Whether you favour spooky fairtales, satanic card games or infernal hijinks at the chip shop there are all manner of fresh top scarers at large this witching season

Tis almost All Hallows’ Eve and naturally, the thoughts of all good video game players are turning to horror. 2026 has already been a bloody good year for the genre with Resident Evil Requiem and Silent Hill: Townfall leading the rabble. But this autumn sees a festering surge of indie horror releases, featuring everything from cursed card games to Nazi-hunting penguins. Here are eight terrifying titles we think you should sample while jack-o-lanterns burn and spirits walk the moonlit streets.

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© Photograph: Question

© Photograph: Question

© Photograph: Question

“Sovereign citizens” think they can live beyond the reach of the state. Now the movement has influencers—and they’re selling all sorts of anarchist courses to expectant families.

Months after Elon Musk declared that the xAI model would outclass Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic, the bot itself admitted defeat.

ELLSWORTH, Kansas — David Rankin has never been one for putting up campaign lawn signs. As a lifelong Republican in a town of 3,000 — where Donald Trump has won by 50-point margins since 2016 — he’s never seen a reason to put a candidate’s name in his yard.

But recently, Rankin and his wife Dina did something new. Frustrated with their senators in Washington, DC, they went out to their front lawn and hammered in a sign in support of the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor running for US Senate — and a Democrat.

As signs of a midterm blue wave rise around the country, perhaps no state has been more surprising to watch than Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. A string of polls now show the incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a tight race for survival, buffeted by low approval ratings, a string of personal controversies, poor campaigning, and Trump’s unpopularity over healthcare cuts, fuel costs, beef prices, and tariffs. 

Kansas is now a toss-up, attracting both national attention and last-minute cash investments from the national parties. Pundits have pointed to a range of reasons: the national backlash against the president; the unusual weakness of Marshall’s candidacy; the persistence of pocketbook issues for Kansas voters.

But there’s also something more interesting afoot, a difference that may have its own national repercussions. Hamilton’s campaign is a rare instance of a Democrat deliberately rallying people of faith, boldly proclaiming the Gospels, openly talking about Jesus Christ, and asking voters to find — and embrace — a profoundly Democratic message in the beliefs they profess every Sunday.

“Our faith is respectful…it reflects the ideas of justice and fairness, things that are just fundamental to the Bible,” Hamilton told me in early October. “Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists.”

That was part of the draw for the Rankins. They had known about Hamilton for a while. Friends had been to his church, and David — a retired choir director — told me that his own Presbyterian congregation had used Hamilton’s books and various sermon series as part of their Bible study. So when they found out Hamilton had decided to run earlier this year — as a Democrat, no less — they prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to break with their political party this year.

“Things are not right right now. They’re not right in Washington and we have to do better,”  Rankin told me. “His faith is just going to make him better as he serves us.”

If Hamilton, and a handful of other candidates of faith in nearby Iowa and Texas, win, it could signal a shift in US politics — or at least a tremor in one of its most rock-solid certainties. One of the defining stories of the last century has been the realignment of religion, religious life, and religious voters on the political spectrum — and the complete shift of evangelicals toward the GOP. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Democrats could routinely count on majority support among white evangelical Protestants in congressional elections, and at least substantial support from them at the presidential level. But by the 1990s — with Americans becoming more evangelical and evangelicals becoming more Republican — the GOP had effectively locked in a permanent voting bloc, especially powerful in the heartland and the South.

Meanwhile the opposite has been true for the Democratic Party: Rapid liberalization and secularization has moved nonreligious and anti-religious voters toward the Democrats, while religious Democratic voters tend to come from smaller progressive churches. The shift has only accelerated in recent years, as Trump has consolidated evangelical voters, while white college-educated voters — who are largely secular — moved left. And when blue-state Democrats try to deploy faith-based messages, they get derided or dismissed as awkward, disingenuous, or off-brand. 

The result: In recent years, Democrats have mostly ceded religious voters, outreach, and messaging to Republicans. That has made it almost impossible for the party to compete in red and rural states, where white evangelical voters make up a substantial share of the electorate. In turn, Democrats have faced increasingly long odds to win those Senate seats, or expand the electoral map in presidential contests.

Whether he wins or loses in Kansas, Hamilton’s overperforming campaign poses a high-stakes question for Democrats nationally: Can a true moderate, a self-described radical centrist, and an openly religious person offer a road map for reclaiming Christianity and winning back religious voters? 

Maybe Hamilton does represent such a playbook. But to watch him on the trail, you find another fact that makes his path look much harder for other Democrats to walk.

It’s not just that Hamilton is a religious Democrat, or even that he’s mastered a message for religious swing voters hoping to reconcile their faith with a Democratic candidate. He’s also a deeply talented public speaker, well-connected community leader, and authoritative religious voice willing — unlike most pastors — to wade directly into electoral politics. He is, in other words, a unicorn.

He’s the leader of a very unique church — not just a politician “affiliated” with Christianity or training to join the clergy, but an established figure in an established institutional denomination that insulates him against attacks on his faith and character. (One of those came from no less than Vice President JD Vance, who attacked Hamilton in September as “dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”) The skills that come with leading a megachurch also lend themselves easily to campaigning — but might not be replicable for others, at least not to this extent. And Hamilton has managed to ease concerns from secular or nonreligious liberals, without compromising his centrist, at times heterodox, religious and political beliefs.

His campaign could change control of Congress. But beyond that, it also offers a new, possibly more effective, political language for Democrats in a post-Trump world.

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On a recent Thursday in Hutchinson, Kansas, Adam Hamilton found himself therapizing a crowd of several hundred. “Republicans for Hamilton” pins floated in the audience at this downtown theater in the middle of the state, as he diagnosed the problems in Washington that have bled into Kansas. Members of the US Senate, Hamilton said gently, had become like Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: They’d lost their minds, their hearts, and their courage.

Along the way, he said, they, and President Donald Trump, had torn apart the fabric of the community, turning neighbors into suspicious strangers. Heads nodded in agreement; those closest to me sighed and lowered their heads. Hamilton recounted something a mother once asked him: to be “somebody who’s going to help me not hate my neighbors with the red caps anymore.”

“And she wasn’t talking about Chiefs fans,” he quipped. Laughter broke the silence.

To see Hamilton in action feels like being thrown back to a forgotten era of politics: His tone is conciliatory. He’s eager to dispense with the “extremes.” He slips into preaching about “radical love,” and he’s comfortable quoting scripture and referencing Christian teachings when answering policy questions. Time permitting, he shakes hands and greets everyone in a room.

His public persona is built far less on his political experience — this is his first race — than on his three decades of experience leading a megachurch. In his own telling, tending to the middle has been a defining part of his life’s work.

His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.

Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes (“Everything happens for a reason”) and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism.

“I carry my pocket testament with me everywhere,” Hamilton told me, pulling out his copy of the Gospels and the epistles of John, as he tends to do on the trail. “This is my defining story. This book and its story define how I understand what it means to be human and is at the center of my life.”

He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church “for thinking people.”

The point was to “use your intellect and not check your brain at the door,” he says on the stump. “And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand.”

And so it came to pass that a congregation that started off meeting in the chapel of a funeral home in the 1990s grew into Kansas’s largest church, and the largest Methodist congregation in the country. The church now has nine locations across two states counting about 24,000 members between them, anchored by a spaceship-looking complex in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb.

Hamilton, and members of the church, are quick to point out the radical centrism of the church: It’s split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Hamilton himself is a former Republican. The Leawood location features both a 3,500-capacity sanctuary, with a full orchestra and 80-person choir for traditional services, a smaller space for modern, nondenominational-inspired worship, and a chapel.

And though the spotlight of the campaign has brought scrutiny, media visits, and broadsides from out of state, it’s also Hamilton’s experience in the church, combined with an unpopular and inexperienced GOP incumbent, that have made the race competitive. 

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The light pouring through the Swedish chapel’s windows in Lindsborg seemed to amplify the hundreds of singing voices. Hamilton, stumping at the front of the room, had broken out into song — “All Creatures of Our God and King” a hymn based on St. Francis of Assisi’s 800-year-old prayer — and the crowd at this Lutheran college quickly joined in.

“You just got to take the time to do that,” he said after the final alleluia.

Before the song, he had been speaking about the Christian roots of his campaign: the Biblical call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, all for the sake of God’s creation. Oftentimes life, and especially politics, make it hard to see the beauty in nature, he was saying, and the complexity in everything.

Hamilton’s popularity in both his church and among Kansas voters owes a great deal to the fact that he’s a moderate. Coming from the coasts, that word, used around Hamilton, doesn’t quite mean what I expected. A “moderate” in American Democratic politics usually describes a longtime Democrat who carves out a middle lane on very specific issues — usually defense or reducing the deficit. But Hamilton has no trouble with complicated, unfixed, occasionally heterodox views, including on hot-button social issues.

Take a question a woman in the chapel asked him about abortion: What does he think about reproductive rights in a state like Kansas?

He’s spent the last two decades writing and talking about his evolving thoughts on abortion. He calls himself “pro-life with a heavy heart,” telling the woman that, as a pastor, he feels “personally moral tension when it comes to abortion.”

But he would be taking on a different role as a US senator, Hamilton said. Crisis pregnancies “lead me to have compassion, and say there needs to be legal and safe access to abortion,” he said. On this issue, politicians are usually pressured to take absolutist positions to satisfy their party’s base, but Hamilton sees his own view as representing what most Kansans actually want. People here have already voted multiple times to preserve abortion access, he said, and when an effort to undo abortion rights protections in the state constitution was on the ballot in 2022, it lost by nearly 20 points. He said he believed at the time that the legislature should not “be making that decision for women who are facing really difficult situations.”

This particular tension comes from his mother’s own experience: Worried she wouldn’t be able to support or raise a child at 17, her father, a TWA pilot, had encouraged her to travel to Switzerland for an abortion when she got pregnant. She considered it, but ultimately refused, leading to her being kicked out of her home and moving in with Hamilton’s 16-year-old father. Even today she tells Hamilton to remember her story — “I just can’t imagine how much poorer the world would be if I had gotten on that airplane and you had never been born.”

“There are things that are clearly black and white, but there’s a lot where there’s room; I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you’re coming from and I can respect you for that,” Hamilton said to me and other reporters after the chapel event. “People on the extremes on either end, they don’t want me telling the story about my mom. … But in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, ‘You know what? That’s real. I know that you’re going to solidly make sure that there’s abortion rights.’ And on the right, people say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you understand the moral tension.’”

He applies a similar mindset to LGBTQ issues. His own church welcomes gay and lesbian people, even as he accepts that individual Methodist congregations can choose their own approach (he advocated for that middle ground while trying to prevent a schism between the mainstream UMC and a traditionalist and conservative offshoot that broke off in 2023).

On the trail, Hamilton hews to the middle on other policy issues as well, raising concerns about the national debt, endorsing border security and ICE’s “original” purpose, letting local communities decide on AI data centers, and critiquing “far-left climate” activism. He’s running ads condemning socialism and the extremes of both sides. And he peppers his speeches with the phrase “independent-minded Democrat.”

In the same way, Hamilton is not afraid to evangelize. He’s both eager and willing to talk about his faith, to preach the Gospel, and to share his personal journey to God, while also reassuring liberal, nonreligious people, and Democrats broadly that he believes in the separation of church and state. He isn’t one of those Christians, he seems to suggest, but he is still uncompromisingly Christian.

“We’re not running to force our religion on other people, but we are running as people who say our Gospel calls us to something different,” he said. When comparing the core priorities of the GOP — fiscal responsibility, limited government, personal civil liberties, and a strong defense — with the core priorities of Democrats — social safety nets, education, the elderly, making sure that vulnerable people are cared for — the space to be a gospel-reading Democrat is quite obvious, he said. 

“Jesus never talked about civil liberties,” Hamilton said. “He never talked about fiscal responsibility, a strong defense or limited government. But he did talk about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ … Which of these two sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”

Which is where the lessons for other Democrats appear plainly. Hamilton thinks the party he joined earlier this year could learn a few things from his campaign, and those of other people of faith running as Democrats across the country.

“Sometimes they have inadvertently alienated religious voters who are just right of center who would easily have come on board if they felt like they were welcomed,” he said. “The Democratic Party would be far stronger and wiser if they were openly willing to say, ‘Of course we embrace people of faith and we need them.’”

And it’s that ability, to combine faith with moderation and openness, that is compelling to the voters across the political spectrum I talked with.

“I’m a Christian and I feel that in Christianity we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, all those things that I read in the New Testament. And I feel that he gets that,” Susan Combs, a 73-year-old registered Republican, told me. “This Christian nationalism that is going on is not really, to me personally, it’s not what Christianity is about.”

She and others pointed to Hamilton and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, as examples of a kind of Christian political revival. Both of them, plus a handful of other Democrats running on openly faith-based messages, present case studies for strategists, scholars, and others who are watching the campaign for political lessons.

When Talarico and Hamilton use religious language, “it really stands out, even though it’s really more of a return to what we’ve seen in the past,” Dave Campbell, a religion and politics scholar at the University of Notre Dame, said. “The trick with religious language is that people from within a religious community, they pick up on the subtleties. Do they really speak the way I do? Do they really understand the world the way I do? And if you don’t really understand those nuances, your rhetoric can come off as not only inauthentic, but even offensive.”

The former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge noted that Democrats will likely not be able to pull many white evangelical Christians into their coalition. 

But his own examination of the data shows that there’s ample room for Democrats to grow their margins among white Catholics and mainline Protestant voters — those who belong to old non-evangelical institutional churches like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches.   

These voters will remain up for grabs in future elections — though outreach may only work in certain states that still have strong mainline traditions. “You can’t win in a place like Arizona — that’s not where your base is,” Burge said. But traditional denominations are still strong in the heartland and farm country. “A place like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even Missouri to some extent, Wisconsin — those are the kind of places I think that message would do well,” Burge said. “It wouldn’t do well nationwide, though.” 

Burge told me the key for Democrats to be competitive in religious spaces again will be to win over old mainliners “who used to be a Bill Clinton voter, even an early Obama voter, who got lost by the progressivism of the Democratic Party on social issues. That’s the kind of voter that you can win back, the 75-year-old Lutheran, Presbyterian.” 

The bigger question, Burge told me, is an uncomfortable one Democrats as a party must face: that the secular far left is loud, but not large. “A lot of those people [who are religiously unaffiliated] are actually open to the idea of religion,” he said. Even among those who don’t identify with any particular organized religion, atheists only make up less than one in five.

“A lot of [religiously unaffiliated people] do believe in something. Those people are not going to be turned off by some religious talk,” Burge said. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people. They’re the ones we’re going for.”

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At a rally in the Kansas City suburbs in September, Vice President JD Vance unintentionally delivered an in-kind donation to Hamilton’s campaign. He leveled an attack liberal and mainline Protestant Christians have long fielded from the religious right: that Hamilton’s faith was just “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”

“That is not Christianity,” Vance, a Catholic convert who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal, and nondenominational faith traditions, said of Hamilton, also calling him “a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself.”

By contrast, he described Marshall as “a proud Christian” with “real faith and real principles.” Marshall also attends a mainline Christian church. 

More than 100 Methodist clergy came to Hamilton’s defense in the wake of the broadside, urging Marshall, and Vance, to be more careful on the campaign. “When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote. “You tear at the fabric that is the body of Christ.” 

The pastor of Marshall’s old church called Hamilton “a middle-of-the-road pastor” who is “pretty good at loving his enemies.”

Trump himself recently called him “a Radical Left LUNATIC Dumocrat,” who is “is not one us [evangelicals].” 

But the personal attacks on his faith, and the defenses, may have only underscored one of Hamilton’s perceived advantages. In Kansas, at least, moral character has become one of the defining stories of the race. It’s no coincidence that Hamilton’s big break came in September, when a major New York Times investigation upended the race by reporting that Marshall — a former OB-GYN — had sued more than 700 former patients, some of them new mothers, for unpaid medical bills. Many were charged 18 percent interest, and 81 were arrested in debt-collection cases. Campaign ads interviewing doctors who said Marshall’s practices were unusual and Marshall’s former patients soon inundated Kansas airwaves. 

“It is ridiculous to suggest that Dr. Marshall ever arrested patients,” Abbi Enders, Marshall’s campaign press secretary, wrote in response to a question from Vox about the article. “The Kansas Bill of Rights states, ‘No person shall be imprisoned for debt,’ proving this to be a blatant lie.” Many of the arrests in the cases of Marshall’s former patients were due to missed court dates.

That story broke right before Hamilton trounced Marshall during a debate at the Kansas state fair. Videos of Marshall being drowned out by booing crowds spread quickly — while competing clips of Hamilton talking about being both liberal and conservative also went viral during this window. 

Hamilton’s favorability has become a prominent example of another shift in Trump-era American politics: the sense that Republicans are now losing the character war, nominating deeply flawed candidates who project strength and bluster at the expense of integrity, decency, and other qualities people trust. Across red states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats have held an edge in polling when voters were asked which party’s candidate has better moral character.

In Kansas, more stories would soon drip out, contributing to the deteriorating public image of Marshall: reports that Marshall’s primary residence was in Florida, not Kansas; an unpaid cookie bill from a 2020 campaign event; allegations of inappropriate usage of officials funds or taxpayer money for campaign purposes.

The result: Hamilton leading the field of key toss-up Senate races with the highest net favorability ratings in a CNN average of polls from September and October.

Republicans have fired back, going after his religion and church. Vance and Marshall attacked his church’s participation in a Pride festival. Marshall campaign ads have criticized the church’s handling of decades-old child sexual abuse allegations against a former volunteer at a church camp, alleging that Hamilton “protected a pedophile.” Trump, at his rally in Wichita last week, delivered his own spin on these accusations, saying Hamilton “used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity,” and “shielded a child sexual predator at his church.” 

Marshall has continued calling Hamilton a far-left, “woke megachurch CEO,” and went after his church again at a debate last week, asking if he was “leading from the middle when one in four churches left his denomination? Is that what you call leading from the middle when you split the Methodist church?”

“People know what I’ve stood for — they know I’m not some woke, far left, whatever,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And I feel at peace about it.” Still, “that’s 24,000 other people in my church that you’re attacking and you’re attacking every other mainline Christian across the state of Kansas as you’re doing that.”

When asked about this charge in an email, Marshall’s press secretary did not respond. 

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When Hamilton discusses religious liberty and the separation of church and state, he makes something clear: “I’m not running to be the chaplain of the Senate.”

Over the days that I followed him, he repeated this line, usually in response to liberal-leaning voters curious or skeptical about endorsing someone so vocally religious. 

“If anything, that might have been a negative,” Sally Gillihan, a Democrat, told me in Hutchinson. “I was really worried that that’s what he was relying on, that’s what he was going to go to bat for.” After hearing him talk about policy, religious freedom, and restoring normalcy, those fears went away.

Others, including Sam Buttram, a 2020 Marshall voter who works in the cattle industry, told me that Hamilton’s religiosity wasn’t a selling point for him, but that it’s “a lot of what makes him who he is,” which makes him trust his character. “I just wish more politicians were like him…independent-minded, wanting to do the right thing for the people instead of worried about staying in office or agreeing with some other politician.”

Ultimately, Hamilton’s unexpected campaign success so far might be due to the combination of all this — not only his faith, but the impression that many voters have that he is guided not by right or left but his own values, as evidenced by his heterodox views and moderate temperament. In his case, those values are informed by his faith, but for other Democrats in other red states, they might not need to be. 

Still, that might not make it any easier for Democrats trying to emulate the Hamilton playbook. 

Much of Hamilton’s success, Burge told me, is due to his unique position. “People don’t realize how good megachurch pastors are at stuff like [campaigning]. When you’re used to talking to 2,000, 3,000 people every weekend, you are a politician,” he said. “It’s a superpower though. … You’ve got to be a one in a million kind of person.”

Copper prices are at record highs, but for TikTok creators, the real money may be in teaching others how to strip wire—and selling them the tools to do it.

Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?

Coyotec is bilingual, swears, and tells listeners how to defend themselves against ICE. Its popularity comes as more broadcasters are experimenting with artificial personalities.

We all know the highlights of the tomb raider’s storied career – but what about the lowlights? We dig deep to unearth the archaeologist’s less glorious moments

Happy birthday, Lara! This month marks 30 years since Ms Croft first swan-dived into our lives with her unique blend of athletic prowess, archaeological expertise and giant knockers. More than 100 million Tomb Raider games have been sold since. We all remember the good times: the bold design and sheer playability of the original titles; the establishment of Lara as a 90s icon, embodying both lads’ mag culture and girl power; the way she made games cool, even appearing on the cover of the Face. We’ve had blockbuster movies, big budget reboots, and shiny reissues. And who could forget the time we got to powerwash her house?

But no one gets to 30 without a few skeletons in the closet – or in Lara’s case, butlers in the freezer. So here’s a look at the darker parts of her past.

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© Photograph: Aspyr

© Photograph: Aspyr

© Photograph: Aspyr

The Trump administration wants to move Forest Service headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, shutter 23 research stations, and close many regional offices and replace them with state offices.

It's been more than a decade since Iowa has had a Democratic governor or senator. But this year, with the incumbents retiring, both races are competitive. As Peter Tubbs at Iowa PBS reports, record-high diesel prices have hit the state's agriculture industry particularly hard and could influence the midterm elections.

Meta got hit this week with its biggest fine yet, the latest in a mounting pile of court-ordered payments.

Upward, a newly relaunched Christian app, is pitching trad values to a generation that barely even dates.

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we go behind the scenes of our Nathan Fielder cover story, unpack tech billionaires’ generous promises, and discuss the suspicious letters sent to US election offices.

Some hosts are threatening to strike, while others are plotting ways around Airbnb’s new restrictions. Guests, meanwhile, are celebrating.

From Trump TV to a Shark Tank knockoff, the president’s latest entertainment ventures are a steep decline from his days on The Apprentice.

Ultra Right Beer, a brand launched in 2023 by MAGA political consultant Seth Weathers, has vanished from the internet with many deliveries unfulfilled.

One of the last decade’s most consequential changes to how the Supreme Court operates is the growth of the so-called shadow docket — a process that allows the justices to decide cases unusually quickly, and often without full briefing or oral argument.

Historically, the Court would typically allow contentious legal issues to percolate in the lower courts for months or even years before the justices agreed to decide one of those issues. Then they’d spend months reading briefs, hearing arguments, and debating the case amongst themselves before they finally issued an opinion. This slow process existed because the Supreme Court is the final word on many legal questions — the Court can even override Congress if it claims a law is unconstitutional — and so it should be cautious before it hands down a decision that cannot easily be displaced.

A new case, which recently arrived on the Court’s shadow docket, embodies all the reasons why America’s highest Court should act carefully and slowly. K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association involves a highly contentious issue — the plaintiffs in the case effectively want the Supreme Court to bar transgender women from women’s sports teams at high schools and universities, even in states that support trans inclusion in sports.

It also involves an appalling sexual assault allegation. One of the plaintiffs in the case is a high school women’s team wrestler who is identified only by her initials because she is a minor. She claims that one of her wrestling opponents, who is transgender, “forcefully” penetrated the plaintiff’s vagina with her fingers during a match.

As a memo from the local prosecutor’s office points out, if these allegations are true then K.M.K. is the victim of a very serious crime — rape in the third degree. The prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to prosecute because it concluded that it could not prove that a sex crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Among other things, prosecutors spoke to the referee who officiated the match, and he said that “nothing stood out to him during the match” and that “after watching the video of the match, he could not say that the suspect’s hand placement was ‘anything out of the ordinary.’”

The school district, meanwhile, says that it has reviewed video of the match, interviewed both competitors, and that its investigation into the allegation is “still ongoing.”

K.M.K., in other words, is exactly the sort of case that the justices should step away from, sending it back down to the lower courts to gather more information and to fully think through the difficult legal issues presented by the case. Setting aside the horrifying allegations against her one-time opponent, K.M.K.’s lawyers — most of whom work for a Christian right law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — make novel legal arguments that ask the Court to make broad pronouncements that go far beyond its previous precedents. 

One of their arguments, if taken seriously by the justices, could potentially make it impossible for any school athletes, whether cis or trans, to participate in competitive sports of any kind.

There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Supreme Court will, if it moves too quickly in this case, harm millions of school athletes throughout the country. The factual question of whether a particular wrestler committed a crime is separate from the legal question of whether federal law strips states of their authority over trans participation in women’s sports. And this legal question deserves more deliberation than the Court can give it if it decides this case on the shadow docket.

So what are the actual legal issues in K.M.K.?

In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026), the Supreme Court warned that judges should not be given the power to decide which athletes may compete on a women’s sports team. “The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for his Court, “to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

B.P.J., of course, was a loss for transgender rights. The Court rejected a constitutional challenge to state laws that forbid trans women from playing on school sports teams within that state. But the legal question in B.P.J. was whether laws barring trans women from women’s sports are allowed — a question that the Court’s Republican majority answered in the affirmative. A victory for the plaintiffs in K.M.K., by contrast, would likely establish that no state may permit trans women to compete on women’s sports teams, regardless of what the people of that state want.

This Court is often skeptical of claims by trans rights advocates, and it almost always resolves disputes between cultural liberals and religious conservatives in favor of the religious right. That said, this Court has thus far respected states’ rights on another contentious issue that is a high priority for the religious right: abortion. Although the Court’s Republican majority overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, it has rejected some attempts to restrict abortion in blue states — including by repeatedly ruling against litigants who seek to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

So it is, at least, possible that this Court will follow a similar path in K.M.K. and conclude that the question of which team trans women should play on should be answered by the states and not the Supreme Court.

Broadly speaking, ADF raises two legal arguments against Washington state’s policy allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams. It claims that Title IX, a federal law that bars “sex” discrimination by most schools, implicitly requires those schools to have sports teams that only cisgender women may play on. It also claims that the Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), which requires public schools to out trans students to their parents even if the students wish to keep their gender identity secret, also requires those schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports.

There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to decide either of these questions now, however. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Lux v. Rodrigues (2010), when a party that lost in the lower courts seeks an injunction from a Supreme Court justice before their case is fully litigated in those lower courts, they must demonstrate that “the legal rights at issue are ‘indisputably clear.’” This rule, like many old rules disfavoring shadow docket decisions, exists to prevent the justices from rushing into a decision that may later prove unwise.

There is no plausible argument that Title IX “indisputably” bars trans women from women’s sports. That’s because, just a few months ago in B.P.J., the Court held that it was not deciding the question of “whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” So that’s a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that the answer to this legal question remains open.

Mirabelli, meanwhile, is an unusually thinly reasoned decision. The Court’s Republican majority held that schools must out trans students because of a judicially created doctrine saying that parents have “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” But the Court’s analysis of this issue was just a single paragraph long, it relied on the most malleable doctrine in all of US constitutional law, and it had nothing to say about sports. 

Moreover, as the school district points out in its brief, the Court has never held that a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child includes a right to dictate which rules will be used by school sports teams. If such a right existed, a parent might insist that a school bar players of a particular race. Or they might demand that their child be allowed to play football without being tackled.

Competitive team sports simply cannot exist if one player’s mother is allowed to demand changes to the rules that neither the league nor the other players support.

In any event, at this stage in the litigation it should be enough for the Court to say that the unique right claimed by K.M.K.’s mother — the right to dictate which rules a multischool competitive sports league will use — is not “indisputably clear” under current law. 

What should happen when the Court eventually decides whether blue states may allow trans women to play on women’s teams?

It is, to borrow from Lux, indisputably clear that the Court should not give the K.M.K. plaintiffs the sweeping policy change that they seek in a shadow docket ruling. But the justices cannot avoid, forever, the question of whether federal law forbids trans women from playing on women’s teams. So how should they resolve this question when it is more properly presented to them?

Let’s dispose of the plaintiffs’ Mirabelli argument first. While the Court has held that parents have some right to direct the education of their children, prior to Mirabelli, this right was construed narrowly. One older case held that states may not forbid parents from sending their children to private schools. Another held that the government may not bar teachers at these schools from teaching the German language.

Prior to the Court’s barely explained decision in Mirabelli, however, the Court had never held that parents may dictate how public schools operate, and the school district’s brief in K.M.K. cites several court decisions warning against giving parents too much authority over public schools. (The Court did hold, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), that parents who object to a school’s curriculum on religious grounds may opt their children out of certain lessons. But the K.M.K. plaintiffs do not raise a religious objection.) As the Supreme Court said in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), states may “restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways.” 

It’s clear from Mirabelli that the Court’s Republicans do not share this caution about judicial control over public schools. But, because Mirabelli was so thinly reasoned, it’s also impossible for outside observers to determine why these justices want an unprecedented amount of control over public schooling, or whether they have good reasons for asserting this new power.

I will simply reiterate the school district’s objection that, once the Supreme Court opens the door to parents dictating which rules will be used in school sporting competitions, the lawsuits will not end with parents seeking to kick trans women out of women’s sports. The next parent may object to their child wrestling Black people. Or they may demand that their child be given protective gear that gives them a competitive advantage. Some parents may also demand rules changes that conflict with changes demanded by other parents. And there is no principled way to distinguish these requests from a request to exclude trans women.

There are myriad problems, meanwhile, with the K.M.K. plaintiffs’ Title IX argument. That statute provides that schools that receive “Federal financial assistance” may not exclude individuals from “any education program” on “the basis of sex.” This statute has long been read to require equal treatment of men’s and women’s sports by schools that receive federal funds.

But, as the school district argues in its brief, Washington schools do not discriminate on the basis of “sex” — which the Court has defined to mean sex assigned at birth in this context. Instead, they classify athletes on the basis of gender identity. There is one team for all people who identify as male, whether trans or cis, and another team for all people who identify as female. Social conservatives may object to this arrangement, but it does not classify students based on their sex assigned at birth at all.

The K.M.K. plaintiffs’ argument is also undermined by federal regulations implementing Title IX. Those regulations provide that schools generally should not separate women and men in sports, but that they “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.” It is quite a stretch to read regulations saying that schools “may” have sex-segregated teams to say that schools must ensure that their teams are strictly sex segregated.

Finally, recall that Title IX only applies to schools that accept federal funding — schools have the option of rejecting Title IX’s requirements if they also forego federal grants. This matters because, as the Court recently held in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026), “Congress must clearly and unambiguously alert a grant recipient to any condition on federal funds.”

Thus, if there is any ambiguity about whether Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports, that ambiguity must be resolved against imposing any requirements on public schools. Title IX may only be read to ban trans women from women’s sports if it “clearly and unambiguously” does so.

Again, there’s no reason for the justices to resolve either of these questions because, at this early stage in the litigation, the Supreme Court should simply decline to decide K.M.K. because the plaintiffs’ legal rights are not “indisputably clear.” But this Court is often impatient, especially in cases involving culture war issues. Mirabelli was also a shadow docket case, but that didn’t stop the Court’s Republicans from inventing a new legal rule compelling teachers to out their trans students.

There’s a serious risk, in other words, that this Court will rush to decide K.M.K. before it fully considers the legal arguments on either side, or even learns whether the genuinely shocking allegations raised by the plaintiffs have merit.

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