Following weeks of failed votes to replace ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican caucus settled on a little-known and inexperienced representative from Louisiana: Mike Johnson. Now in his fourth term in Congress, Johnson is known for being a hard-right Trump supporter who led congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election, backs a national abortion ban, and opposes LGBTQ equality.

Unfortunately, Johnson’s right-wing extremist beliefs don’t end there.

More from Right Wing Watch: The New House Speaker Is an Acolyte of Christian Nationalist Pseudo-Historian David Barton >>

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has mastered the art of churning out cookie-cutter model bills that are adopted, often word for word, by conservative state legislatures. And it’s all bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires that are only too happy to help draft laws that are great for their bottom line and bad for us. Incredibly, hundreds — maybe thousands — of bills have been passed this way.

There’s nothing wrong with third parties in theory. But what No Labels is doing is not honest. No Labels differs from authentic political parties and movements that grow from the bottom up, running candidates for mayor, city council or state government. The group plans to swoop in at the top — in a presidential election — with an opaque system for choosing its candidates. Forbes, which calls the group “shadowy,” points out that by establishing itself as a nonprofit rather than a political party, it’s able to bypass financial disclosure rules for parties.

Meanwhile, No Labels vehemently denies that it wants to play a spoiler role or throw the presidential election to Donald Trump in a Trump-Biden rematch. If that’s true, it has blinders on.

Early voting is well underway in the bellwether state of Virginia, with every seat in the state legislature up for grabs this November. The election will be the curtain-raiser for national elections in 2024, and analysts will be all over them trying to gauge the political mood — especially ahead of a presidential election year.

Four years ago in 2019, Democrats flipped the Virginia legislature, and Joe Biden went on to defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Four years earlier than that, with control of the Virginia Senate described as “on a knife’s edge,” the GOP rallied to keep both chambers — and the following year Trump won the presidency. So it’s no surprise that this year the heat is on. Throw a few more ingredients into the mix — including the national ambitions of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) — and you’ve got high stakes and high drama combined.

You can find anything on the internet, and one of those things is a countdown clock that tracks exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remain until Election Day 2024. As those minutes slip by and Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican primary field, a scary truth is coming into sharper focus.

The cavalry is not coming. Neither the courts nor other Republicans appear likely to stop Donald Trump in time for the general election. Legal theories about how he might be disqualified face an enormous uphill battle. Anybody waiting for a deus ex machina moment that sweeps Trump from the scene is wishcasting in an increasingly dangerous way.