he mutters, “I’m making this up as I go.” That improvisational approach by a signature Paramount hero appears to mirror that of the company’s current CEO David Ellison, as he stumbles through a conservative media takeover that feels more like the product of expediency than ideology.

The latest odd wrinkle in Ellison’s serialized pursuit of becoming one of media’s most influential figures — acquiring Paramount through Skydance Media, then engineering a pending $111 billion merger with a much larger studio, Warner Bros. Discovery — emerged this week. Frustrated by the thus-far effective efforts of state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, to delay or even derail the deal, Paramount officials privately floated the prospect of abandoning California if Ellison doesn’t get his way, administering a blow to the state’s economy.

Bonta quickly labeled the not-so-subtle threat “blackmail,” but like many of Ellison’s actions, there’s a sense nobody fully thought the logistics through in terms of relocating and how that would practically work. Since the Skydance deal closed a year ago, Paramount has been defined by chaos, potentially destroying traditional media outlets while cozying up to the Trump administration to secure its regulatory blessing.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Earlier this week, Todd Blanche was sworn in as the newest attorney general of the United States. Administering the oath of office to Blanche, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, was another former member of Trump’s legal team: Judge Emil Bove, whom Trump nominated in 2025 to a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit. 

For both Blanche and Bove, the reunion must have been a real treat. Three years ago, they were unknown New York City-area law firm partners taking a long-shot bet on a disgraced ex-president who stood accused of, among other things, sexually assaulting a magazine writer, storing classified government documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, making illegal hush money payments to kill an unflattering news story about his philandering, and trying to fraudulently overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia. (That last list item should not be confused with separate federal charges stemming from Trump’s involvement in efforts to foment a violent insurrection and overthrow the government on January 6.)

Thanks in part to the work of Blanche and Bove, though, none of those cases resulted in meaningful consequences for Trump. And now that he is president again, their respective appointments are best understood as hard-earned rewards for their troubles. After Bove finished conducting Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the two former colleagues got to hug it out in the Oval Office as their bored-looking benefactor clapped politely.

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.

With a potential midterm wipeout just three months away, Republicans have been recycling past conspiracy theories to an epic extent, mining the greatest hits of a decade of paranoid plots both to please the president and to invoke memories of the “good old days.” 

From the Senate’s contentious hearings that saw Dr. Anthony Fauci grilled with lockdown-era conspiracy theories to President Trump’s continued evocation that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are both replaying the past and actively rewriting it, trying to distract their voters from current crises and rally them around Trump’s brand one last time.

It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term “oligarchy” in the first place. Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that an oligarchy — which literally means “rule of the few” — is indeed all about a small number of individuals steering a given country, nation, or empire. But even then, Aristotle added, it wasn’t just about the number of individuals that mattered, but also about how much wealth they controlled. In order to have an oligarchy, a state had to be run not just by the few, but by the wealthiest few. 

The other part that’s made “oligarchy” such a tricky thing to define is that, for centuries, oligarchic figures tended to operate out of sight, or by playing down their impact on politics. Not always, necessarily; the so-called “robber barons” of the Gilded Age — oligarchs by another name — were front and center in American society in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by and large, oligarchs tended to downplay their influence, and even their wealth. Since they could operate as the powers behind the throne, they tended to keep themselves (and their wealth) out of the spotlight, making it even trickier to nail down who an oligarch actually is, or what oligarchy looks like when it’s taken over a democracy. 

Those two factors — the difficulties in defining “oligarchy,” and the struggles in identifying oligarchs themselves — made analyzing the topic, let alone writing a book about it, an uphill battle. 

And then, in January 2025, all of that changed. Because there, in the U.S. Capitol, as President Donald Trump once more swore the oath of office for the presidency, stood a suite of men, just off to the side, all standing in a row. They looked out over the audience, smiling in their suits. In that moment, those figures — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a small number of others — made oligarchy impossible to miss. Looking out at a man they’d propelled back to office — at a man who would usher in not only the most corrupt administration in American history, but who is himself oligarchy made flesh — they forced Americans to an inescapable realization. We’d once, as a country, had a Gilded Age. But now, with more wealth inequality than ever prior, and with more power concentrated in the hands of a small number of select men, we have something else: the Age of Oligarchy. 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”

They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Kash Patel, the conservative podcaster whom President Donald Trump appointed as the director of the FBI in 2025, is currently suing The Atlantic for $250 million over its reporting that his predilection for drinking “to the point of obvious intoxication” has been a “recurring source of concern across the government.” In a lawsuit he filed in federal court on April 20, Patel characterized the article as a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” In an interview on April 23, the writer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, said that in the days since The Atlantic published the story, she’d been “inundated” with new sources corroborating it.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On August 4, Kansas voters will decide whether to replace the state’s longstanding merit selection system for Supreme Court justices with direct elections. Republicans want voters to believe the proposed constitutional amendment is just about transparency and giving the public more power over who sits on the state’s highest court, but the debate in Kansas is also part of a broader Republican push to inject more partisanship into state judicial elections. But the differences in where they want partisan elections and where they do not give the game away.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The story of modern gun culture is partly about how reactionary forces worked lawmakers and the judiciary to transform America’s relationship with firearms. Congress granted extraordinary liability protections to the gun industry, while the Supreme Court reframed the Second Amendment, ignoring the long-held view that its reference to “a well-regulated militia” was not a fusty preamble but a commonly understood restraint.

In Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, I explore how these legal victories freed politicians, businesses, and Wall Street players to seek power and profits by making gun ownership a cultural identifier. And the gun lobby worked especially hard to cultivate a younger generation of gun owners by making rifle shooting a school physical education activity and conducting social research on how to get kids interested in firearms.

The heedless integration of firearms into American life is not solely explainable by historical undercurrents, such as the grand schemes of the NRA and the gun industry to inculcate pro-gun attitudes in young people. Larger cultural and social forces have also become increasingly important.

As I began exploring them more deeply, it quickly became apparent that modern-day gun culture has entered a phase akin to the late-stage Roman Empire, when success and power devolved into selfish extravagance. No longer was it enough to argue that sports shooting, hunting, and self-defense justified an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment—simply having fun with guns was now a God-given right.

On a 550-acre desert expanse in the unincorporated township of Pahrump, Nevada, you can pay for Rolling Thunder, an “adrenaline-fueled experience” of high-speed tactical shooting from an off-road vehicle, offered by Staccato Vegas, an offshoot of the Staccato gun company. A marketing brochure shows a blond woman wearing mirrored shades blasting away with a semiautomatic rifle painted like an American flag.

For a $1,000 annual Patriot membership plan, you get 50 percent off on “run-n-gun” courses, free firearms cleaning, and unlimited monthly guest passes. If you’re willing to pay $3,000 to upgrade to the Freedom plan, you get additional perks such as concierge services, on-demand food and beverage, preloaded magazines for your pistol or rifle when you arrive, and exclusive access to the Staccato 368 Lounge (368 supposedly was a code used for the word liberty by Revolutionary War patriots).

If all of this sounds rather silly, Staccato wants you to know that it is their solemn obligation as red-blooded Americans. At Staccato, you see, “We believe in protecting freedom and celebrating liberty: “It’s a part of who we are as Americans, allowing us the freedom to be individuals and for each of us to pursue our own unique happiness.” To join this assembly of patriots, you must buy at least one Staccato Pistol. 

Sport-shooting clubs have been around for at least a century. In olden days, they mostly entailed well-to-do men gathering at some secluded retreat to drink, smoke, play cards, and occasionally shoot bolt-action rifles at targets or maybe go out for a hunt. They were genteel affairs. In recent decades, entrepreneurs have taken this concept and jacked it on steroids. Numerous oases of controlled violence dot barren landscapes in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, with indoor facilities as well in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In Las Vegas, the Range 702 offers bachelorette parties, where ladies can shoot machine guns and get a free shot glass, followed by drinks and a “limo to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.”

Luxury is a defining theme. An NRA blog post from 2017 explained the emergence of a new name to describe the phenomenon: guntry club. Acknowledging that “gun culture could inspire thoughts of dark and cold ranges, dusty or muddy outdoor environments or even loud, brash and unforgiving crowds,” guntry clubs sought to combine the shooting experience with luxury accoutrements of traditional country clubs.

Some of these places are fashioned as family theme parks, combining sightseeing, swimming, and horseback riding with shooting machine guns and grenade launchers. “Drive a tank! Crush cars!” blares an ad for Bullets and Burgers, an apocalyptic playground of sorts in Arizona. If you’re willing to part with $2,300, the Super Platinum Shooting Package gets you access to eight machine guns of your choice, a flamethrower, and a gigantic .50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle “used in several Hollywood hits including Jumanji and Rambo II.”

In 2014, Alex MacLachlan, an Ivy League-educated investment banker from New Jersey, and his wife, Alison, visited Bullets and Burgers. Their nine-year-old daughter was allowed to shoot an Uzi submachine gun, but lost control of it, accidentally killing the shooting instructor who was guiding her.

The relative wealth and professional status of the tragedy-struck MacLachlan family came as somewhat of a surprise to me. I suppose that betrays my own biased assumptions about the type of person who would want to go to a place such as Bullets and Burgers. Part of my preconception was based on my experience in the 1990s visiting gun ranges such as the one in Kentucky where you could pay to blow up gas-filled barrels—“Machine gun and flame thrower rentals available Friday, Saturday and Sunday!” It was the epitome of “loud, brash and unforgiving.” Since then, it seemed, the audience had expanded to include a demographic

I had not thought would be as interested in it. When I learned about the MacLachlan incident it immediately brought to mind an eerily similar case I knew of involving a physician from Connecticut. In that tragic incident, the doctor’s eight-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the head when he lost control of an Uzi submachine gun he was given at a range in Massachusetts (unlike the Arizona case, this one led to criminal indictments and changes in the law). Well-educated, well-off parents with the freedom to choose any number of healthy, memorable adventures for their children gravitated to ones centered around instruments of lethal violence as entertainment. Some of this was undoubtedly influenced by the gun lobby’s decades-long effort to position firearms as an acceptable way to teach responsibility to kids by making shooting a family-friendly pastime.

But there were deeper societal currents working as well. Legally purchasing and maintaining a decent firearm has never been cheap. One consequence of restricting imports of expensive guns such as so-called Saturday night specials—which in the 1960s and early ’70s could be bought for as little as $10—is that it allowed American-made guns to be sold at even higher prices. Gun control advocates such as Sen. Thomas Dodd were often accused of pushing import bans, in part, to protect homegrown manufacturers, such as Colt, Winchester, and Sturm, Ruger in Dodd’s state of Connecticut.

Import restrictions under the 1968 Gun Control Act required firearms to be for “sporting purposes” and go through licensed dealers. The foreign-made guns that continued to be imported, such as the Beretta, tended to be higher quality and thus more costly. And as the AR-15 took off as a cultural icon, the money required to partake in the fun increased exponentially. Gun industry marketing adjusted to target higher earners, who could more easily afford the advanced weaponry they were selling.

By 2014, households earning more than $90,000 were nearly twice as likely to have guns in the home than those earning less than $50,000. A 2019 study found that “slightly less than half of US guns were owned by persons whose household income was $100,000 a year or more.”

At the same time, the typical education level of the people buying these weapons was also on the rise. In 1994, 29 percent of gun owners had some college education. By 2017, that figure had risen to 34 percent, and by 2022 it was 40 percent. Of course, educational attainment for Americans in general has been trending upward, but the concentration of gun ownership among wealthier households outpaced the extra income that accompanies higher levels of schooling.

There is no better window into this phenomenon than the history of the Staccato Vegas gun range in Pahrump, Nevada. The place actually began under a different name and ownership. It started as the vision of Ignatius Piazza, a chiropractor from California, who founded a firearms training program he called Front Sight. But it wasn’t just about shooting.

From the beginning, Piazza imagined more than dusty target ranges nestled in the desert canyons. He obtained a development agreement with the county to build a “vacation club and resort” that would include thousands of time-share condos, single-family homes, a hotel, and a recreational park, among other amenities—a veritable town dedicated to gun lovers.

To join Front Sight required paying membership fees that could reportedly exceed $200,000 at the topmost “lifetime” tiers, which included a luxury home site. I had a hard time believing anyone would actually pay that much, but fortunately there was a way to find out: Front Sight filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022, and buried in the thousands of court records I found a list of close to three thousand members and the amounts they were said to have paid. The membership costs ranged from $500 to $350,000.

There was the real estate sales and investment consultant from California who paid $165,000; an oncologist and vineyard owner, also from California, was in for $148,000; a corporate lawyer in Illinois paid $106,000; for a physician in Arizona it was $50,000; a tech consultant in New Jersey, $48,000. And on and on.

The chief operating officer of Front Sight once described the Clientele this way: “We’ve got people that are college students to Forbes 400 guys. The economic spectrum is quite broad, but what we find is there’s very few, like forty or fifty, who actually want a residence. What they want is an upscale place to stay for the week or two that they’re out here.”

What motivates them? Bruce, a “gold status” member and CEO of a tech company in Orange County, California, explained why he brought his fourteen-year-old son and members of his family’s church group to the range: “The feeling of security that I come home with, that I’m able to protect my family with all the craziness going on in this world.”

Michelle, a tax accountant from Liberty, Missouri, spent weeks at Front Sight with relatives and “girls from my office” learning to shoot and “be ready to defend our family.” Grant, a software-company executive from Bloomington, Minnesota, came with friends because “it’s really important to be able to defend myself and defend my family if I ever got into that situation.”

As much as self-defense may be the practical, mature rationale participants offer when asked, many also gravitate to these guntry clubs for entertainment. The industry has been remarkably successful at selling the eat-your-spinach objective of skills training in a sugary wrapper of fun, comfort, or excitement. And for that, the lure of cool “forbidden” stuff comes in handy.

Desert Wolf Tours in Arizona offers packages for bachelor and bachelorette parties and corporate retreats that combine off-road ATV driving with shooting machine guns, which they are licensed to operate. One of them, priced at $314 per person, is the Machine Guns and Suppressors Adventure, which is cosponsored by a company that makes silencers or, in the industry’s preferred parlance, suppressors: “Shoot REAL, Federally-Restricted Machine Guns and Suppressors! These are the REAL DEAL!”

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The use of guns for entertainment and over-the-top recreation may be all in good fun (the wisdom of it notwithstanding), but a darker element to the modern idolization of firearms and violence can be found in our political discourse. Here, the societal effects are especially profound because, for better or worse, our elected leaders both reflect and set the tone for what’s considered “normal.”

For schoolchildren, a visit to their class by a politician once conveyed a sense of seriousness and civic duty. Students today could be forgiven for confusing it with professional wrestling.

To be sure, American politics has a long history of bare-knuckle excesses. The 1828 presidential campaign featured accusations, circulated in dueling handbills, that Andrew Jackson was a cannibal and John Quincy Adams a pimp. In modern times, negative attacks on opponents have tended to emphasize fear as much as slander and innuendo. Democrats can lay claim to one of the most notorious examples — The “Daisy ad” of 1964, showing a little girl plucking flower petals followed by a nuclear blast, the unsubtle message being that a vote for Republican Barry Goldwater meant the end of the world.

At the same time, as the NRA made support for gun rights a potent political signifier, it became increasingly common for candidates from both parties to flaunt their love of firearms. Traditionally, they struck relatively tame poses—hunting ducks or shooting at targets—just enough to reassure voters for whom guns were important. But in the 2010s, political messaging around guns took a sharp turn. Conservative opposition to President Obama and the rise of the Tea Party movement propelled a class of antiestablishment Republicans to the fore, along with increasingly agitated campaign ads of a different caliber—literally.

In Arizona, there was Pamela Gorman bragging about her NRA rating in 2010 by firing a machine gun, an AR-15, and a semiautomatic pistol. Another Arizona candidate, Jesse Kelly, promoted a campaign event that year where supporters could “shoot a fully Automatic M16” with him. Around the same time, Christina Jeffrey in South Carolina ran an ad in which she brandished an AK-47 while asserting that gun rights were necessary “to ensure that our limited government stays limited.”

Will Brooke, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress in Alabama in 2014, ran an ad in which he used a small arsenal of semiautomatic weapons to blow holes in a printed copy of the “Obamacare” law. He was mimicking a milder ad from four years earlier showing West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, shooting a bolt-action rifle at a different bill.

In the 2016 Missouri governor’s race, Eric Greitens, a Republican and former Navy SEAL, took gun imagery to new heights in two ads, one showing him firing a mounted machine gun while pledging to “fight Obama’s Democrat machine and their corrupt attacks.” In the other, he shot an assault-style rifle at an unseen target until it blew up. And in 2018, there was the not-so-subtle ad for Republican Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, showing two men loading pistols at a range while saying they are “sick of those DC politicians” and that Ms. Ivey “protected our monuments.”

What was different about these is that the political messaging featured a firearm but, unlike in the past, the focus was neither progun nor pro–gun control. Rather, the gun itself was a prop used as a sort of ominous exclamation point for some other argument. The careless flaunting of firearms by these twenty-first-century pols stood in stark contrast to earlier generations of elected leaders, who may have supported gun rights but didn’t shove it in people’s faces. The discourse had become so militant that even John Dingell, the archetype of the pro-gun politician, was having doubts.

In a memoir published shortly before he died in 2019, Dingell recounted watching his wife, who had succeeded him in Congress, give a speech pleading for reason and a spirit of compromise to address gun violence. Thinking about it the next day, he said he found himself regretting that “the gun debate had gotten too polarized.” “As Debbie had said with such passion the night before, ‘Can’t we have a discussion?’” Dingell wrote. “And I thought about the role I know I played in contributing to that polarization.”

Compromise, however, does not sell as well with certain constituencies as performative antics, which have only gotten more extreme in the years since Dingell’s ruminations. Republican Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent out

Christmas cards in 2021 showing their families posing with assault rifles. A Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, Josh Clark, held weekly giveaways of AR-15s in 2022 to ensure voters are equipped to “fight tyranny and evil” and filmed himself with his kids shooting one of the rifles. And in 2024 in Missouri, Republican attorney General candidate Will Scharf fired a grenade launcher at a stack of documents from Trump-related court cases.

Watching these ads, I found myself thinking of another politician from a bygone era, Robert F. Kennedy, and his remarks about gun ownership after his brother, the president, was assassinated: “We have a responsibility to the victims of crime and violence. It is a responsibility to think not only of our own convenience but of the tragedy of sudden death. It is a responsibility to put away childish things, to make the possession and use of firearms a matter undertaken only by serious people who will use them with the restraint and maturity that their dangerous nature deserves and demands.”

Copyright © 2026 by Mike McIntire. From Ricochet by Mike McIntire, published by One Signal/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a homebuilder in Houston, woke up before sunrise, ate breakfast prepared by his wife, and drove his construction crew to work. Around 6:50 AM, federal immigration agents surrounded Salgado Araujo’s van and shot him through an open window. Struck in the stomach, he died at a hospital a few hours later. 

The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement that evening which claimed that immigration officers stopped Salgado Araujo’s van as part of a “targeted” operation, and that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him “in self-defense” after he “weaponized his vehicle” in an attempt to run agents over. Later, DHS admitted that Salgado Araujo was not the target of an investigation. And video evidence and witness reports revealed that Salgado Araujo did not aim his vehicle at ICE agents, who shot him from the passenger side of the van.

Just a few days later, the same deadly scenario played out all over again. On July 13, around 7 AM, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left his apartment in Biddeford, Maine, to go to work. Mere feet from the front door, federal immigration agents fired at least four shots into his car. Nearby, his 3-year-old daughter looked on, in her Bluey pajamas, and cried.

Again, the Trump administration initially claimed that Guerrero was the “target” of an arrest warrant, and that officers shot him after he “weaponized” his car. Again, the administration later admitted that Guerrero was not the target of an investigation. An ICE spokesperson eventually abandoned the self-defense claim, too, saying only that agents shot Guerrero out of an amorphous concern for “public safety.”

The American Civil Liberties Union published a report on Thursday that examined more than 1,200 incidents of immigration enforcement across eight states that occurred during President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House. The report concluded that in 432 of those incidents—representing more than one in three of the reviewed enforcement actions in 2025—agents used or threatened force, used intimidation tactics, or retaliated against observers. The ACLU also identified 130 instances in which agents brandished weapons and 16 incidents in which agents used lethal force.

The report stresses that the misconduct of immigration agents is not the result of “a few bad apples.” Rather, the fault lies with “a culture of abuse” encouraged by the Trump administration, and “a broken system of accountability.” Basically, when immigration agents are free to break the law without personal consequence, there are deadly consequences for everyone else.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters.

That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington. The gathering was informally called the “Antifa summit.”

Rubio described antifa-aligned networks as sharing infrastructure across borders and accused Iran and Cuba of helping bankroll the movement, without offering evidence. The White House declared the summit the start of an “unprecedented global offensive” against what it calls “radical left terrorism.”

This offensive is built on the same domestic legal architecture that has now sent American activists to prison for decades.

That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.

Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

House Republicans will bring forward this week a surprising and dangerous form of the voting restriction proposals that President Trump has been relentlessly pressuring Congress to pass for months. That act may well discourage or exclude millions of voters via draconian requirements for presenting proof-of-citizenship when registering, showing rigorous voter ID at the polls, or even purging voter rolls. Previously, Trump has pushed these notorious proposals under the guise of “election integrity,” termed the “SAVE America Act,” repeatedly and loudly, and they have even passed the House. But the proposals have failed in the Senate, for lack of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster, thanks to unyielding Democratic resistance and an assist  from some Senate Republicans. Trump has asked  Senate Republican leadership to abolish the filibuster in order to get the legislation through, and even to fire the universally-respected Senate Parliamentarian, and has been repeatedly refused. It seemed dead. His threat is back, disguised in a new form.