An important new story by Layla A. Jones out this morning shows yet another way right-wing conspiracy theories may be making their way into government, impacting regular people’s lives.

For more than a decade, the Census Bureau has been preparing to swap out the way it records people’s race and ethnicity, eliminating the separate “Hispanic or Latino” ethnicity option and adding more options to the question about race. The change was intended to offer people categories that better reflect their understanding of their identity; many respondents had been checking “other” rather than choosing from the categories available.

Here’s where the story gets weird.

You’ve now probably seen news that Trump plans to use the U.S. Postal Service as a key part of his war on the 2026 midterm. Specifically, according to testimony Wednesday from Postmaster General David Steiner, if a state doesn’t hand over its absentee and/or voter list to the federal government, the post office simply won’t deliver that state’s ballots. This morning a court blocked aspects of the policy.

Lets start by saying this is blatantly anti-constitutional, though of course it’s possible that the corrupt Supreme Court will allow it.

But this front in Trump’s war against the 2026 election is illustrative of a number of critical factors in the challenge before us.

The key paragraph from this bizarre Josh Kovensky story about how Ken Paxton, the Trump DOJ, and a federal judge who is notoriously friendly to Republican causes worked together to scrap an immigration rule they didn’t like — in just a few hours.

Timestamps show that the complaint was filed against the DOJ at 1:51 p.m. At 2:59 p.m., the DOJ and Texas filed a motion jointly asking the court to order what Paxton’s complaint sought. At 6:29 p.m., 278 minutes from the time the case was filed, Judge O’Connor, chief judge in the Northern District of Texas, gave the DOJ and Paxton much of what they asked for.