I met up with Crystal Mason in mid-October, in a hilly neighborhood south of downtown Fort Worth. She was easy enough to recognize—she wore a black t-shirt with a pair of bright red boxing gloves on the front, and a single word in big block letters, “STILL ACQUITTED.” 

Eight years ago, amid a push by Texas Republican officials to find and prosecute instances of voter fraud, the Fort Worth resident was sentenced to five years in prison for voting in the 2016 presidential election while on supervised release for a felony conviction. Mason argued that she had never been informed she couldn’t vote, and that she cast only a provisional ballot, which was never counted. In 2024, a court agreed and threw out the conviction, but Tarrant County’s Republican district attorney appealed that decision. She finally beat the case for good this September—and then got right back to work. 

When I met her, she was checking a voter list on her phone and rattling off instructions to a group of volunteers—two daughters, a son, and one grandkid—who had accompanied her to knock doors and check in with residents on a 94-degree afternoon. These days, when she’s not driving a box truck for her day job, she runs a voting rights group called Crystal Mason: The Fight. In recent weeks she’d participated in registration drives, hit the doors, and stopped by a senior center on karaoke night to make sure voters there had a plan to get to the polls.

The kind of organizing Mason and others have been doing has taken on a new urgency ahead of the November election. In September, the Republican-led county commission eliminated 92 Election Day voting sites—nearly a third of its 2024 total. Advocates argued the reductions would disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic areas. Mason calls the closures “unreal.”

This would be a big deal anywhere, but Tarrant is not just any county; it’s the state’s ultimate battleground. The area has narrowly backed Democrats at the top of the ticket in some recent cycles, but it’s the last of the state’s big urban counties still run by Republicans—including the district attorney who tried to reinstate Mason’s conviction. And the conservative enclaves of Tarrant have played an outsized role in shaping the recent trajectory of the Texas Republican Party. This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference took place in the Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine. Bo French, the racist nominee for Texas Railroad Commission who wants to remove all Muslims from the United States, is a former Tarrant GOP chair. The True Texas Project, formerly known as the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, celebrated its 15th anniversary by hosting a conversation on “the war on white America”; this fall, it’s held screenings of a new documentary called Don’t Sharia My Texas, at chapters around the state.

In light of the stakes and the preeminence of Tarrant County, the local Democratic Party headquarters in an office park on the edge of Fort Worth had been bustling with volunteers and candidates, as well as ink-stained wretches like me. When I spent a little too long admiring the political paraphernalia at the front of the office—including Kamala Harris-branded beer cans and a wine glass for Wendy Davis—Reyne Telles, the Tarrant County Democratic Party’s executive director, wistfully quoted the Boston Globe’s recent description of the space: “The Tarrant County Democratic Party office is a shrine to great hopes past.” 

Telles says that every statewide candidate on his side of the ledger has a number in mind for how much they need to win the county by in order to win the state—generally somewhere between three and eight percentage points. But there are some indications Democrats have made inroads, including with residents who traditionally support the other side. In a special election earlier this year, a Democratic union leader named Taylor Rehmet stunned political observers by flipping a state Senate district that had voted for Trump by 17 points. The data suggested he owed much of his success to persuasion, not turnout. While the official county Republican organization carries the flag for the far right, Fort Worth’s moderate Republican mayor, Mattie Parker, has endorsed Democratic candidates for two statewide offices—railroad commissioner (against French) and attorney general. Glen Whitley, who served for 16 years as Tarrant County judge (it’s the equivalent of county executive) cut an ad endorsing Democratic state Rep. James Talarico over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race for US Senate. 

While Talarico and gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa have captured most of the headlines (guilty), the stakes are high in Tarrant County’s local races, where Democrats have not won a countywide race in decades. Alisa Simmons, a Democratic county commissioner, is in a tight race against the incumbent county judge Tim O’Hare—a conservative Bo French ally who pushed the reduction in polling locations. 

“He’s a really interesting person—I’m not sure why he even wanted to serve because he’s not serving,” Simmons told me, before a fundraiser at a private home in Colleyville.

Good governance has been a major feature of the campaign. In 2025, even before Republicans in the state legislature redrew the state’s congressional maps, O’Hare embarked on an unusual attempt to gerrymander the county commissioner districts, in order to secure what Republicans hope will be a 4–1 majority. The commission has cut its meeting schedule in half, all guest speakers are limited to one minute, and attendees have been hauled out by sheriffs deputies for clapping. (In one notable case, a local activist who used the word “bullshit” in his testimony was charged, one week later, with disorderly conduct.) In our short conversation, Simmons took aim at the county’s Republican leaders for cutting taxes meant to fund the county hospital, and highlighted the rising death toll at Tarrant County jails. 

“We almost rival Harris County, and Harris County is double the population,” she said, referring to the jurisdiction that includes Houston.

Democrats in Tarrant believe the county is there for the taking this year—that the apathy and resignation that have kept turnout lower than other large urban counties is changing, and that the Republicans on the ballot aren’t cut out for swing-state realities. Telles told me he hoped flipping the countywide races would send a signal to other corners of the state, that if a historically Republican metro famous for its cattle drives and western culture can vote blue, they can too. Republicans have pushed voter-fraud narratives and ruthless gerrymandering to preserve their grip on power. But in doing so, they also reminded voters what was really at stake.

As we walked through Fort Worth, I suggested to Mason that the kind of ordeal she went through might have easily turned her away from politics. 

“I realized that’s exactly what they wanted me to do,” she said. “And that was to stand on display and tell them how I would never vote again to discourage the black and the brown from coming to the polls.” She had an obligation, she said, “to make sure that I let them know that these same people that did this to me are elected officials.”

Mason’s door-knocking was a strictly nonpartisan operation. She congratulated a young woman who was preparing to vote for the first time, and double-checked that she knew which precinct to stop by. But not long after, voters in select Texas ZIP codes began seeing a new ad in which James Talarico sits at a kitchen table with a familiar voting-rights activist.

“Crystal didn’t back down,” he says.

“And you shouldn’t either,” Mason tells the audience.

Greed is on California’s state ballot, and it appears to be winning.

For a while, Prop. 40, the Billionaire Tax initiative, which is supported by the state Democratic Party but opposed by many unions and prominent Democrats, was polling well. The notion of taxing the excessive wealth of the super-rich, or the basis of that wealth—the “paper profits” on a sea of unsold investments—has become increasingly popular across the nation. Nobody much likes taxation, but the way the economic spoils are distributed just isn’t working out well for most Americans, whose costs of living are growing faster than their wages, even as the wealth of the 0.00001 percent goes completely haywire.

Add to that the specter of a wealthy, hyper-transactional president openly using his office to enrich himself, and his family and friends, often at taxpayer expense. The public, too, is finally starting to grasp the full extent to which our billionaires, most notably Elon Musk, are using their largely untaxed and godlike fortunes for political gain: dictating our ballot choices, messing with elections, harming the nation, and dodging accountability.

If Prop. 40 passes, it would be the first-ever tax on excessive wealth, as opposed to income, in the United States. It would place a one-time, 5 percent levy on the net assets of California residents in excess of $1 billion. The measure, put forth by a health workers union to plug holes in the state Medicaid and education budgets created by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, immediately raised the hackles of California’s three-comma club, whose members tend to be allergic to taxation.

These moguls, led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who now claims residence in Nevada), started a group called Building a Better California, which they’ve bankrolled to the tune of $333 million—about 0.1 percent of the combined net worth of its top 5 backers: Brin, Google’s Steve Schmidt, venture capitalist John Doerr, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and investor Vinod Khosla. The group has blanketed the state political landscape with anti-Prop 40 advertising and propaganda. It also bankrolled two poison pill initiatives, Props. 41 and 42, that we’ll talk about in a minute.

There are legitimate critiques of Prop. 40: Voter initiatives are a lousy way to do tax policy. Maybe it won’t bring in as much cash as projected. It’ll be challenged in court. (What isn’t?) Voters might conflate it with another measure, Prop. 3, that would extend an existing tax on income in excess of $371,000 ($742,000 for joint filers) to fund public education.

One big (valid) gripe about Prop. 40 is that it’s one-and-done. The California Teachers Union, for instance, says it opposes the measure on the grounds that it “will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve.” Such arguments are politically safe for Democratic politicians such as Xavier Becerra—who will almost certainly replace Gavin Newsom as governor, and who opposes Prop. 40 (though, in true weasel fashion, he has declined to take a position on the competing propositions, 41 and 42). The fact that most of the Prop. 40 revenues are earmarked for health care also may have miffed some of the other unions that oppose it, and that would prefer some of the money go toward their own interests.

But the billionaires have been hawking other, dubious concerns, which Democratic foes of Prop. 40, including Newsom, have parroted without a lot of scrutiny. For instance, the claim that Prop. 40 will end up costing California money because billionaires will flee the state, and that this would be terrible for its economy.

US Rep. Katie Porter, who lost her recent run for governor, posted a video of her top three reasons to vote against Prop. 40. To paraphrase: It doesn’t accomplish any of the big things Democrats have always longed for, such as Medicare for All; It’s “big bucks for Big Insurance;” and “It’s a one-time tax that would create long-term harms” by driving “hundreds of billions in potential tax revenues out of California.”

Her first reason is clearly ridiculous. The second is misleading: State legislators would sort out the details but, per the legislative analyst, 90 percent of the tax revenue would have to be spent on “health care services for the public.” To the extent this would “line the pockets of health-care executives,” as Porter put it, well, that’s a function of America’s dysfunctional health care system, which Prop. 40 wasn’t designed to fix. But the alternative, proponents say, is to leave millions of low-income Californians, including many children, without health insurance, and put tens of thousands of health care providers out of work.

Her third talking point is echoed by other opponents, including Newsom, who has close ties to the Getty clan and is likely running for president, which means he needs billionaires in his corner. This one is straight from the No on 40 playbook: the notion that if the measure passes, these captains of industry will pull up stakes and depart for other jurisdictions, crippling the tax base and stifling California’s engine of innovation. Early on, a handful of billionaires announced their intention to leave. “The departure of these individuals alone,” the No on 40 campaign asserted, “is estimated to remove $536 billion, or nearly 30 percent of aggregate billionaire wealth, from the tax base.” This claim, though, is based on an analysis by the conservative Hoover Institution that prompted a detailed rebuttal from the economists who helped write Prop. 40, arguing that the Hoover study is deeply flawed.

There are other, more basic problems with the notion that significant wealth flight will occur and that it will harm California and stifle innovation. As I’ve written elsewhere, the choice of whether to stay or go also depends on many factors unrelated to taxation, and nobody can accurately predict how most billionaires would react if Prop. 40 passed. The people making such predictions either have an agenda or are “delusional,” the former chief economist for California’s tax authority told me.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, an outlier, has made clear he’ll stay put, and says he has no problem paying whatever taxes the state may impose. It’s a “privilege,” he told CBS News.

Of course, most of these tech billionaires weren’t wealthy when they started out—Huang once worked as a dishwasher at Denny’s. New scrappy founders will come around and start ventures with or without the help of their predecessors. And even if all of California’s billionaires (Forbes counts 255) were to leave and quit investing in new Silicon Valley companies, there’d still be tons of money available. The data firm Altrata, which tracks global wealth trends, estimates there are well over 22,000 ultra-high net worth individuals—people with net assets of $30 million and up—in San Francisco and Los Angeles alone. And investment, of course, can come from anywhere.

Finally, billionaire wealth is not a significant part of California’s tax base. In op-eds opposing Prop. 40, writers have pointed to the tax contributions of the state’s richest 1 percent—Newsom has even cited the top 10 percent. But billionaires comprise another realm entirely, and they already, by and large, have gone out of their way to ensure that only the tiniest sliver of their true economic income, and that of their companies, is subject to tax. Take Peter Thiel, one of the handful who say they’re already done with California. He famously used outrageous tactics to accumulate more than $5 billion in a Roth IRA, a tax-free retirement account designed for middle-class earners.

Newsom and others claim that, because billionaire wealth is portable, any wealth tax should be imposed at the federal level, not the state level, but as I made abundantly clear in my earlier piece, “How to Tax a Billionaire,” a federal wealth tax is never going to fly. Not, at least, without radical changes in the Supreme Court.

Besides, billionaires have done tremendously well in California, whose tech industry was built on a foundation of publicly funded innovation. According to Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg’s net assets grew from $64.4 billion in 2023 to $214.6 billion on Thursday—an untaxed 233 percent gain in less than three years. If you’d put $1 in the S&P 500 in September 2023, and reinvested the dividends, it would have been worth about 80 bucks in September 2026.

Would billionaires really turn tail over a paltry 5 percent tax?

At a recent event in San Francisco, I posed that question to Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna, whose support for Prop. 40 has made him persona non grata, he told me, among the tech billionaires in his district. “They know that that is total propaganda,” Khanna replied. “The AI revolution is happening in the Bay Area—it’s not happening in Miami or Austin. More wealth continues to pile into Silicon Valley than people know what to do with. One-third of the nation’s wealth is in my district and the 50-mile area around it. So the idea that investment is going to leave is just counter to every point of data that we have.”

“The reason they don’t want to pay the tax is they don’t want to pay the tax,” he continued. “They simply believe they’re entitled to this wealth…that they have, through their own labor, earned every penny, because they somehow are better than the rest of us.”

So, sure, there are legitimate quibbles, and maybe Prop. 40 isn’t the greatest thing, but it does at least break the glass. It creates a precedent for taxing wealth, which is what the billionaires fear most. In the end, their argument mainly boils down to greed. They don’t need this money. The reality, as I learned while researching my 2021 book, Jackpot, is that the nation’s richest men—and they are mostly men—are engaged in an epic yacht-measuring contest, literal and figurative.

And they don’t know how to stop.

At the same event where I interviewed Khanna, I witnessed a barnburner of a speech from Erica Payne, executive director of Patriotic Millionaires, an advocacy group of wealthy Americans pushing for saner, more inclusive tax policies. It’s worth watching if you’ve got the time.

The billionaires’ quest to hoard wealth and fight taxes tooth and nail is, in Payne’s view, an addiction. “What happens when people start doing drugs?” she told the crowd. “The drug becomes disproportionately important. They need more of the drug to get the same high. Their emotional baseline changes and their braking system is less effective. So, the next time a billionaire says they don’t want to be taxed, you just say to yourself, that’s the addiction talking.”   

This addiction to hoarding is what prompted the inclusion of the competing propositions I mentioned. Both are poison pills. Prop. 41, in addition to imposing audits on future tax initiatives, would nullify any state tax whose revenues are excluded (as Prop. 40 would be) from the spending limit voters passed in 1979. Because the two propositions are in conflict, the legislative analyst notes, Prop. 40 would likely be voided if both measures pass and Prop. 41 gets more yes votes.

The same goes for Prop. 42, which Newsom also supports. This measure also subverts Prop. 40 by prohibiting retroactive taxes. (Prop. 40 would apply to anyone who was a California resident on January 1, 2026.) But Prop. 42 also prohibits any future state tax on “personal property, business interests, and financial assets”—namely, wealth—“including assets in retirement and investment accounts.”

The billionaires are quite sneaky here. By calling out retirement savings, they are implying that ordinary people’s nest eggs are at risk. That’s really not true, but Newsom, shamefully, has embraced the fearmongering: “We all agree that Californians deserve to have their retirement and life savings protected from new state taxes,” he said in a statement released by Prop. 42’s backers.

One never knows what’ll happen on Election Day, and polls are often unreliable, but the latest reputable ones, with days to go, are suggesting that Prop. 40 and Prop. 41 are likely to go down, whereas Prop. 42 may well squeak by.

So much for California dreamin’.

At the GOP midterm convention in Dallas last month, a curious guest posed for pictures with Ken Paxton and other MAGA dignitaries. Fatmir Mediu, a 59-year-old Albanian parliamentarian, wore a dark suit, a big security badge, and a pin that included the Albanian and American flags. At his side was Sali Berisha, the leader of Albania’s main opposition party, who posted a photo on X. Berisha can be seen to Paxton’s left, and a smiling Mediu is on Paxton’s right.

To understand Mediu’s interest in American politics, you have to go back to March 15, 2008. On that day, in an Albanian village called Gerdec, a former army barracks full of excess munitions exploded. A series of massive blasts killed 26 people, injured hundreds, and leveled or damaged thousands of buildings.

Investigators, including a team from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, later faulted egregious safety violations at the facility. Those included a private contractor using untrained local workers, some of them children, to dismantle live ammunition. At the time, Mediu was serving as the country’s defense minister. Families of victims and political opponents of Albania’s then-ruling Democratic Party alleged Mediu and other officials had overlooked safety concerns. Albanian prosecutors later charged Mediu, who resigned shortly after the disaster, with abuse of his position related to his failure to oversee the contractor. Mediu has denied wrongdoing, and the case remains unresolved amid wrangling over whether he had parliamentary immunity protecting him from criminal charges.

In a June 2008 letter to the State Department, the chair of the US House Oversight Committee cited an allegation reported by the New York Times that Mediu had accepted kickbacks related to a scandal featuring an American military contractor called AEY. (Mediu denied that allegation and was never criminally charged over it.) Four men connected to the American company were later convicted of fraud for selling aging Chinese-manufactured ammunition to the US military for use in Afghanistan, after altering its packaging in Albania to mask its true origin. This scandal was depicted in the 2016 movie War Dogs.

Eighteen years after those events, various players have served prison sentences or died. But Mediu appears to be thriving. He is member of parliament representing a minor party closely aligned with Berisha’s. He’s a frequent international traveler, who seems to function as the Albanian opposition’s liaison to the American right.

Mediu—who an associate said favors well-tailored suits and expensive watches—often attends the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington and international conservative conferences. He has built relationships with figures like former Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita and has met Justice Department officials and a slew of Texas lawmakers.

But Mediu appears to have been especially successful in cultivating Paxton. The controversial Texas attorney general has interacted repeatedly with Mediu over the last four years, including in Albania. This year, Mediu, along with Berisha, appears to have helped Paxton raise money from Albanian Americans in the United States. Mediu, meanwhile, seems to be using his American political ties as he seeks US government help pressuring Albanian prosecutors to back off their longstanding case against him.

Mediu and a representative for Berisha’s Democratic Party of Albania did not respond to detailed questions from Mother Jones.

Paxton’s Senate campaign against Democrat James Talarico has been dogged by ethics questions. Media reports have highlighted Paxton allegedly stealing a $1,000 Montblanc pen in 2012 (he claimed it was a mix-up); his 2015 indictment for securities fraud (The DOJ dropped the charges after he paid $300,000 of restitution in 2024); his 2023 impeachment in Texas (the state Senate acquitted Paxton); various investments with questionable partners; and his reported partying with two international fugitives at a 2024 New Year’s Eve party in Dubai. Paxton has denied any wrongdoing in all these matters.

Amid those issues, Paxton’s relationship with Mediu, Berisha, and their associates has drawn more modest attention.

The Texas Observer reported in 2023 on a trip that Paxton and his now-estranged wife Angela took to Europe the previous year with a major campaign donor who was working as a lobbyist promoting a telecom startup. When the Paxton’s visited Tirana, Albania’s capital, Mediu hosted them.

The state of Texas paid nearly $80,000 for that trip, which included a security detail for the Paxtons, according to the Observer. That’s part of the $3.1 million in state funds that Paxton has spent on 350 trips outside of Texas since 2015 on which he brought a security detail, the New York Times reported this week.

In January 2025, Mediu and Albanian real estate magnate Bashkim Ulaj—a long-time Berisha ally—stayed in Washington hotel rooms that Paxton’s state office had booked, the Texas Bullpen reported last year. The rooms were for Trump’s inauguration and people watching the Texas AG’s office argue a case before the US Supreme Court around that time. Other people who received rooms from the same hotel block included major Paxton donors. Paxton’s office has said the nonrefundable rooms would have gone unused because a winter storm had interfered with Texas officials’ travel and that the people who ultimately used the rooms reimbursed the state. But the office has not explained what the Albanian men were doing there.

Federal Election Commission records show that Paxton this year received $2,000 from Ahmet Ulaj, 75, and $8,000 from Astrit Ulaj, 59, both residents of New Jersey, who are brothers of Bashkim Ulaj. Two other individuals—Arbi Ulaj and Arlind Ulaj—each gave Paxton’s campaign $5,000. Both those men are in their mid-twenties and have shared an address with Astrit Ulaj.

Ahmet, Astrit, and Baskim Ulaj jointly own an Albanian media company and ABA Blue Borgo, a controversial luxury development on the northern Albanian coast. Critics have held protests, arguing the developers illegally seized land for the project from local residents. The developers have countered that they acquired the land legally.

In an email to Mother Jones, Astrit Ulaj said that he and his brother Ahmet “both donated to Ken Paxton because we thought he was worth supporting, just as we have supported other candidates over the years. These were personal donations, made with our own money, they were publicly reported, and have nothing to do with our business interests.”

“Neither of us has business dealings with Ken Paxton, Fatmir Mediu or Sali Berisha, and neither does Bashkim,” UIaj added.

Arlind Ulaj, reached by phone, declined to comment. Arbi Ulaj did not respond to a query.

On September 9 of this year, while Mediu and Berisha were in Dallas, Paxton’s campaign recorded $37,000 in donations from six people in the Dallas the area. Several of those donors, reached by Mother Jones, said they are involved in Albanian-American activism.

Dritan Nokshigi of Mesquite, Texas, said in phone interviews that he donated $5,000 to Paxton in order to attend a September 7 dinner with Berisha in another Dallas suburb. Nokshigi recalled that Mediu also attended the dinner.

“I wanted to go and eat dinner with Sali Berisha,” Nokshigi told Mother Jones, noting he comes from the same northern Albanian town as the opposition leader. “That was the only reason. I’m not a rich man.”

“I never vote,” Nokshigi said. “I don’t like politicians. They’re all the same.”

Two days later, on September 9, Berisha and Mediu attended a separate event held at Nokshiga’s pizzeria in Mesquite, where the Albanian officials received keys to the city from Mesquite Mayor Daniel Alemán.

The Paxton campaign did not respond to a list of questions about his ties to Mediu and other Albanian figures. Neither Mediu nor the Democratic Party of Albania responded to questions about why Berisha and Mediu were helping raise money for a Senate campaign in Texas.

During the Biden administration, the State Department placed Berisha and members of his family on a “persona non grata” list, which barred them from traveling to the United States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attributed the designation to Berisha’s “involvement in significant corruption.” Berisha denies wrongdoing, claiming the allegations, the subject of an ongoing criminal case in Albania, are politically motivated.

Last year, the Democratic Party of Albania retained Continental Strategy LLP, a firm that includes a former top aide to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, to advocate for the removal of the sanctions. Following lobbying by the firm, the State Department granted Berisha a visa waiver that allowed him to travel to the US for the convention.

A spokesperson for Continental told Mother Jones last month that it has received $750,000 for that work. The payments came from an organization called the Make Albania Great Again Foundation, a nonprofit launched last year by Nuredin Seci, an Albanian American contractor from New Jersey. Seci has said the organization, which has not filed any paperwork detailing its financing, is bankrolled by Albanian Americans.

This funding arrangement has drawn scrutiny in Albania, including a reported investigation by the country’s the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, known as SPAK. That office—which has not detailed the status of this reported probe—is the same agency that has also brought criminal cases against Berisha and Mediu.

Mediu has previously worked to build ties to various Texas Republicans, including Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, deploying a connected Texas lobbyist in 2022 to seek meetings with the lawmakers. Since Trump returned to office, Mediu has touted meetings with Cruz; Texas GOP Reps. Pete Sessions, Brandon Gill, Beth Van Duyne, and Keith Self; and others.

Mediu in 2024 met LaCivita, who co-managed Trump’s 2024 campaign, at a Washington conference for right-leaning parties. Mediu recruited LaCivita to work as an adviser to Berisha ahead of Albania’s 2025 parliamentary election. LaCivita has said he did no US lobbying for Berisha, but he used his Trumpworld stature to help Berisha advertise his ties to the US president. “We want to help elect a prime minister who is a true friend of the United States and who will successfully work with President Trump and the United States,” LaCivita said in one appearance in Tirana. The Democratic Party of Albania reported paying LaCivita’s firm more than $1.6 million for his work there.

After obtaining his visa waiver, Berisha traveled in early September 2026 to New Jersey, where he met with Albanian Americans. Then, joined by Mediu, he attended the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. In additional to Paxton, the pair snapped pictures there with a host of prominent MAGA figures, including Republican National Committee chair Joe Gruters; Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz; and former DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin.

While courting the MAGA movement, Mediu has tried to use the connections he has made to seek help with his own legal problems.

Last year, for example, Mediu claimed to have submitted to an Albanian court a letter from six American congressmen urging that he not be prosecuted, though he has not made the letter public. Mediu announced in June 2025 that he had met with Aaron Reitz, a former Paxton deputy, who at the time was DOJ’s Assistant Attorney General for the department’s Office of Legal Policy. Mediu said that he had pressed for the Justice Department to oppose the politicization of the Albania’s judiciary, according to Albanian news reports. Reitz, now the US Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, did not respond to questions.

Mediu also met with a Justice Department official in September 2025 to seek Trump administration help with his ongoing criminal prosecution over the Gerdec explosion, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Mediu pressed in the meeting for help from DOJ’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance & Training. That office provides support to SPAK, the Albanian prosecutorial body that brought the criminal cases against both Berisha and Mediu.

Last month during the GOP convention, Berisha and Mediu took a picture with with Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward. Berisha later claimed the interaction represented “an important meeting” for Albania-US relations.

The Justice Department disputes that. “There was no meeting,” a spokesperson told Mother Jones via email. “The hotel guest approached the Attorney General in the lobby and the Attorney General agreed, as he often does, to pose for a picture.”

The spokesperson did not answer questions about Mediu’s other contacts with DOJ officials.

So far, there’s no indication that Mediu has succeeded in winning Trump administration help with his case. But he clearly isn’t giving up. And his energetic support for powerful Americans like Ken Paxton appears to reflect the hope that in an increasingly transactional US capital, they will return the favor.

“Let’s start off by saying, Garrison, this is all lies. It’s ludicrous. I mean, they’re saying things that are just not true.”

That’s Stress Test host David Corn, describing to his co-host Garrison Hayes the barrage of Islamophobic attacks from Republicans desperate to hold on to Congress. As this episode shows, the GOP—from Donald Trump to JD Vance to Cabinet secretaries to senators and representatives—has made hateful bigotry a central element of its final midterms push.

Those assaults have primarily targeted Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, with Vance calling him a “cancer” with “zero attachment” to America’s land or history; Sen. Ted Cruz falsely labeling El-Sayed a “theocratic zealot” and lifelong Muslim Brotherhood supporter; and Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno declaring El-Sayed doesn’t belong in Washington, DC, because he doesn’t believe “Jesus came here for our salvation”. Pointing out that Moreno appeared to be establishing a religious test for service in Congress, David says, “That’s not what the Constitution says. That is what Christian nationalists say.” The race-baiting doesn’t stop there: Donald Trump warned that El-Sayed and Democrats will invite “hordes of jihadists” until Americans “cannot even have a Christmas.”

Noting that Vance mocked the names of Middle Eastern countries as unpronounceable, Garrison observes that the veep—a member of the elite with a Yale Law pedigree and financial backing from Peter Thiel—has been shamelessly code-switching: “I mean, he’s G-dropping: ‘When I was waitin’ at the gas—‘ Like, brother, we hear you speak. We know you don’t speak like that all the time.”

What does all this bode for Tuesday? That’s one of the themes of this episode, as David points out that this divide-and-conquer racism and white nationalism has been building within the GOP for years: “They really have been heading toward—I should say, maybe galloping toward—this view that there are different types of Americans, and white Christians are the only true Americans out there. “But this election is gonna tell us whether motivating the far-right base is enough for Republicans to win, even in red states.”

To that end, Garrison and David bring in Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, who has been on the ground in Alabama reporting on the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican legislatures across the South to gerrymander to dismantle majority-Black congressional districts. “This Callais decision has really resonated,” Ari reports. “This is the Dobbs decision of 2026,” referring to the 2022  ruling that abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. “It has motivated Black voters like the Dobbs decision motivated women voters in the last midterm election.”

Black voters are acutely aware of why their rights are being targeted, Ari says: “They kept saying to me, ‘If our votes didn’t matter, why are they trying so hard to dilute our power, to gerrymander us out of representation?’”

The resulting surge in early voting may be one reason why Trump appears to be on the defensive, forced to spend critical campaign days shoring up deep-red strongholds like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Still, another threat looms after the votes are cast, when Trump’s election-interference schemes might kick into gear. The good news, according to Ari, “is that you can’t nullify an election through Truth Social, okay?” Even so, Republican legal challenges are already underway, and “what I worry about,” Ari says, “is what happens after the legal process has played out, ’cause I think that’s where things went crazy in 2020.”

The MAGA playbook at this point is clear: suppress the vote, stoke the base, then cry foul. Whether that strategy prevails will be determined by voters on Tuesday.

The following transcript is generated using automated tools and may contain errors.

David Corn: A campaign of hatred and bigotry.

Garrison Hayes: Trump is scheming to screw the election.

DC: This is Stress Test for Mother Jones. I’m David Corn.

GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome back to the show, my friends. We are four days away from the election, David.

DC: It’s the final countdown. Cue the music. [Laughs.]

GH: I don’t think we can actually cue the music. [Laughs.] But we do have plenty of things to talk about. It’s getting spooky out there, of course.

DC: Halloween.

GH: And—naturally. And Republicans are emphasizing a few things as we reach the kind of end of this stressful, maybe even exhausting, but very important midterm election season. Explicit bigotry, I think, is how you could describe it—Islamophobia specifically. That’s where we’re at right now.

DC: I mean, the Republican Party and the conservative movement have been drifting this way for years and years. Islamophobia is nothing new, but they really are turning it up to 11 as we get into the final days here. And it’s being targeted primarily at Abdul El-Sayed, but they also are making this a general push against the entire Democratic Party.

GH: Yeah, we have a video that I want to play here, and then we can talk about it on the other side.

[Clip plays.]

JD Vance: We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people, to young men with zero attachment to its land or to its history. Because what we saw in France—the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy rather than the desire to build—that exact same cancer is what has corrupted Abdul El-Sayed writ large.

[Clip plays.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields Prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature.

[Clip plays.]

Ted Cruz: Abdul El-Sayed is a theocratic zealot and an ideologue. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that Abdul El-Sayed is a strong and lifelong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

[Clip plays.]

Greg Abbott: We must not allow a candidate like my opponent, who supports Sharia law, to ever have control over the levers of government in the state of Texas.

[Clip plays.]

Donald Trump: If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.

DC: Let’s start off by saying, Garrison, this is all lies. It’s ludicrous. I mean, they’re saying things that are just not true. I mean, Robert F. Kennedy, his father would be aghast to see him engage in such outright bigotry and racial hatred.

GH: The other thing I want to say about this, David, is this kind of Islamophobia, in my perspective, really harkens back to a kind of “Great Replacement” theory. You know, this language of folks who are infiltrators, they aren’t from this land, they are more or less supplanters. You know, that language has been deeply effective in scaring people into electoral submission, if you will. A lot of this harkens back to a kind of post-9/11 Islamophobia, that there is this threat knocking at the door, and if we don’t beat it back, then it is going to take over. And they are using that, they’re playing on that in a really deep and disgusting way in this election.

DC: I mean, do you remember after 9/11, when George W. Bush came out and said his party should not do that, that Americans should not do that? We shouldn’t let this pull us into bigotry and hatred and Islamophobia. And we should mention here, too, we just played Ted Cruz, the least-liked senator perhaps in the history of the US Senate, you know, claiming that El-Sayed is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. There is no evidence for that. He’s disavowed it. It’s just one of these bullshit lies they keep telling over and over again to scare people. And for good measure, they’re even throwing in a touch of Christian nationalism. Let’s turn to Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio.

[Clip plays.]

Bernie Moreno: This character, Abdul El-Sayed, can be nowhere near Washington, DC. Do you think he understands that concept that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation? He should be nowhere near Washington, DC.

DC: So he seems to be saying, if you don’t believe that Jesus came here for your salvation, you have no business serving in the United States Congress. I mean, that’s not what the Constitution says. That is what Christian nationalists say. And there’s just so much to unpack here, but one interesting fact is that his daughter recently converted to Judaism. So does she not qualify to serve in the US Senate, in the US House? She happens also to have been married to Max Miller, a fellow who we’ve reported on tremendously here at Mother Jones on all the allegations of misconduct that came out of his contentious divorce proceedings with Bernie Moreno’s daughter, Emily.

But taking a step back, JD Vance is married to a woman who comes from a family that is not Christian. It’s quite stunning that Bernie Moreno can get away with saying this, and I don’t think it’s gonna be on the front page of The New York Times or be covered extensively in the media.

GH: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about statements like this, which are—you can hear this. I mean, you just turn on a conservative radio program or maybe even Fox News, and you can hear some of these things being said, obviously, in this midterm election. The interesting thing is that I think it presents a very specific kind of ideological vulnerability for the right going forward. I mean, if we’re looking toward 2028 and beyond, there, Christian nationalism has presented a real tension, I think, in the Republican Party around this, like, very fundamentalist view of who is—who does and does not belong in power in America, and also this kind of Christian Zionism that is deeply kind of connected, I think, to Israel and, you know, all of that.

And so these ideas are really in tension in the party. And I think, as you point out, Bernie Moreno is almost, like, [laughs] kind of in a weird way, an embodiment of that tension and incoherence. And the thing that I’m kind of really curious about, David, is how voters will respond to this. I mean, genuinely, I think the American people are often smarter than we give them credit for, than politicians give them credit for. And so I’m wondering if voters are able to decipher and look through all of the kind of craziness and incoherent beliefs that make up conservatism today.

DC: Well, they really have been heading toward—I should say, maybe galloping toward—this view that there are different types of Americans, and white Christian are the only true Americans out there. And they’re obviously doing that because they think it motivates their base. But this election is gonna tell us whether motivating the far-right base is enough for Republicans to win, even in red states like Mississippi and Texas and Ohio and Iowa and Kansas. So it’s really a good test case.

And while we’re talking about testing, it seems like JD Vance is testing the waters. He’s out there, you know, obviously trying to position himself for 2028, taking point on some of these more extreme positions of the Republican Party, but also being a bit of a dunderhead. [Laughs.] And, you know, sort of—this is a guy who went to Yale Law School, but he’s acting like he’s just the average—well, perhaps even dumb—Joe Schmo, and sort of leaning into that, maybe thinking that makes him look like he’s more of a populist. Let’s look at this thing that he had to say while on the campaign trail.

[Clip plays.]

JDV: And I also remember goin’ to a gas station and waitin’ in line for hours for gasoline that, of course, had shot up in price because of a region of the world made up of countries whose name I couldn’t even pronounce.

DC: Oman, Syria, Jordan, United Arab Emirates. None of these names are hard to pronounce. Yes, you may not know all the -stans that came out of the Soviet Union, but there’s not a single name of a country, of an Arab country, a country in the Middle East—Algeria, Egypt—that is hard to pronounce. So what is—what’s going on here, Garrison, with him claiming it’s just too hard to pronounce the names of these pesky Middle Eastern countries?

GH: This is the—you know, people look at Democrats and they often say, like, Democrats are pandering. They’re pandering to the queer people and the Black people and the immigrant people, they’re pan—this is actual, real pandering. I mean, this is real, [laughs] like, hardcore, capital-P pandering. I mean, he’s G-dropping: When I was waitin’ at the gas—like, brother, we hear you speak. We know you don’t speak like that all the time, at the very least. To your point, David, this is an elite. Can we be very clear that JD Vance is a member of the elite? He’s bought and paid for by Peter Thiel. He went to Yale Law School. He’s a Silicon Valley, you know, acolyte.

And so in many ways, this person has nothing in common, despite whatever Appalachian, [laughs] you know, Hillbilly Elegy roots he can probably—he can legitimately lay claim to. At the end of the day, his trajectory has certainly not been that of the average American. I think in some ways people may see him as an aspirational figure because of that, but there is a lack of authenticity that I think is often just on full display, and I think this is one of those times where that kind of, like—what do you think about the voters in that room at that rally, that they would not be able to say a word like Syria or Iran or Oman, as you point out?

DC: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. Not a single one of these is hard to pronounce. But he’s like, I don’t know, these, those—you know, he’s basically being, you know, pejorative about a whole region, and I think it feeds into the elements of prejudice that we talked about earlier.

The other kind of, you know, nutty thing—I mean, a bunch of nutty things that he did, he’s done recently—but he defended the Ramaswamy ad. And of course, that’s the ad in which they took Amy Acton’s mother, who she’s been estranged from. She is the Democratic candidate, Amy Acton, running for governor in Ohio, and Vivek Ramaswamy is the Republican running against her. And the ad was the mother accusing Amy Acton of being a liar. And of course, we all know now that Amy Acton said she was raped when she was 12 by her stepfather, who was arrested, he fled the state, and the mother took the stepfather’s side. And we’ve even learned more recently that she was basically a homeless person, unhoused person, living in a car in a church parking lot. And somehow operatives for Ramaswamy got her out of the car and convinced her to go on camera and say her daughter was a liar.

Republicans and conservatives throughout the land have decried this ad, justifiably. It’s one of the few signs that there’s still some decency within the GOP. They wouldn’t go this far. But not JD Vance. Let’s hear what he had to say.

[Clip plays.]

JDV: And now the media and the Democrats of the state of Ohio are obsessed, because guess what? Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.

GH: Yeah, [laughs] yeah. It’s just—it’s not the hill that I’d expect a sitting vice president to kind of go fight on. I really am shocked that this has become a point of rally. And really what it comes down to, David, is that the president sided with Vivek. And a person like JD Vance, who is simply trying to kind of align himself with power, is simply trying to do whatever it is that the boss says to do—like, that kind of person, it’s not surprising that if President Donald Trump has said, okay, this is good, we should all rally behind, you know, Ramaswamy and his, you know, disgusting ad, then he’s just gonna fall in line. And that’s the kind of person he’s proven himself to be.

DC: Well, that brings us up to speed on the state of the race, which is pretty grim.

GH: It’s a little grim. It’s a little grim. It’s a little grim. Okay, we should probably do a little bit of a—let’s change tones here, right? We’ve been looking at ads and videos and people on the campaign trail.

DC: Shift gears. Shift gears.

GH: And now I want to turn to voting rights and what’s happening, especially in the South. And to join us for that conversation is none other than national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Great to see you guys again. Thanks for having me back.

GH: We actually have a video that I think it may be helpful to play here at the top, and then on the other side, we can talk a little bit about what you saw when you were down in Alabama.

[Clip plays.]

Shomari Figures: I think there are a lot of things backfiring on the GOP this cycle. I think they had a serious sort of, you know, misreading of the room, thinking that apathy equated to agreement with their policies. The Callais decision essentially says in a nutshell that it is not okay to discriminate against Black Democrats, but it’s okay to discriminate against Democrats who are Black, right? That is problematic.

[Clip plays.]

Cory Booker: So I’ve campaigned in Alabama a lot, but I’ve never seen energy and enthusiasm like we’re seeing across the state right now. Folks know they’re hurting.

[Clip plays.]

Letitia Daniels-Jackson: I was born and raised in Dothan, Alabama. I have never seen a rally with this much excitement and this kind of crowd, ever. Ever. This was historic for Dothan, Alabama. This has fired people up. People understand what this—what’s at stake in this election, and they will show out. They will show up and they will show out.

GH: Tell us about your time in Alabama.

AB: I went down to Alabama recently with our colleague Anna to do some reporting and video. And I wanted to go down to Alabama because that was one of the places where Republicans redrew maps after the Supreme Court effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act. And they took a district that elected the second Black member of Congress in Alabama, Shomari Figures, and they tried to turn it red. And they tried to turn it red by taking Black voters out of his district and putting white voters in more conservative rural areas in the district. And so we went to those places, and what was fascinating was that there were a really large, energized crowd, even in these very red areas.

We went down to Dothan, Alabama, in the southeast part of the state. It’s the peanut capital of the world, and it’s in a county that Trump won by 73 percent of the vote. And we went for a midday rally on a Thursday, so you don’t expect these things to be very well attended. But New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker flew down; Montana—former Montana Sen. Jon Tester flew down [laughs] from 2,000 miles away to campaign for Shomari Figures, and also for the Democratic candidate for governor, Doug Jones. And it was—there was a ton of people there. There was, like, 400 or 500 people there, which I was shocked about, and they were basically saying, this was the largest turnout for a rally we’ve ever seen in a place like this.

And then we went up to Montgomery, which is sort of the more Democratic part of the district—was also standing room only. And so Alabama doesn’t have early voting, so we don’t have the same indicators from Alabama that we have in Louisiana and South Carolina and Georgia and North Carolina and these other states where Black voter turnout is surging during early voting. But just from the size of the rallies alone and the turnout in these traditionally red areas, it seemed like people were really motivated to vote in this election, and particularly they were motivated to vote because of anger over the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

DC: Well, let’s talk about the bigger picture that you just mentioned, because in some states we do have early voting, and because of polling and other issues, you can see—get a sense of who’s coming out early. And in a lot of places, there seems to be a Democratic edge to that. Doesn’t mean anything until we see the full vote count on Election Day, but tell us about what’s happening in these other states with the Black vote.

AB: Well, it’s pretty extraordinary. The biggest jump in the Black vote is in Louisiana, where the Callais decision originated from. So that seems like a pretty direct straight line in terms of the impact. And the Black share of the early vote is up nine points in Louisiana, which is totally unseen since 2008, when Obama ran for president the first time. You’re also seeing big increases—six-point increases in South Carolina, big increases in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee. And so it seems like throughout the South, this is a trend now, that the Black vote, at least during early voting, is increasing.

And when I talk to political analysts, they basically say, if a lot of people vote during early voting, a lot of people tend to vote through the election. Like, this is not just a sense of people voting earlier. They are comparing early voting turnout in 2026 to early voting turnout in 2024 and 2022, and they’re seeing that Black voters are turning out in higher numbers here. That means that races that we didn’t think could be competitive, like the Senate race in Louisiana, for example, or the Senate race in Mississippi—Mississippi, like Alabama, doesn’t have early voting, but you’d expect to see similar trends—that—

DC: Well, we have an interesting data point on all this, Ari, and that is that Donald Trump is holding a tele-rally in Louisiana. He’s not gonna get there, but the fact that, you know, they’re using the president—the most valuable resource that they think they have at this time, I think they’re wrong, on the Republican side, is the president’s time, where he gets to travel, where he gets to campaign to get out Republican votes—and they’re taking some of that time to have him shore up Republicans in the great state of Louisiana. They must be seeing what you’re just talking about.

AB: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you see where Trump has gone already. He was in Alabama. He was in Mississippi. He was in South Carolina. Now he’s not going to Louisiana, but he’s virtually going. And that tells me that they are nervous about all of these races. And if these deeply red places are this competitive, you can imagine what it’s like in the battleground states.

And so the fact that the South is competitive in and of itself is important, because in the wake of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, we’re gonna need a lot more investment in the South. But if the South is competitive, that means that the Midwest and the East Coast and the West Coast are certainly competitive, ’cause all those places are bluer than the South. And I think that it’s just fascinating that Republicans are on the defensive even in the Trumpiest parts of the country.

DC: Well, one short point, because I know Garrison has a larger theme here to get to, and that is if Black voting in these states forces Trump and the Republicans to spend time and money on these states, that means they’re not spending it in other places where it could be more competitive. So even if they don’t win some of these races, pulling the Republicans into these Senate and House races helps the Democratic Party across the nation.

AB: Yeah, for sure. And there’s also, you know, competitive elections in these places, like, for example, in Alabama. Doug Jones is running for governor. He’s probably not gonna win, but if he keeps the election close, that means that Shomari Figures in Alabama 2 can win. And so there’s downballot races that matter, even in places like Louisiana, even in places like Alabama. It’s not just necessarily about the top of the ticket. There’s a lot of things that matter on the bottom of the ticket, too. They could, for example, break up Republican supermajorities in these state legislatures. There’s lots of interesting things that could happen here. But yeah, you’re right, if they’re spending time in these deep-red places, it probably means the Republican Party is losing pretty badly.

GH: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me, when I was reporting during 2024, I was talking to a lot of Black voters who honestly felt a certain degree of apathy toward the electoral process. There’s always this debate about whether or not voting even matters. And I think what we’re seeing in this moment is a return, I think, to an awareness that folks in previous generations had quite acutely, that there wouldn’t be this great effort to undermine one’s vote, or to limit one’s access to the ballot, or even beyond that, to the kind of redistricting effort which dilutes voting power. I think people are realizing that they wouldn’t really be trying to do all of this, particularly to Black communities, if that stuff didn’t matter. When you were talking to voters themselves, did that theme ever come up for some of the people that you were talking to, Ari?

AB: Absolutely. That’s a really good point, Garrison. They kept saying to me, if our votes didn’t matter, why are they trying so hard to dilute our power, to gerrymander us out of representation? And it’s sparking a backlash, ’cause this Callais decision has really resonated. This is the Dobbs decision of 2026. It has motivated Black voters like the Dobbs decision motivated women voters in the last midterm election. And it’s really crystallized this larger existential threat that the Black community feels, which you know very well, Garrison, that rights that have long been protected are being taken away, and now they have something to point to.

And the polling is remarkable. The fact that Black voters now say the Supreme Court is the greatest threat to the Black community, that they’ve never said that in decades. The fact that 80 percent of Black voters are saying they’re more motivated to vote because of the Callais decision. And then the numbers themselves in terms of turnout: People are not just saying this to pollsters, they are getting out and voting, even in places where people told them, you have nothing to vote for.

So this is really extraordinary, and to me, this is bigger than one election, ’cause, yeah, it’s gonna have a big impact on the midterms, but it’s also gonna send a signal after the election, when all of these Southern states try to gerrymander again to dilute Black votes even more, that this kind of gerrymandering can be defeated. And so maybe the hopeful scenario here is maybe they’ll at least think twice about doing this if there’s a political backlash for it being done.

DC: Well, it would be delicious to see this become a be-careful-what-you-wish-for type of situation for the Republicans, if it backfires on them in the way that seems possible.

So let’s pivot here. You are our voting rights expert at Mother Jones, Ari Berman. So people are still worried about Trump somehow intervening and screwing up the election, or messing with it on Election Day or in the days afterward. And we see him already calling for the prosecution of the Democratic candidate in Alaska because she’s been implicated in a controversy in which a second candidate named Dan Sullivan—the Senate Republican incumbent is named Dan Sullivan, but a second Dan Sullivan got put on the ballot. Her campaign, Mary Peltola, said they had nothing to do with it. Seems that was not true, and they did. So this is the type of campaign chicanery that often happens. It’s not a crime, but yet Trump’s calling for her to be prosecuted and talking about nullifying those election results if they don’t go the Republicans’ way. What else is happening out there in these final days that we should be keeping an eye on?

AB: Well, the good news, David, is that you can’t nullify an election through Truth Social, okay?

DC: [Laughs.]

GH: [Laughs.]

AB: That doesn’t actually work that way, and they’re not gonna be successful in doing this through the courts, either. Now, what I worry about is what happens after the legal process has played out, ’cause I think that’s where things went crazy in 2020. And so they could use these lawsuits, not just in Alaska, but in California, to try—I mean, they’re already preemptively challenging the legitimacy of the election, but they certainly are gonna go into overdrive after. And that’s when you could see, for example, the seizure of ballots, the effort to take voting machines, the effort to pressure election officials not to certify the results, which I would expect would be much more intense in Alaska than in California, right? Because in California, you have Democrats in charge of those elections, they’re gonna certify them. In Alaska, you have Republicans in charge of the election that might think twice about doing so, and that then goes back to the courts.

And so this process could play out for a while, and it could go off the rails like it did in 2020. I think at the end of the day, the result will be similar to 2020, in that all the votes will end up being counted, but there could be some nervy days in between. And I think a lot of it just depends on how close the election is. If the election is not that close, there’s not gonna be a lot of attempts to try to steal it, because they just won’t be able to. But if it comes down to one Senate race, particularly a Senate race in a place like Alaska, which Republicans could control, then that’s where it could get kind of dicey. Even though, I will say, courts have made it very clear: Election certification is not optional. You have to do it. And so at the end of the day, these elections are gonna be certified, but Trump could cause a lot of chaos between now and whenever that certification time actually comes.

GH: Okay. Ari, it’s always so nice to talk to you because you’re deep in the weeds, you know your stuff, you’re doing the reporting, you’re maybe the best in the world at this. So thank you for checking in with us. We’ll be back with you. Don’t leave the country after the election.

DC: [Laughs.]

AB: Probably the furthest I’ll go is Alaska, but yeah, I’ll still be there.

GH: [Laughs.] Okay.

AB: I can see Russia from my window, but don’t worry, David, I won’t go over there.

DC: [Laughs.]

GH: There it is. That’s not bad. Maybe we’ll meet you there. Thank you so much, Ari, for the time.

AB: Thanks a lot, guys. Great to see you again.

DC: Well, that’s all we got for now, but we always end with this: Garrison, what’s stressing you out?

GH: Oh, my goodness, what’s stressing me out? Okay, I’m thinking a lot about the Senate race down in Mississippi. I’ve mentioned this a little bit before, we talked about this a little bit earlier. Scott Colom is down there doing his thing, running for Senate, and it’s tight, but there’s a third-party candidate. I mean, we know that Mississippi is the Blackest state in the country by way of voting percentage, and so the Black vote really matters. It’s shocking that people are even watching a Senate race in Mississippi.

And so the Black vote, as we’ve been talking about, will be incredibly important for the outcome of that election. And as it stands, there are two Black candidates on the ballot. And so [laughs] that’s a real tricky kind of moment when, you know, we’re looking at a 52–48 kind of split that favors the Republican, which a lot of people see as an opportunity for the Democrat to kind of be in striking distance, but the independent candidate, the third-party candidate, is also Black. And so there’s some really kind of interesting dynamics there, and I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about what that might mean and how it might affect the outcome of that election.

DC: Well, in these final days, I’m thinking of a great song by the group Dawes that’s called A Little Bit of Everything. There are so many moving pieces in this election. One piece of ratfuckery, you know, in one Senate race could decide whether the Senate goes one way or the other. And we just talked a little bit about Alaska. That could end up being a bit of a mess. Certainly, that’s where Donald Trump has put his energies now in terms of screwing the results and trying to retain power for the Republicans.

So, you know, in 2020, we were focused on what Trump was doing, and it was more self-contained. We’re gonna have to be looking at Senate races and House races across this great country of ours, and making sure that none of them are being hijacked or undermined by what we are expecting or what we haven’t yet even thought about. So that’s what’s stressing me out: a little bit of everything.

GH: A little bit of everything, that makes sense to me.

DC: And that’s all we have in today’s episode. If you missed earlier episodes of Stress Test, you can go watch them, listen to them. Go to our YouTube channel. That’s youtube.com/MotherJones.

GH: Yes, indeed. You can also listen in your favorite podcasting app. In fact, you are probably watching or listening to this on your phone, or maybe your laptop, or maybe even your TV. So this is a great time for you to press subscribe, press the plus. Make sure you like this video if you’re watching on YouTube. Our great journalism—the work of Ari Berman and David Corn and me and many others—it’s all supported by you. Your views and subscriptions keep us going, so don’t forget to like, don’t forget to share, don’t forget to subscribe, especially over on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/MotherJones.

If you have any questions or suggestions, make sure you drop them down in the comments, or even just thoughts on what’s happening right now as we are in the final days of the midterms. Feel free to leave us a comment down below. We’re reading them all. We will be back in just a couple of days in this final countdown of the midterms. Until then, we’ll see you, and thanks for joining us for another edition of Stress Test.

This story is published in partnership with the Human Rights Center at the University of California Berkeley.

On the evening of March 28, 2026, USC freshman Tucker Collins was attending a No Kings protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed, screaming and clutching his right eye. Initially, amidst the drums, shouts, and flags, only a few people noticed the young man with long blond hair go down, but as he was pulled to the curb by on-scene independent field medics, it quickly became clear that something was very wrong: he had been shot in the face by an officer monitoring the protests, and his eyeball was completely ruptured. 

At the hospital, doctors removed jagged plastic fragments and metal shards from Collins’ eye socket. “When eventually we got to the hospital, and they told me, ‘We’re gonna have to remove your eye,’ I didn’t really know how to process it,” recalled Collins, an aspiring filmmaker. “I understood intimately that this is something that could happen. This is why I was there—to document these sorts of things happening.”

He would never see out of that eye again. 

Video of the incident quickly circulated online, and one theory was that Collins had been blinded by a PepperBall round, fired from somewhere in the MDC. This turned out to be incorrect. The plastic fragments and small metal pellets doctors removed were actually fired from a lesser-known and more powerful weapon, the Fabrique Nationale 303 Less Lethal Launcher, or FN303.

A report produced by the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) reveals that the FN303 has been disproportionately responsible for some of the most severe injuries in recent immigration-related protests across the US. The report, titled “Charting the Crackdown,” used open-source methodologies to trace and document misuses of crowd control weapons at immigration related protests from June 2025 through May 2026. The researchers catalogued over 400 incidents of misuse, the vast majority of which were committed by Federal agents. 

A peculiar pattern was hidden in the data: although the FN303 makes up only 12 of the 412 total cases of misuse (less than three percent) it was responsible for some of the grisliest and most debilitating injuries documented in the study. In fact, the FN303 was responsible for a higher proportion of severe injuries than those from any other single weapon. The report’s lead author, Dr. Rohini Haar, who is an emergency room doctor and an expert on crowd-control weapons, considered the discovery something of a surprise.“The FN303 is a unique example of something we were not looking for,” she said. “To be honest, even I didn’t know what an FN303 was.”

The FN303 has caused over half a dozen serious injuries between June 2025 and May 2026. But its history of severe, sometimes deadly injuries spans the launcher’s entire 23- year history. When asked about this pattern, Henry de Harenne, Head of Communications at FN Herstal declined to offer details saying that “the review of specific incidents is a matter for the agencies concerned and the competent authorities.”

Federal agencies have invested unprecedented amounts of funds in the FN303 in recent months; the Department of Homeland Security is the largest purchaser of the launcher in the Federal government. Though it’s unclear how much they paid per unit, local law enforcement records from California show launchers selling for $800 each, and according to government contracts, DHS has bought $2.2 million in weapons and projectiles since 2021 alone. The agency’s largest purchase, however, came in September 2025, during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, when they purchased more than $1 million of FN303 launchers and projectiles. 

Marketed as highly safe and very accurate, this .68 caliber pneumatic launcher has been used by law enforcement agencies all over the world— from Belgium and Turkey, to Georgia and even Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, whose ministry of defense purchased 2000 launchers in 2009. Though it closely resembles a pepperball or paintball gun, with a plastic body and air tank affixed to the front, it fires a denser and faster-moving projectile that can cause debilitating injuries in crowd control settings. In some countries, Belgium and Georgia, for instance, deployments of the launcher have triggered national debates about its use in managing protests. But in the US, the FN303 has gone largely unnoticed, even as demonstrators continue to be injured. With the Trump administration pouring nearly $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security through the 2029 fiscal year, the agency made the federal government’s single largest purchase on record of the weapon in September 2025—just as protests peaked across the country.

In 2003, within months of the FN303’s release by Belgian weapons manufacturer FN Herstal, the seriousness of the injuries it inflicts became controversial. On March 29, during protests against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, Swiss police shot union organizer Denise Chervet in the temple with an FN303. She was hospitalized with metal pellets embedded dangerously close to nerve clusters in her face. Fearing permanent paralysis, her doctors refused to operate. Chervet would live with the remnant shards for the rest of her life.

The incident caused an uproar in Switzerland. An investigation conducted by the Council of State of Geneva found that officers had little training on how to safely deploy the FN303 prior to using it, and the cantons of Geneva and Zurich both immediately discontinued its use. A review of Swiss cantonal police agency data reveals that no law enforcement agency in Switzerland that deploys the FN303. 

Chervet may have been the first to experience this weapon, but she was far from the last. A little over a year later, on October 21, 2004, celebrations turned to chaos in Boston after the Red Sox defeated the New York Yankees in the ALCS Championship. A responding officer, wielding the FN303, shot and killed Victoria Snelgrove, a 21-year-old journalism student. The investigation into Snelgrove’s death found that the department failed to properly train its officers in the safe deployment of the weapon. According to the report, Police Deputy Superintendent Robert O’Toole gave an FN303 to an officer who had not been trained or authorized to use it, saying, “Just pull the trigger.” In short, the investigation found that the department had misinterpreted FN Herstal’s claims about the weapon’s ability to penetrate the skin.

“The FN303 appeared to have been viewed by the Department to be not simply ‘less- lethal,’ but really non-lethal,” the report notes. “The fact that the rounds are advertised by the manufacturer as never causing a ‘perforation of the skin,’ which proved to be inaccurate, may have contributed to this misunderstanding.”

On the night of Snelgrove’s death, Boston police officers shot two other people in the head with FN303s in Fenway Park, injuring them and causing them to bleed from the face.

“It does not appear that the police immediately understood that these injuries were the result of FN303 projectiles,” reads the report. “If they had, it would have alerted the police that there was a problem with the use of (the) FN303.”

Once the broader investigation was completed, which revealed that the weapon was far more dangerous than the department had been led to believe, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis ordered the FN303s destroyed.

Both Chervet’s injury and Snelgrove’s death sparked immediate and widespread reporting, but over two decades later, the FN303 remains largely unknown in the US. Recent reports of injuries involving FN303s frequently cite “rubber bullets” or the general category of “less lethal projectiles” as the culprit. American law enforcement often uses the weapon in much the same way  as they would a PepperBall launcher. “PepperBall’s got certain ways that they build and assemble their delivery system versus FN,” says Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA), a nonprofit that trains over 14,000 law enforcement officers a year. “But at the end of the day, they are very, very similar in what type of ammunition they deliver.” 

Alexandre Papy PhD, a lieutenant colonel and the Head of the Weapon Systems and Ballistics Department at the Belgian Royal Military Academy, says this comparison is understandable, but incomplete. “They are both expelling projectiles, impacting projectiles,” he explains, “but the magnitude is quite different.” This is because PepperBall rounds are simple plastic spheres filled with chemical irritants or marking paint. On the other hand, the FN303’s ammunition is composed of hard, transparent plastic, filled with bismuth pellets in a semi-spherical dome, with a cylindrical finned design in the back to stabilize the trajectory. 

The theory behind this unusual design is that, upon impact, the round would break open and spread the heavy bismuth across a larger surface area, thus distributing the force of the projectile. Video materials marketing the launcher claim this feature gives the weapon system “sufficient energy to gain compliance from a suspect with minimal risk of skin penetration.” 

Researchers like Papy stand by these claims. He views the FN303’s shattering projectile as extremely effective at preventing penetrative injury, even calling it “quite safe.” He does cite one major caveat. “If the projectile reaches the head, you have a problem,” he says.  The reason for this, Dr. Haar of PHR explains, is that because there is less fat and tissue to absorb impact on the head or face, the debris of hard plastic and bismuth from the shattering projectile have a much higher chance of penetrating. “Any projectile with metal or anything composite with metal is more harmful,” she says. 

FN Herstal said in a statement that all of their documentation and training emphasize that the FN303 should never be aimed at the head or neck. They also mark every unit of the FN303 with a label warning against aiming the weapon above the shoulders.

But even so, shots to the head with impact projectiles continue and data show that the FN303 is particularly problematic in this realm. The “Charting the Crackdown” database logged 73 incidents of head shots across all weapon types. This includes 34 head shots from PepperBall launchers and six from the FN303. Though more common, PepperBall launchers were far less likely to cause penetrative injuries than FN303s. Less than 10 percent of head shots from PepperBalls caused lacerations, while five out of six from the FN303 penetrated the body, causing lacerations and sometimes blindings.

By looking for its unique injury profile of skin penetration coupled with bismuth pellets and plastic shards, researchers at the Human Rights Center identified 16 instances of severe injuries caused by the weapon since 2003. All save one involved a shot to the head. “The fact that two young people are either dead or blind from the same weapon 20 years apart means we failed in identifying this as a risk,” Haar said, underscoring a systemic problem.

In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the FN303 was used by police departments across the country. On May 29, 2020, a Georgia State Trooper using the FN303 shot and permanently disfigured the face of journalism student and filmmaker Mikaela Dyett, who was filming a protest in downtown Atlanta. Like Chervet, Dyett will live with the debris from the round embedded in her face for the rest of her life. During a protest in Portland, Oregon, on June 30, an independent journalist covering it was shot in the groin by an FN303. His injury took over a month to heal. The following month, also in Portland, on July 25, 2020, a mother of three was shot in the forehead with the launcher, causing severe lacerations which required stitches.

A day later, on July 26, Portland-based journalist Trip Jennings was similarly shot. The round punctured the face shield of his gas mask, embedding pellets in his eyeball. Jennings had previously reported in the West Bank, where he had been hit with stun grenades, struck in the leg with a tear gas canister, and shot with pepperballs. “I got hit by all sorts of different munitions in the West Bank, and I can say very conclusively that this was the worst and most painful and longest impact,” Jennings recalled. The force of impact from the FN303 was so intense that he initially thought he had been hit by a shotgun shell. 

In many of these cases—such as with Dyett and Jennings—the FN303 was not initially identified as the culprit.

For Scott Reynhout, a researcher who has spent the better part of a decade studying the use of crowd control weapons in protest settings with Physicians for Human Rights, this lack of awareness around the FN303’s potential for severe and even fatal injury is the clearest explanation for why it’s so dangerous. 

“I was certainly guilty of failing to understand the nuances of this weapon in the past,” he admits. While working with PHR, he co-authored a study that cataloged injuries to the head and face caused by impact projectiles during the George Floyd protests in 2020. At the time, he made no distinction between this launcher and Pepperball guns. But six years later, in January 2026, as he began compiling a new database of crowd control weapon misuse, again with PHR, he saw a video of a DHS agent shooting 21-year-old Kaden Rummler in the eye at a demonstration in Santa Ana, California. At that point, he realized the FN303 was in a category of its own.

“It was something different, not just the severity of the injury, but also the types of injuries that you’re seeing,” Reynhout says. “If we think about the different types of less lethal weapons, there are a lot of different shapes and sizes, but not a lot of them can actually fit inside the orbit of the eye. Fewer still can fit inside the orbit of the eye and then carry enough energy with it to actually pass through the orbit and affect the brain.”

Now working independently, Reynhout visited the bullet-casing littered ground of Jawbone Canyon to better understand how the launcher works and to collect data on its ballistic qualities. This sun-baked valley located two hours outside of Los Angeles is commonly used as an improvised gun range by recreational shooters in the area. Crucially for Reynhout’s work, it’s a long, narrow canyon where he can set up targets up to 60 meters out without fear of striking passersby. His range consists of large cardboard and plywood targets to evaluate how far the projectiles drop over specific distance and doppler radars strategically placed to measure projectile velocity at the muzzle and at the target. 

Reynhout extracts the FN303 from a large case and fires half a dozen rounds at a square of heavy-duty, reinforced plywood. The launcher makes a popping noise with each projectile, followed a split second later by a loud crack as the rounds collide with the wood. Shards of plastic explode outward. Even from 30 meters away, the dents are visible.

Almost immediately, the tests reveal the disparities with the claims made by FN Herstal. In the FN303 Armorer Training Manual from 2002, the only publicly available copy, the weapon is described as firing projectiles at 280-300 feet per second. In Reynhout’s testing, the velocity at the muzzle of the weapon reaches as high as 330 feet per second. 

“The formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared,” Reynhout says. He explains that in layman’s terms this means that “even small changes in velocity can have an outsize effect on the kinetic energy.” Though the additional 30 feet per second difference he measured versus FN Herstal’s claims represents only a 10 percent increase in projectile velocity, they translate to a 21 percent increase in energy delivered to the target. 

More concerning is the fact that the disparity in velocity is not a surprise to Alexandre Papy of the Belgian Royal Military Academy. He says that the FN303 can be tuned to fire at higher velocities and explains that because “it’s compressed air, it’s just a question of changing the pressure threshold.” Law enforcement agencies can even make this request of FN Herstal on an entire order of launchers. Meaning launchers used on the street may well exceed the specifications listed in manufacturer documentation. When asked about the velocity of their own launchers, Customs and Border Protection responded that their internal test showed projectiles traveling at the advertised 280-300 feet per second. 

By examining the gap between a point of aim and puncture holes made by the launcher’s projectiles in sheets of cardboard, Reynhout’s testing confirms what is already known, that the FN303 does not fire projectiles in a straight line but in an arcing trajectory. The round initially travels upward, going higher than the point of firing, only dropping as it nears the target. By collecting this data, Reynhout can determine exactly how much officers must adjust their aim at specific distances.

When aiming at a subject 30 meters away, the rounds will hit more or less exactly where intended, which is known as being “zeroed.” Between the 40 and 50 meters, Reynhout found that the rounds start to drop precipitously, requiring the user to aim over a foot higher than the target they had  intended to hit. This introduces “a pretty significant hazard that is completely dependent upon the individual who’s firing the weapon’s ability to accurately judge distance,” Reynhout notes. “Even if a police officer is doing their due diligence…there’s still the possibility that these weapons could go errant and therefore strike someone in a place where they should not be struck.”

Because it is a specialty weapon, proper use of the FN303 is not typically taught in general use-of-force training.  Instead, law enforcement agencies can request an instructor certification course from FN Herstal. Once certified, these instructors then bring lessons learned back to their departments. Police insiders have noted that this is part and parcel of the specialty less lethal weapons industry.

According to police training practitioners and use of force experts, these manufacturer-led, weapons-specific trainings typically focus on how to assemble, operate, and repair the weapon. Issues around tactics, use of force standards, and procedure are considered to be matters of internal department policy for individual agencies to manage independently. According to a statement from FN Herstal, the manufacturer “provides equipment, training and technical support but does not determine operational policies, rules of engagement or use-of-force doctrines.”

When asked for details about their training program, FN Herstal stated that though their curriculum covers “deployment procedures, engagement distances and target selection, including repeated instructions on the areas that must not be targeted,” namely the head and neck, “operators remain bound by their agency’s use-of-force policy.”

“(Manufacturers) will sometimes offer model policies,” said Roy Taylor, a former police chief and expert witness in use of force cases, “but they will never tell the agency what they should or shouldn’t do. That’s outside their bailiwick.”

For Thor Eells of the NTOA, the lack of standards in training creates a gap in the landscape for US law enforcement. 

“We have this duty to make sure that people are thinkers. So we spend more time on the case law,” said Eells of the NTOA’s approach to training. But on the national level, “There is no standard. None. And in fact, in policing as a whole, there are little or no standards in the United States.” 

When it comes to speciality launchers like the FN303, the baseline for training tends to come from the manufacturer. “Unless that specific agency or entity providing the training chooses to go above and beyond,” Eells explained, “then the training tends to be the minimum as put forth by the manufacturer.”

When asked about their training program for the FN303, DHS sent a reply from Customs and Border Protection. The agency stated that CBP agents are required to complete a qualification course and yearly recertification to be authorized to use the launcher. The course includes “classroom instruction, written and practical assessments, familiarization, use of force instruction, and qualification.” Agents are also instructed not to “target the head, neck, spine, or groin unless deadly force is reasonable and necessary.”

The content of FN Herstal’s curriculum is not publicly available. There are state-level institutions, such as the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, known as POST, which is a government agency that sets standards for local law enforcement agencies. It has the power to decertify officers for serious misconduct, and oversees general use of force training curricula. Nonetheless, manufacturer-led specialty weapons trainings lay outside the purview of agencies like POST. Meaning there is virtually no oversight on what manufacturer-trained instructors actually share with their departments.

After measuring the arc, precision, and velocity of the launcher, Reynhout sets up one final test of the FN303’s real power. He removes the cardboard target, now fully dotted with holes, and replaces it with a box of ballistics clay, a polymer clay of a particular consistency that is often used to measure the force of the impact of different weapons. The box is about three inches deep and open on one side. Reynhout explains that though the clay is a poor proxy for the human body, he is able to measure the craters that projectiles leave on its surface to compare the energy that they deliver at any given distance. It’s a “visual representation of the numbers that I’m presenting,” he says.

First, Reynhout takes aim with a paintball gun loaded with rubber balls, the exact size and weight of a standard PepperBall. The force of this shot, he explains, should be roughly equivalent to that of a PepperBall launcher—the weapon that law enforcement consistently conflates with the FN303.

He fires from a distance of about seven meters and hits his target. The small yellow ball makes a nearly one-inch deep indentation, before popping out and bouncing away through the desert.

Reynhout then aims the FN303. The loud pop of the weapon reverberates through the canyon. In an instant, a crater appears in the clay. The round has bored a hole all the way through to the back of the box. Shards of plastic and thousands of bismuth pellets coat the inside of the crater. 

This weapon is no PepperBall launcher.

The Los Angeles Police Department frequently has turned to the FN303 when responding to anti-ICE demonstrations. As protests raged last June, sparked by ICE raids in the LA area, LAPD cracked down hard. The department deployed tear gas and fired thousands of rounds from less lethal weapons. Uses of the FN303 peaked in the 8-day period between June 6 and June 14, 2025, when the department reported firing 244 FN303  rounds in response to immigration related protests.

The LAPD periodically releases summarized reports to the public of their use of less lethal weapons and the injuries caused by their activities. These documents noted a total of 12 injuries from their activity during this period, but documentation did not specify which weapons caused these injuries. 

By the end of January 2026, the LAPD had shot at least three journalists with the FN303 and seriously injured a woman with the weapon, causing severe lacerations to her face. She is now suing the department. Despite its repeated, sometimes dangerous misuses of the launcher, the LAPD continued its use in February. After a federal judge banned the department from using 40mm impact rounds in January, citing safety concerns, Chief Jim McDonnell announced at a Board of Police Commissioners meeting that the FN303 was an alternative option. The LAPD declined to answer any questions about the number of FN303s the department has in use, or to provide information about their training program for the launcher. 

DHS, too, has leaned into the FN303, investing historic amounts in purchases of the weapon in September 2025. The effects of this DHS  investment can be seen in the Trump administration’s crackdown on the recent surge of protests. Of the 12 incidents of FN303 misuse identified by the HRC and PHR team this past year, eight were perpetrated by federal agents working for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or the Federal Protective Service (FPS). Tucker Collins and his attorney, V. James DeSimone, filed a $100 million tort claim as a result of the injury DHS caused. Following the incident, DHS issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.

This surge of FN303 use has resulted in a new wave of injuries, many of which are permanent. Collins was not the only person who was partially blinded by DHS officers wielding the FN303 this year. In January, Kaden Rummler was shot in the eye from roughly three feet away by an FPS agent outside a federal building in Santa Ana. Video of the incident shows agents dragging Rummler across the concrete and into the facility to arrest him, blood pouring down his face. Like Collins, he will never again see out of his left eye.

The Federal Protective Service, the DHS subagency responsible for the injuries to both Collins and Rummler, follows a use of force policy that classifies any impact projectile fired at the neck or head as a use of deadly force. That same policy limits deadly force to extreme circumstances. “An FPS (officer) may use deadly force only when the (officer) has reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to the (officer) or to another person,” the policy manual states.

The Human Rights Center and Physicians for Human Rights identified five incidents in which people were shot in the head by federal officers using the FN303 over the past year, and one by LAPD. Along with Collins and Rummler, an 84-year-old woman, a 25-year-old woman, and two other unidentified victims suffered injuries of varying degrees after being struck in the head or face by a projectile from an FN303.

Outside of the US, injuries of the same severity were enough to trigger national conversations about whether the FN303 should be permitted at all. In the early 2000s and 2010s, Georgia, Turkey, and Switzerland all saw serious injuries, including blinding from FN303s being used in crowd control settings. The incidents prompted debates, and parliamentary sessions. Beyond the limited uproar following Victoria Snelgrove’s death, the FN303 has never been meaningfully scrutinized in the US. 

Recent American use of the FN303 has sparked a new debate in FN Herstal’s home country of Belgium. Members of the right-wing New Flemish Alliance party, such as Defense Minister Theo Francken, have held up the LAPD’s use of the FN303 as aspirational. They argue that the weapon, which is heavily regulated in Belgium and rarely used in crowd control settings, should be deployed more broadly against left-wing protesters.

In October 2025, Francken travelled on a Belgian economic mission to California, where he, along with the CEO of FN Browning Julien Compère, Belgium’s Princess Astrid, and Los Angeles’ Deputy Police Chief Steve Embrich, had attended a demonstration of FN Herstal’s new generation FN303 Tactical at an LAPD firing range. The group was presented not only with an updated model of the launcher but also with an AI camera system mounted to the muzzle that automatically locks the trigger if it detects the user pointing at a face. 

Days after his visit to the US, Francken posted to X advocating for use of the FN303 against Belgian protesters, “Extreme-left antifa mobs wrecked the entrance hall of the Immigration Service and injured multiple staff members…The police should deploy the FN303 against this scum, just like the LAPD, the police in Los Angeles, does.” 

In Belgium, the use of the FN303 by law enforcement remains limited to special tactical units and is subject to approval from the Minister of the Interior, who is now Bernard Quintin. He has indicated he has no desire to change this anytime soon, telling journalists, “The use of FN303 is strictly regulated, and I want to keep it that way. There will be no change in the potential use of this weapon by police in policing protests.” 

Rémy Farge is a researcher for the Belgian Human Rights League, a group that is advocating fiercely against any broader deployment of the FN303. In his opinion, “FN Herstal is making a sort of admission with the release of the ‘FN Smart Protector 303T,’ as if to cynically address the numerous cases of maiming and eye loss that these weapons have already caused.” As he sees it, the comparatively stringent regulations on less lethal weapons in Belgium fall far short of what is necessary. “If we take seriously the danger posed by this weapon,” he said, “then we must stop downplaying its effects and work toward reducing its use, particularly through stricter bans.”

Meanwhile, in the US, the FN303 remains in wide circulation, though it’s unclear exactly how wide. Each department at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels manages its own arsenal of approved weapons. With 18,000 police departments, before counting federal law enforcement agencies, the prospect of stronger standards regulating the use of a single weapon seems unlikely. As Reynhout points out, “The United States is not an ideal place to use the legislative cudgel to manage these weapons.”

For law enforcement, the decision of what to use then becomes a question of risk assessment and mitigation. “There is no magic threshold to say again, now that is lethal, that is non-lethal,” says Papy, “you can kill people with almost anything— including just your hands.”

Despite the established comparison with the Pepperball launcher, there is another weapon that shares features with the FN303 whose history may prove instructive: the beanbag round. Like the FN303’s bismuth-filled ammunition, it is a less lethal projectile filled with metal fragments. In this case, a kevlar sack filled with lead pellets.

These beanbags were used widely during the 2020 George Floyd protests, causing severe injuries by embedding in people’s bodies and cracking skulls. Since then, Reynhout notes, law enforcement has  shifted away from using these projectiles, which caused so much harm six years ago. The data support his claim. The database compiled by Physicians for Human Rights and the Berkeley Human Rights Center found only one misuse of a beanbag round in over 400 incidents recorded from June 2025 through May 2026. But the question remains, why?

“To my knowledge, there wasn’t any sort of legislation that specifically targeted beanbag rounds that was passed,” says Reynhout “yet police departments of their own volition seem to have come to the same conclusion that we came to, that the risk is unacceptable.”

That assessment of risk doesn’t come on its own. For Haar of PHR, it comes down to public understanding of the dangers of the use of the  FN303. “I think that’s kind of the goal,” she says. “You just got to push against it and increase the cost of buying that.” If that happens, then perhaps the FN303 could quietly go the way of the bean bag.

At the conclusion of a crowded campaign event at K’s Hamburger Shop in Troy, Ohio, on Thursday, I approached the state’s Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, with a simple question.

“Do you think Dr. Acton lied about being raped?” I asked him.

It’s not something I ever thought I’d have to ask a politician. But last week, Ramaswamy’s campaign released a controversial advertisement that strongly suggested his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, fabricated the story that she was raped by her stepfather when she was 12, which is well documented in court records, as well as her account of experiencing homelessness.

“She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life,” Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, said in the ad bankrolled by Ramaswamy’s campaign. “Don’t vote for people who lie.”

Ramaswamy did not answer my question directly.

“Our ad was about her lying about me, and I can confirm she has lied about me extensively in this race, and it’s shameful,” he told me.

“Can you answer the question?” I said. “Did she lie about rape?”

“I’m talking to voters right now,” he said, before being shooed away by campaign staff.

Acton has said she hasn’t seen her mother since 1978, the year her stepfather was indicted by an Ohio grand jury for “engag[ing] in sexual contact” with Acton when she was “less than thirteen years of age.” The man, Cledith Arthur, fled Ohio with Acton’s mother and was able to evade warrants for his arrest until he died in Pennsylvania in 2004. “After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said in a statement defending Acton after the ad was released.

Much to my disappointment, I didn’t have the chance to ask Ramaswamy anything else about his decision to exploit his opponent’s traumatic childhood by featuring the woman who stood by the man charged with raping her daughter.

But 20 minutes before my interaction with the billionaire biotech entrepreneur—as I snacked on a tasty $4.40 cheeseburger—Ramaswamy clapped as Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber, the GOP nominee for state attorney general, characterized Republicans as the political party that protects children from sexual abuse.

“We passed the strongest laws in the country to go after human trafficking and to lock up sexual predators. In fact, we passed the law that said if you molest our children, you go to prison for life without a chance of parole,” said Faber.

“I am proud of being the guy who will stand with the men and women who keep our families safe. That’s Republican values. That’s what Republicans stand for,” Faber continued.

A woman from Xenia named Susan came up to me as I was leaving. She said she was grateful I confronted Ramaswamy about the ad. Despite previously voting for Republican candidates, she told me she can’t see herself supporting Ramaswamy next week. “My family puts people who protect predators in prison,” she told me through tears, explaining that her family works in law enforcement. “Giving that woman a platform—it’s disgusting.”

At an intimate dinner in 2023, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman received a special gift from the Israeli government. 

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu had traveled all the way to Cedarhurst, New York, to present the Long Island Republican with an enlarged replica of an ancient coin. “I graciously accept this on behalf of all the people of Nassau County and the people of the United States of America who love Israel,” he said to Eliyahu, in a video of the event that has since been deleted from YouTube.

Blakeman, who is now running for governor of New York, is a staunch supporter of the Israeli government. At a time when Americans across the political spectrum are becoming increasingly critical of Israel, Blakeman’s record stands out. He has a long history of embracing far-right figures associated with the Israeli settler movement, which, since 1967, has been encroaching on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. Last year, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that “Israel must immediately cease all new settlement activity” and return all West Bank land and property. But since then, violent settler attacks on Palestinians and settlement construction backed by the Israeli government have continued. 

Yossi Dagan, an influential Israeli official who has lobbied US lawmakers in support of settler interests, told the Hebrew-language news outlet Arutz Sheva in 2021 that Blakeman is a “strategic asset” not only for his New York constituents, but also for “the State of Israel and Samaria.” (Judea and Samaria is the Israeli name for the occupied West Bank.)

Blakeman’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or a detailed email outlining this story.

On the campaign trail, Blakeman has touted himself as the candidate who can bring safety and security to New York’s Jewish community. He has said that if elected, he could “stop” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom Blakeman has frequently—and baselessly—called an antisemite. Blakeman has seized on Mamdani’s alliance with the incumbent governor he’s hoping to defeat: Democrat Kathy Hochul. Mamdani has drawn the ire of right-wing Israel supporters for his consistent public remarks accusing Israel of genocide and his release of a video calling for the arrest and trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mamdani’s rhetoric is far from extreme. Many leading experts say Israel’s attacks on Gaza amount to genocide, and the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest on war crimes charges.

Beyond his criticism of Mamdani, Blakeman has been a vocal antagonist of the pro-Palestine protest movement across New York, even visiting Columbia University in 2024 amidst a burgeoning student protest encampment. “These people that are protesting are professional protesters, they are anti-American,” Blakeman said at Columbia.

Months later, he signed into law a mask-ban prohibiting the use of facial coverings to conceal one’s identity in public in Nassau County. According to the Long Island Press, the measure was introduced by another Republican, who “argued for the law’s necessity in the wake of pro-Palestine protests across the country.” Protesters have often covered their faces to protect themselves from pro-Israel groups that publicly identify activists. If elected governor, Blakeman has said he would push for a mask-ban statewide.

Blakeman’s association with the Israeli far-right is nothing new. As a congressional candidate in 2014, he traveled to Israel and met with Dagan and numerous other government officials, according to Arutz Sheva. On that trip, Blakeman visited East Jerusalem on a tour hosted by Ateret Cohanim, a group that has worked to methodically take over real estate in the area and evict Palestinian residents.

As a Hempstead town councilman and later as Nassau County executive, Blakeman has worked explicitly to link Long Island’s municipal governments with the Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories. He signed partnership agreements, in 2016 and 2022, with Dagan’s Shomron Regional Council and the Binyamin Regional Council—Israeli governmental entities that oversee settler communities in the West Bank.

In November 2025, Blakeman signed a cooperative agreement with the Har Hevron Regional Council, which recently hosted a conference featuring US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. “I love Judea and Samaria,” Blakeman said at the signing of the agreement. “I love the spirit of the people there.”

The Har Hevron council administers Israeli settlements around Hebron, where Israel’s ultra-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir lives in an enclave called Kiryat Arba. Even within pro-Israel politics, Ben-Gvir is deeply controversial. The Guardian has reported that “Ben-Gvir hung a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein on the wall of his living room for years.” In 1994, Goldstein, an American settler living in Kiryat Arba, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque and killed 29 Palestinians in a mass shooting. The killing led Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to designate the Kach party—to which Goldstein belonged—as a terrorist organization. In 1995, as a 19-year old, Ben-Gvir appeared on television brandishing a Cadillac emblem he said was stolen from Rabin’s car, while stating: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.” Weeks later, Rabin was shot dead by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir.

In 2019, even AIPAC denounced Ben-Gvir’s Oztma Yehudit—or Jewish Power—party as “racist and reprehensible,” and in recent years, 10 countries have banned him from entering their territory. But since 2023, Ben-Gvir has served in Netanyahu’s cabinet, a perch from which he’s called for the “voluntary emigration” of nearly 2 million Palestinians from Gaza and a campaign of targeted assassinations there killing 30 to 40 people “every night.”

Eliyahu—the Israeli official who gave Blakeman the replica coin—is also a member of Ben-Gvir’s party. Months after meeting with Blakeman in 2023, Eliyahu expressed openness to using a nuclear bomb in Gaza. He later claimed the comment had been “metaphorical,” but Netanyahu suspended him from the Israeli cabinet. 

Blakeman met directly with Ben-Gvir in April 2025, welcoming him to Nassau County with a police honor guard. Blakeman also sat for a meeting with Ben-Gvir and NYPD commander Richie Taylor at the private home of a nursing home magnate. (The day before, Ben-Gvir had given a speech at the Chabad Lubavich headquarters in Brooklyn. Outside, a mob of pro-Israel men attacked two women and chanted “death to Arabs.”) 

In a private meeting with Hasidic leaders in Brooklyn this month, according to the New York Times, Blakeman posed a question: “If there is rioting here, if they’re burning down the yeshivas and your shuls, and burning down your house and raping your women, you think Zohran Mamdani is going to stop them?”

The meeting was organized by a close confidant of Blakeman, David Katz, who serves as the executive director of the nonprofit Israel Heritage Foundation, which provides a forum for Israeli ministers to interface with influential Americans. At an IHF event in 2024, then-Religious Zionists of America chair Martin Oliner said that “maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians” in Gaza. Those comments later received a disavowal from the IHF. 

At another 2024 IHF event, Blakeman suggested his remarks from a recorded video should be deleted if the IHF wanted to retain its 501(c)(3) status with the IRS. That video remained online for months until the IHF deleted its entire YouTube channel after I reported for Prism on the group’s ties to the Trump campaign and top Israeli officials in 2024.

Dagan’s office, Katz, and Oliner did not respond to requests for comment. 

Earlier this year, Blakeman crossed paths with Dagan and Katz again at the New York premiere of a play called Jabotinsky’s Dream, produced by a settler theater company. At the play, Blakeman took a smiling photo with Ross Glick, the former executive director of Betar US, which only days before had signed a settlement agreement with the New York Attorney General’s office in response to the AG’s allegations that Betar had engaged in “violence and harassment…motivated by the anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim sentiment expressed by its leadership and members.”

Betar’s legal counsel, Jeffrey Schwartz, told me that “there was never any judicial review, findings, or admission of wrongdoing of any kind” as part of the settlement agreement. Glick acknowledged that the AG’s investigation “reportedly included incidents from the period when I was working with Betar.” But, he added, “I did not become aware of that investigation until well after I stepped aside.” Glick strongly disputed the attorney general’s public characterization of the settlement agreement, saying it was “grossly misleading and self-serving.” Glick said that he grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors and that he is supporting Blakeman for governor and has also supported Dagan. “I am an advocate for bipartisan support for the ‘Friends of Judea Samaria’ congressional caucus,” he said. “I’m also looking at property in Judea for myself.”

The same day as the premiere, Blakeman met privately with Dagan, and the pair issued a joint video. “We will always stand with you, Yossi,” Blakeman said. 

“Bruce is a real supporter and real partner of all the people of Israel,” Dagan said, “and especially to the brave people who build Judea and Samaria.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When millions of voters fill out their ballots in November, they won’t just be choosing elected representatives. Many states are offering the chance to impact conservation and wildlife as well, through ballot measures focused on things like dedicating more money to habitat protection or mitigating the impacts of climate change. One could even reshape wildlife management in one of the country’s most picturesque mountain states—and also lead to the indiscriminate deaths of all kinds of wild animals.

And while ballot measures might seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of electoral politics, they could have an outsized impact this year. The Trump administration has been systematically rolling back protections for endangered species, taking a hammer to longstanding pillars of climate regulation, and cutting funding to agencies like the National Park Service and National Forest Service, both of which oversee vast stretches of wildlife habitats. In many cases, states have had to step up, putting more resources into conserving the habitats and species within their borders, and ballot measures can help shape those decisions.

Here are the seven ballot measures that could transform ecosystems across the country this election:

California — Proposition 45: Cutting pesky environmental reviews, also maybe cutting habitats

This ballot measure would shorten environmental review periods for “essential projects” like housing, water systems, clean energy, and medical facilities, among others. In a state that’s been struggling to build what it needs fast enough, this could help speed essential clean energy projects that could help slow climate change. On the other hand, reducing California Environmental Quality Act review time, as this proposition would do, could also lead to increased habitat destruction, leading advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club to oppose it.

Georgia — Amendment 1: Tax breaks for conservation land (maybe)

This amendment might seem a little in the weeds—and mostly in the interest of farmers and ranchers looking for tax breaks. But it would double (from 2,000 acres to 4,000 acres) the amount of land an owner can get tax breaks from if they protect it under the state’s Conservation Use Valuation Assessment program. As Yanshu Li, an Associate Professor of Forest Economics at the University of Georgia, told me, the amendment could incentivize landowners to set aside larger tracts of their property for wildlife habitat conservation, which would benefit species like the nine-banded armadillo and the northern bobwhite quail that call these habitats home.

Massachusetts — Question 6: A fund for nature

Question 6 would create a “Nature for All Fund,” routing existing taxes on sporting goods, recreational vehicles, and money spent at golf courses to conservation. That fund could then be used on natural resource conservation, making it the first time the state has a dedicated funding source for conservation projects.

Colorado — Proposition 137: More money for restoration and wildfire prevention

This proposition, similar to Massachusetts’, would direct existing sales taxes on sporting goods to a state fund dedicated to conservation and wildfire prevention. In a state where wildfires have torn through more than 2 million acres in the past decade, dozens of conservation groups are supporting this measure to protect habitats and species.

Arkansas — Issue 4: Waterworks and waterways

Here, voters are being asked to approve up to $500 million in bonds that can be used to fund water-related infrastructure projects like water treatment, waste disposal, and wetlands infrastructure. A boost to wetlands under the Arkansas proposal could help animals that live in those habitats, which are often overlooked in this region.

Rhode Island — Question 5: New money for climate resilience and habitat protection

This measure would allow for $55 million in bonds to fund environmental and recreational projects. The largest chunk of this change—$25 million—would go to helping to protect the state from the impacts of climate change. Another $7 would be devoted to protecting Narragansett Bay and its watersheds, which would include funding to “restore natural habitats and control invasive aquatic plants,” according to the Rhode Island Current.

These ballot measures are all relatively straightforward so far, but there’s one question up to voters this fall that puts wild animals front-and-center—and is splitting hunters and anglers down an ethical centerline. Which takes us back to Colorado:

Colorado — Amendment 83: A constitutional right to hunt…traditionally

On its surface, this amendment seems fairly innocuous. It asks voters to enshrine “the right to hunt, fish, and harvest fish and wildlife by traditional methods” in the state’s constitution. Hunting and fishing are already big in Colorado, and they’re protected by statute, so this may not seem like a major change. But, as Rebecca Niemiec, co-director of Colorado State University’s Animal-Human Policy Center and a Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioner, speaking for herself, told me, neither the text of the bill nor its proponents define what “traditional methods” of hunting and fishing would be allowed under this amendment.

“Read plainly, traditional methods could be interpreted to include practices like poisoning, leg hold traps, gill nets, or baiting and hounding,” Niemiec said. Many of these practices injure or maim animals, including ones that aren’t targeted: Steel-jawed traps and poisons don’t discriminate between, say, a deer, a wolf, and a lynx. All of these practices have been outlawed in Colorado over the years, either through other ballot measures or regulatory changes; in 1992, for example, Coloradans voted to ban hunting bears using bait and hounds, and four years later they banned leg-hold traps and snares.

The new amendment also continues on to propose: “establishing hunting and fishing as the preferred means of managing fish and wildlife populations.” This would leave far less room for wildlife agencies like CPW to make nuanced decisions or roll out alternative programs, like birth control or animal relocation. It also reduces their ability to take into account the preferences of people who value wildlife for reasons other than hunting.

“Biological science can inform decisions about how many animals can be killed without threatening a population,” Niemiec said. “But it can’t tell us what hunting practices are ethical, or how to balance hunting opportunities with the public’s desire to see wildlife alive—and protected from unnecessary suffering.”

The push for these constitutional protections, Niemiec told me, is part of a larger backlash against conservation groups. But in this case, it’s not as simple as hunter vs. non-hunter: Plenty of hunters and anglers support taking ethical considerations into account when making decisions about how to manage wildlife, and some hunting groups in Colorado have publicly spoken out against the amendment.

“If we’re going to enshrine anything in the Constitution, it should say we should be balancing the diversity of public interest in wildlife in all of our management decisions,” Niemiec said. “We need innovative methods, not traditional methods, if we’re going to deal with the complex challenges that our wildlife is facing moving forward in the state and throughout the country.”

Early voting is about to close this Saturday in Virginia’s second congressional district, where Republican incumbent Jennifer Kiggans and Democrat challenger Elaine Luria are facing off in a closely watched House race. The candidate who wins the district, which Cook Political Report recently updated from a “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” could have a significant impact on the 2027 Congressional makeup—as well as for the future of military operations. 

For over a decade, the coastal district, which encompasses Virginia Beach and Hampton Roads and borders Norfolk, has been on the frontline of climate change-induced sea-level rise, experiencing everything from “sunny-day” flooding to significant land sinking (making coastal areas even more vulnerable to flooding). Home to several of the nation’s largest military installations, and adjacent to the world’s largest naval facility Naval Station Norfolk, the region has been a flashpoint for what happens when rising tides potentially jeopardize military readiness. Or, as the Biden administration’s Department of Defense put it, Naval Station Norfolk is a “unique example of how the nation’s defense can be affected by the environment.” 

In Virginia’s 2nd congressional district, defense issues heavily shape election debates. But climate change sentiment might also play a part in this race, where 57 percent of adults believe that global warming affects sea level rise, and 55 percent believe that it also contributes to flooding, according to Yale’s Climate Opinions Map. Despite the tendency for Democrats to engage in what has been called “climate hushing,” which is to publicly subordinate the importance of climate change as an issue, almost half of voters in VA-2 believe climate change should be a high or very high priority for the next Congress. And while the district’s future House rep may not be able to reverse the Trump administration’s insistence that climate change is a “hoax,” the winning candidate could push the administration on climate resilience initiatives through mechanisms like defense appropriations, oversight hearings, and constituent advocacy. 

Democrat Elaine Luria, a veteran Navy officer, previously served as the district’s representative from 2019 to 2023, when she was defeated by Kiggans. During her last congressional term, Luria, along with five other Democratic representatives, sent a letter to Biden pushing for the Department of Defense to coordinate climate resilience efforts in Hampton Roads. Now, one of Luria’s top campaign priorities is, as she has written, to “Protect Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay” from the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise. 

“When I’m elected again, I’ll continue to lead efforts to combat the economic and national security impacts of climate change on our local community, invest in energy projects that create jobs and lower prices, and protect clean air and water,” Luria said in a statement to Inside Climate News in August following the state’s primaries. The article also noted Luria’s support for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project near Hampton Roads and her membership on the New Democratic Coalition Climate Change Task Force. 

Incumbent Jennifer Kiggans, also a Navy veteran, voted in January to fund the FY 2026 appropriations package, which she said would deliver clear investments for her district. “These commonsense investments improve military readiness and ensure our ports, roads, waterways, and military installations have the resources they need to keep our region moving,” she wrote in a press release. 

Like Luria, Kiggans demonstrated support for the construction of the CVOW as well as the buildout of renewable energy projects. In January 2026, after Trump attempted to pause construction of the offshore wind project, Kiggans signed on to a letter to Defense Secretary Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum denouncing the president’s move.  

“Naval Station Norfolk is probably one of the most at-risk large Navy or military installations when we look at climate change,” said retired Rear Admiral Jonathan White, who previously directed the US Navy’s Climate Change Task Force and was the Navy deputy to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration under President Barack Obama. “Climate change impacts readiness: the ability to get a job done, to keep ships up and running, and get them to where we want them to be in time. It all makes a difference.”

In 2023, the naval base was designated as the first pilot site for a federal climate resilience program. Now, the pilot program has been stagnant under the Trump administration, which has deleted most mentions of climate change across federal websites, and whose Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X that his war machine “does not do climate change crap.” 

“As a coastal installation, Naval Station Norfolk routinely plans and prepares for flooding, severe weather and other environmental conditions that may affect installation operations,” a Navy official who wished to remain anonymous wrote in an email. “The installation incorporates these considerations into infrastructure planning, emergency preparedness and operational procedures to minimize disruptions and maintain its ability to support fleet readiness.”

But when I asked White how the Trump administration’s animosity towards all things climate affects resilience planning, he said efforts have languished. “Everything is being shelved. I’ve become totally frustrated.” On the state of the country’s national security more widely, White told me the United States is “just falling farther and farther behind. If we don’t have strong leadership in the White House and Congress to push these issues forward,” he said, “it really impacts our national and global security.”

Apart from the service members who are stationed on military installations like Naval Station Norfolk, the entire workforce that helps keep bases running are affected by rising seas. Every job, “from driving trucks around the bases for basic deliveries,” White said, “to welders and machinists,” contributes to how effectively a base operates. But if your street at home gets flooded and you can’t drive to work? “As people become more and more stressed and impacted by weather conditions, we see an impact on the ability of people to actually get to work and do their jobs.” 

Of course, climate change effects extend far beyond the military bases to the communities living in and around them. “The naval base is in the heart of this region,” said Quentin Scott, Federal Policy Director at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN). “A lot of the sailors and naval personnel who live in the area are impacted, as are their families.” According to the US Census Bureau, VA-2 is also home to over 88,000 veterans.

One of CCAN’s current campaigns focuses on sea-level rise, and the organization advocates for funding flooding solutions in Virginia through the Community Flood Preparedness Fund. “Flooding is overwhelming our systems here. People are driving boats through the middle of the neighborhood. There’s a ‘No Wake Zone’ sign in the middle of a school playground,” Scott added. “These are the everyday experiences that people are adapting to.” 

Scott’s organization has publicly endorsed Luria, who he feels is “willing to speak up and push back against this administration.” But he acknowledges that during her time in office, Kiggans “did stand up for clean energy as they were talking about repealing the Inflation Reduction tax credit.” However, she later voted to repeal the same tax credits in 2026, which Scott said was a “stab in the back.” Kiggans “portrayed herself as a champion of renewable energy” but then “voted in favor of Republican legislation to gut clean energy tax credits,” AP reported at the time. 

“Climate change is one of the biggest national security threats,” Scott said. “Consistently, we hear that the best way to communicate with this administration is through national security. If you can find a way to connect your issue to national security, hopefully they will listen.”

For both White and Scott, climate change is on the ballot this election, whether Virginia voters know it or not. “The people who believe that healthcare, vaccines, and medicine are important to our society, also believe that climate change is important,” White said. Scott is even more direct about the link. “The two things that are driving people in this district to vote are data centers and flooding,” he said. “Both of those issues, whether they know it or not, are directly related to climate change. So that’s a big yes.”

Scrolling through X last week, I came across information for a “Get Out The Vote” rally with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and US Sen. Ashley Moody, who is running for reelection next week. The event would be located in Tampa Bay, where I live, and was scheduled for this Monday. Notably, the press was allowed “by invite only.”

Moody’s campaign never responded to my multiple messages seeking an invitation to the rally. Other reporters noted the curious press disclosure. “The Moody campaign has often this cycle sent press releases to reporters after they do events,” wrote Florida Phoenix reporter Mitch Perry on X, “today they’re choosing who they want to cover her rally in St. Pete tonight.” Her campaign later posted images from the event on social media, showing Moody, Florida’s flag behind her, speaking as a crowded room cheered for her. 

The reticence around the rally is just one example of how Moody has maintained a deliberately low profile in recent months on the campaign trail. She declined to debate her opponent, Florida state representative and Democratic socialist Angie Nixon, explaining that she would not “give a stage or any attention” to Nixon’s socialist platform. She has largely avoided the press, literally walking away when reporters in Washington, DC, and in Florida approached her. When a reporter asked her about Flock cameras at a recent event in Indian Rocks Beach, Fla., Creative Loafing reported, “her security detail physically blocked this reporter from following her as she left.” And yet, some polls show Moody winning by a few points. “When you have a socialist coming to try and take over your state and be at the top of the ticket, and walk on the United States Senate floor,” she told FOX News, “we won’t let it happen. We’re working hard, running to the finish line.”

Moody’s campaign also appears to choose speaking engagements where she is at low risk of facing an unscripted situation, such as giving remarks at the Trump rally in Fort Myers last week and speaking at smaller venues only attended by her supporters. “During an appearance at the state GOP’s annual meeting in January, Moody addressed rank-and-file Republicans from the stage,” Politico reported in August. “But unlike several other elected GOP officials who attended, she didn’t mingle with the crowd after her brief speech, instead leaving from a side entrance.” Politico also described a similar hasty exit in June, when Moody and incumbent Florida Sen. Rick Scott appeared together at a press conference protesting a Kanye “Ye” West concert. “But she left before Scott and former Gov. Charlie Crist took questions from reporters.”

Moody’s caution increased in September, when a leaked grand jury report that found Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration diverted $10 million meant to fund health care for poor children to “multiple organizations before eventually landing in the bank accounts of two political action committees and the Republican Party of Florida,” CBS News reported. As the state Attorney General at the time, Moody’s office was involved in the transfer of funds, the report states. In an X post, Moody said her office “had no knowledge of how funds would be spent.”

Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, told me this week, that Moody can afford to take a more guarded approach on the campaign trail because she has several advantages over Nixon. First of all, there are the sheer numbers of registered voters. Since 2020, Republicans have built a comfortable advantage of 1.5 million voters over registered Democrats. Then there is the money; according to the most recent campaign finance disclosures, Moody has raised more than $20 million, compared to Nixon’s $8.5 million. Plus she’s been endorsed by DeSantis, whose popularity among Florida Republicans is still high. DeSantis appointed her to the Senate in 2025 after Marco Rubio became the US Secretary of State. Moody was Florida’s Attorney General between 2019 and last year. Originally from Plant City, Fla., the fifth-generation Floridian is also a former prosecutor and circuit court judge. “If Republican turnout is very solid despite Trump’s declining approval, and she’s able to control her message and just focus on a handful of things like affordability and attacking Nixon,” Jewett said, “she ought to be able to win.”

Meanwhile, Nixon’s campaign is strikingly different. The union organizer and Democratic state representative from Jacksonville has held dozens of large rallies across the state and is continuously speaking to the press, including our own Al Letson. She’s been endorsed by Democratic royalty like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s also called Moody out for her evasion on the campaign trail, nicknaming her Absent Ashley: 

This level of accessibility can also put candidates at the risk of a misstep. In a CBS interview last weekend, a reporter asked Nixon if Cuba was living under a dictatorship. Nixon’s response: “That is what people have told me. I have never been to Cuba, and so I will have to take their word for it.” Her answer prompted backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, including Moody, who posted on X: “Socialist Angie can’t answer if Cuba is a dictatorship? I guess now we know why she voted against the Florida law to require schools to teach the dangers of communism.”

But even if Nixon does not win on Tuesday, she has provided Democrats with a blueprint on how to efficiently campaign in Florida, and some evidence of this is in her ability to raise money. She brought in more than Moody in the latest quarter. “No matter what, the Democratic party is going to have to look at her approach to politics if they want to continue to better their record in Florida,” said Susan MacManus, a political analyst with decades of experience in the state. “She’s just really tapped into people who are tired of waiting for change to happen.”