Any remaining skepticism of America’s literacy crisis vanished Tuesday morning, when Katie Zacharia, a former TV political commentator, stepped up to the White House podium for her first briefing as President Trump’s new press secretary.

It is from this esteemed perch that Zacharia appeared physically strained as she struggled to deliver prepared remarks, as if the task of reading was too much to endure. In other moments, Zacharia sighed heavily. As for the content of her remarks, they fit the usual Trumpian bill, with Zacharia vacillating between thanking the president for anointing her with a dream job and portraying Trump’s job performance as overwhelmingly positive.

But the overtly propagandistic notes took a backseat to Zacharia’s first-day performance, which even included the error of referring to her husband as “my president.” By turns halting and anxious, it made Karoline Leavitt, who resigned in September, seem like a rhetorical genius.

“The clock is running. Thus far 1/11th of a Scaramucci,” Anthony Scaramucci, the former press secretary during Trump’s first administration, quipped on social media.

As the Cornell rape allegations continue to roil beyond college campuses and into the homes of families across the country, a familiar question has played out: How do we educate our sons? Specifically, how do we raise boys who grow up to be men who will not rape women and who will stand up to perpetrators?

In discussing the case in my social circles, the mere suggestion that our kids could come to mirror the behavior of the so-called Cornell 7 is enough to induce genuine nausea right there smack in the middle of a 5-year-old’s birthday party. The allegations seem perversely unrecognizable to us and the inner lives of our families, leaving parents understandably grasping for strategies for a scenario they can hardly imagine. And so, it’s against this air of anxiety that favor has once again settled on sexual consent, and the need to drill its importance into the minds of our youth.

If consent as a talking point feels like grim deja vu, that’s because it returns with each cycle of outrage over alleged campus sexual assault. Consider how the topic has been the inspiration for two different Saturday Night Live skits across 25 years: a 1993 segment that ridiculed the “Ask First” policy at Antioch College, and another in 2018—albeit depicting consent education in a more favorable light—during the #MeToo movement that emphasized an unambiguous “yes means yes” approach to establishing consent. Which is to say that consent, in different registers and varying deliveries, has informed decades’ worth of discourse around sexual assault.

But too often, these conversations treat consent as the finish line—not the starting point to addressing more challenging aspects around rampant sexual assault on our college campuses. In doing so, we sidestep more uncomfortable questions of what makes something like rape appealing to perpetrators in the first place: the thrill of violating consent. That rapists don’t just disregard your consent but don’t want it.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent,” Andrea O’Reilly, a professor at York University in Canada, said. “It’s about power, misogyny, and abuse. This is what we’re missing in the conversation with all these memes going around.” (Indeed, the Snapchat thread at the center of the Cornell allegations is littered with comments relishing this rot: “Free pussy” upstairs. “Shop still open?” “Like you can walk in and whip it out rn.”)

“Of course, we need to educate boys about consent,” O’Reilly added, “but we need to reframe the conversation. Why [do some men] even desire sex with an unconscious woman?”

It can be a deeply torturous thought experiment. Once you confront the psychological attraction, you start seeing strains of it everywhere, like an outbreak. When, amid this very climate, a comedian cracks jokes about gym “whores” on national TV. When, for decades, titans of industry prized the company of a known pedophile. When a man held liable for rape, to accompany the dozens of sexual assault allegations, wins the presidency twice over.

Of course, talking to boys about misogyny and abuse is a far more difficult, and frankly, intimidating, task than teaching consent. Who wants to acknowledge, accurately, that plenty of everyday men hate their mothers and that this hatred informs endless corners of an ugly society? But advocates of comprehensive sex education say that small bites at these difficult topics—sitting cross-legged on the floor, keeping hands to ourselves, etc.—can start at the earliest stages of a child’s education, and later, widen the narrow focus on consent to model what desirable, respectful sex looks like.

Robin West, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me that when we restrict the conversation to consent, parents run the risk of sending the message that “sex is the proper subject of a bargain and [once obtained], you’re off the hook.”

“It shouldn’t be problematic for parents to say that you need to make sure that this sexuality you’re introducing into your relationship is actually serving the welfare of all of you,” West added. “That you’re not just doing it for your own selfish ends.”

“There are so many other dimensions of a sexual interaction [than consent],” Jennifer S. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, said. “A focus on consent is not really meaningful if somebody doesn’t understand that the other person is a sexual citizen, that people fundamentally are equivalent human beings. That yes, I have a right to choose my sexual experiences, and so does the other person.”

Such concepts might seem like the bare minimum to some. But in a country so lacking in gender equality—where, as Hirsch told me, so-called blue states such as New York do not mandate medically accurate sex ed—they are far from a guarantee.

“I’ve been working on comprehensive sex education in New York since 2008,” Hirsch said. “We’ve flown through many different legislatures, and it’s never even come to the floor for a vote once. So think about the thousands and thousands of people who have experienced sexual harm in that time because of their political inaction.”

The consent and education-based models of today can be traced to Barack Obama’s first presidency as an effort to address campus sexual violence. But despite their prevalence on college campuses today, campus sexual assault has persisted, with some studies showing that incidents of reported assault have actually increased in recent years. These worrying trends force a thorny question: Does education even work when it comes to reducing sexual violence?

“These approaches have an implicit theory of behavior change,” Ana Gantman, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College who, with several colleagues, conducted a 2024 meta-analysis of related studies, told me. “They assume that changing ideas related to sexual violence—like the endorsement of rape myths that claim ‘a woman says no before she says yes’—will change overall rates of perpetration and victimization.”

Though these programs appeared to effectively shift attitudes and beliefs around sexual violence, curiously, they had little impact on the ultimate goal of this education model: reducing instances of assault. None of which, as Gantman stressed, was to argue “that rape myths are not worth dispelling in their own right—they absolutely are. But as an avenue to reduce rates of perpetration, I think we have tried changing beliefs to change behavior, and it doesn’t seem to be very effective.”

In other words, successfully convincing someone that rape is bad doesn’t mean they won’t commit it. Gantman emphasized the need for changes beyond education, including creating spaces outside fraternities and dormitory bedrooms where students can socialize.

“What students are getting is the message that sexual assault is bad,” Hirsch said. “Don’t rape someone. Don’t get raped. Don’t let your friends get raped. But as public health professionals, we know that doesn’t equal effective prevention. It is a first step to make people aware of a problem, but it doesn’t give people the tools that they need to not rape somebody or to not get raped.”

One exception to this broad failure, Gantman said, was a school-based program called Safe Dates, which focused on students younger than college age. These educational approaches tended to involve the comprehensive approach Hirsch referenced, with curriculum focusing on more nuanced topics around sex, such as dating norms and gender stereotypes. “This program has been rigorously evaluated and has been shown to decrease reported rates of perpetration,” Gantman said. “It also paved the way for Shifting Boundaries, another school-based program that has been rigorously evaluated, and also takes the literal physical space of the buildings of the school into account.”

Physical spaces as a critical factor in campus sexual assault goes to the heart of the renewed calls to ban fraternities nationwide amid the Cornell allegations, which involve seven former fraternity members, and dozens of others who belonged to a now-famous Snapchat text thread.

“Fraternities represent a very dense concentration of many forms of power: the power of masculinity, the power of wealth, and frequently, the power of whiteness,” Hirsch said. “They also have the power to control alcohol, the power of being third- and fourth-year students, and the power of controlling social space.

But while some of these powers were modifiable—for example, a college could make it easier for younger students to socialize in spaces that weren’t controlled by older men—Hirsch said college campuses that remove frats would still struggle to address more systemic forms of inequality. “If people step onto campus not realizing that the people around them are equivalent human beings who have the right to choose their sexual experiences, the communities that raise those people have failed,” she said.

That might be true. But why not try eradicating just one of the many cradles for male entitlement, secrecy, and generally egregious behavior? Excuses for frats—bonding, community, career networks, alumni donations—are endless, and plenty of ink has been spilled on their supposed values. Yet, for so many of us, watching another round of campus sexual assault allegations unfold, these justifications seem to limp on arrival this time around. Could the current outrage open a rare opportunity for Cornell officials to lead the way to larger institutional change, including, yes, bans on Greek life? Will states like New York move to codify medically accurate sex ed in their schools and make a helluva big deal about it? It remains to be seen. But for now, we can at least go beyond the rallying call of consent.

“I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.”

So said Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, a military technology company that sells autonomous drones and software to the Defense Department, Customs and Border Protection, and militaries abroad in a vocal defense of “public and brutal” executions in general, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in particular.

Executions are the “ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence,” Luckey wrote in a Sunday night X post, arguing that all executions should be public to discourage the acts in question—and that to “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it…is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order.”

Last week, Trump approved the execution by firing squad of Hasan, who opened fire on unarmed fellow soldiers, killing 13 people, at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced shortly after that the execution would be livestreamed.

Hasan was an active-duty major in the Army at the time, and was shot in the back by police during the mass shooting. He is now paralyzed from the waist down. The mechanics of the execution—including whether Hasan would remain in his wheelchair—have not been officially addressed by the Pentagon. 

Luckey, who has donated $5.9 million to Republicans since 2017 according to FEC records, cited George Washington, who authorized public executions in the military to reinforce discipline, to support his stance. 

“The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms,” Luckey wrote. “It makes needless executions more likely, not less so.”

Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty attorney, told my colleague Sophie Hurwitz in April, when the Justice Department announced plans to revive executions by firing squad, that White House supporters of public executions by means like the firing squad have an “affection for causing visible harm to people…They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”

Fellow defense automation enthusiast Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of military tech firm Palantir and frequent advocate of far–right positions on social media, leapt to Luckey’s defense. “Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric,” he wrote. “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”

But according to Axios, even Trump has expressed doubts on livestreaming the execution. Opposition to broadcasting Hasan’s shooting has been bipartisan. On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CBS News that a livestream could be used by terrorist groups to recruit more people. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a vocal critic of Hegseth, called the plan “beyond disgusting” last week, comparing it to public executions performed in oppressive dictatorships.

In a follow-up to his first tweet, Luckey concluded by suggesting that non-public executions were fascist.

Over the weekend, a poorly constructed and very obviously fake claim about Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico sprang up on X only to almost instantly fall apart. The claim was that Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail not because he had the flu, as he and his campaign have said, but because he was secretly flown to Ohio on a private plane and committed to a mental hospital there.

One of the most prominent people involved in spreading the story on X was none other than the site’s owner, Elon Musk. With the midterm elections just weeks away, Musk is pouring money into GOP Senate candidates’ coffers and involving himself in the spread of literal fake news about a Democratic candidate, at a time when basically every true trust and safety guardrail has long been erased from his site. Given that he and his companies stand to profit handsomely from a Republican victory, the pattern is clear: The biggest election disinformation risk in the next few weeks is Elon Musk. 

The Talarico story, as journalists Will Sommer and Andrew Egger have written at The Bulwark, centers on accusations that the candidate had suspiciously disappeared from the campaign trail. Talarico himself said repeatedly that he had the flu, and appeared remotely at an event on September 30, citing his illness. But on Sunday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher began hinting that they had bombshell news about exactly where Talarico had been. Sortor gave Talarico a 1 PM deadline to “reveal” the truth before he said they’d break it themselves, adding in a tweet to a follower: “I’m genuinely trying to give them a chance to respond, but some high profile folks we’ve informed are ridiculously excited.”  

One of those “high profile folks” appears to have been Musk. At the appointed time, Sortor and Amacher released a 55-second audio clip on X of a purported call between Amacher and the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health treatment center in Mason, Ohio. In the call, an unidentified employee is asked about Talarico and appears to say that there is no one by that name in the hospital’s records, but then, in response to further questions, says Talarico had been released on Saturday night. 

This timeline didn’t add up, given that Talarico had been seen campaigning in Texas on Friday and Saturday. Amacher soon tried to explain these appearances away by tweeting that it “is not uncommon in the healthcare industry for a patient to be physically discharged from a facility before all administrative discharge documentation has been finalized.”

Nonetheless, Musk responded to Sortor’s tweet breaking the “news,” tweeting, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” A few minutes later he responsed to a tweet from presidential special envoy Richard Grenell that shared the story, adding that “The Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening.” 

The Lindner Center released a brief statement Sunday evening that Talarico had “never received treatment” at their facility, and Talarico re-shared it, adding, “I’ve never even been to Ohio,” along with a laughing emoji.

The Lindner Center’s clear denial took the air out of the story immediately, but no one involved—especially not Musk—admitted that they might have made a mistake. Instead, Musk began tweeting clips of Talarico speaking critically about capitalism, which the trillionaire called “troubling.” In other words, in the absence of an actual scandal, Musk resorted to fearmongering.

He stayed in the spotlight on Monday, as the The New York Times reported that Musk has become the midterms’ biggest donor, pouring $276 million into what the paper termed a “rescue mission” to keep Republicans in office and in control of Congress.

The midterms’ largest donor, then, is also a person who controls an enormous information source, one that he frequently uses to amplify politically motivated lies and fake news—including tweeting about the possibility of “large-scale fraud” in elections. Musk’s company SpaceX currently holds several lucrative federal contracts with the Defense Department, which could be probed if Democrats retake Congress. And House Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to subpoena Musk amid an ongoing Democrat-led inquiry into his conduct while working as a part of DOGE. With a Democratic majority, that subpoena could move ahead. 

Besides Musk’s personal behavior and business interests, his threat as a disinformation vector is also due to how he’s changed X since acquiring the platform. Under his watch, X decimated its teams of internal moderators and engineers working on trust and safety. A group of academic researchers wrote in a 2024 paper that they’d found an increase in hate speech on the platform and no decrease in inauthentic activity, contrary to Musk’s pledge to root out “spam bots” when taking it over. If anything, the researchers wrote, there was a “potential increase” in “the activity of inauthentic accounts.”

As it comes to the midterms, recently a network of X accounts tied to a Russian disinformation operation produced a blizzard of fake videos and news articles, each one offering a false and lurid piece of fake information about a Democrat. (One might argue that the disinformation was just slightly too outrageous to even work; one claimed that a candidate had murdered several sex workers; another claimed that a different candidate had sold crack to college students, resulting in their deaths.) Some of the videos purported to be from CNN, others from Mother Jones. The fake videos purporting to be from this news organization weren’t removed until our lawyer contacted X. 

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

A new report paints a dark picture of the state of global wildlife—but also highlights flickers of light where some populations are on the upswing. 

Over the past half-century, populations of thousands of vertebrate species across the globe have decreased in size by 73 percent on average, according to the “Living Planet” report published this past Wednesday by the nonprofits World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. A number of factors contributed to this precipitous decline, including habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change. 

However, a closer look at certain regions and biomes offers reasons for hope, the report’s authors say. Roughly half the populations they studied are stable or even increasing. Though these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere, they show that concerted conservation efforts have made a difference for species such as green sea turtles and bluefin tuna, according to lead author Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund.

“The report focuses on hope because even though the headline statistic is really, really stark…what we see underlying the statistic is some real movement in some species,” Shaw said. 

Despite these successes, the report stressed the importance of tackling biodiversity loss at a global scale by changing the three major systems driving extinction: food, energy, and finance.  

The “Living Planet” reports are released roughly every two years. The latest taps into data from tens of thousands of populations of 5,790 vertebrate species across the animal kingdom—from Laysan albatross to ring-tailed lemurs. 

Rather than tallying the total number of animals lost or gained, the researchers measured changes in relative abundance of populations. That means a small population of monkeys that has dropped from 200 to 100 would have experienced the same 50 percent loss as a large colony of 20,000 bats that has dipped to 10,000. 

This method allows researchers to compare data from different populations and better track overall trends, said Louise McRae, a research fellow at the Zoological Society of London who works on the Living Planet Index that informs the report.

“The reason we do that is so that we can get a good picture of what is happening across different species by giving them equal weight within this index,” she said. “We’re getting a better signal of the health of the environment.”

So while the new report does not mean there are 73 percent fewer wild vertebrate animals in total today than in 1970, it does show populations the report monitored are plummeting on average. However, diving deeper into the numbers reveals the varied stories playing out for wildlife around the world. 

By geography, monitored species populations have faced the most significant decline in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an average 95 percent decrease from 1970 to 2022. In that same timeframe, North America and the combined regions of Europe and Central Asia have seen around 25 percent declines, though the authors pointed out that development in those areas had already had large-scale impacts on nature prior to 1970. Declines in Africa and the Asia and the Pacific region were 80 percent and 49 percent, respectively. 

The researchers also broke the numbers down by biome. Freshwater species were the clear losers, seeing an overall decline of 85 percent—significantly more than terrestrial or marine species, though these vertebrates are also seeing major losses. 

The report attributed the nosedive in freshwater species to a number of factors, including pollution, overharvesting, and habitat loss caused by infrastructure such as hydropower dams. Impacted species included in the report range from migratory fish such as Chinook salmon in the Western United States to the Amazon pink river dolphin in Brazil, which plummeted by 65 percent between 1994 and 2016 alone in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the state of Amazonas. 

For terrestrial species, habitat loss and degradation drove much of the biodiversity decline, while marine life faced major threats from overfishing. 

Viorel Popescu, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the report, said it’s valuable to bring these “huge amounts of data” that are largely invisible to most of the public “to the forefront.” But he added that the report may be an underestimate of total biodiversity losses, given that it only focuses on vertebrate species the authors analyzed. Other scientists have echoed this critique. 

Popescu pointed to the collapse of many populations of insects, which make up roughly three-quarters of all known animal species on Earth. In fact, beetles alone account for 25 percent of all animal species. 

“Those declines could be even more drastic,” Popescu said. 

The report also pointed to bright spots around the world. For example, in 2025, the green sea turtle became the first marine turtle to be downlisted by the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature, which means populations increased enough around the world for the animal to no longer be considered endangered. 

But this recovery didn’t happen overnight. According to the report, a roughly five-decade coordinated conservation effort launched across more than 80 countries helped populations rebuild through protecting nesting females and eggs, beach management, lighting regulations, turtle excluder devices and other bycatch reduction measures to help reduce sea turtle entanglements in fishing gear. 

Researchers have also documented population increases for species such as tigers, Southern African elephants and Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna following conservation initiatives and stricter industry regulations. 

However, efforts to help pull species from the brink are struggling to secure the necessary funding to meet the accelerating global extinction crisis, experts say. In the United States, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to conservation programs, both domestically and internationally.

“[D]evelopment aid budgets from national governments and international agencies have historically formed the majority of global conservation funding, with a focus on supporting the communities living alongside wildlife,” Andrew Terry, the chief conservation officer at the Zoological Society of London, said in an emailed statement to Inside Climate News. “Cuts to these aid budgets by governments across the northern hemisphere have had widespread impacts on people and nature alike.” 

Even if additional funding emerges, the new report argues, ensuring the long-term future of the world’s biodiversity requires fundamental shifts to society, particularly in the food, energy and finance sectors. Agriculture is the single largest cause of habitat loss and a major contributor of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions alongside fossil fuels. 

According to the report, accelerating solar uptake around the world illustrates how systems can change to reduce their impact on biodiversity. However, financial systems are still pumping money into development that hurts biodiversity, with one estimate suggesting that $7.3 trillion flowed into activities that harm nature in 2023, more than 30 times the money spent on efforts to protect or restore it. 

Shaw said the new report shows countries must simultaneously increase conservation funding to restore wildlife populations while reducing investments in the activities that undermine them. 

“Go after the root causes, don’t do this species by species,” she said. “Focus on the food system, the energy system, and the finance system, and the connections between the three. That’s a recipe for really turning around the loss of wildlife and the loss of species that we’re seeing at a global scale.”

Federal officers raided Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home early Monday morning, reportedly related to an investigation into the lawmaker’s immigration paperwork, filed by a relative when Omar was a child. 

The search was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that manages criminal investigations, and, according to a Justice Department spokesperson, “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” the agency secured. An anonymous source reportedly “familiar with the situation” alleged to NBC News that the raid was part of a yearslong investigation involving whistleblowers. CNN also reported that a federal judge approved the search warrant but did not name the judge. 

White House border czar Tom Homan, the acting head of ICE, stated on Fox News last month that Homeland Security was investigating Omar for alleged unspecified “criminal” conduct, but claimed he couldn’t “give the specifics of what’s happening.” 

“If someone committed an immigration violation, if someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law,” Homan said at the time. “So, I’ll leave it at that. We’ll let HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, continue the investigation.”

In a Monday morning Fox interview, Homan confirmed that the search had taken place.

Omar immigrated to the US from Somalia in 1995, when she was 12, amid the ongoing civil war in the country. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2000. President Donald Trump and his administration have regularly racially targeted Omar—a progressive Democrat and frequent critic of the administration’s policies—fueling further violent threats against her and other lawmakers of color, and people from Somalia living in Minnesota.

Trump and other White House officials have repeatedly cited the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal that involved members of the state’s Somali American community to justify the mass violence by immigration officers in the area as part of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in late 2025. 

The timing of the raid on Omar’s Washington-area home—22 days before the November midterms, in which she is a heavy favorite for reelection—adds additional scrutiny, as Justice Department policy prohibits federal prosecutors and agents from timing investigations or charges to affect election outcomes. While not a binding rule, the Justice Department has historically complied by pausing all related actions in the 60 days before an election. (Trump and the wider MAGA movement have repeatedly targeted former FBI head James Comey, and that agency as a whole, in part over the timing and supposed political motivations of the FBI’s own investigations under Comey into both Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)

“Americans see this for what it is,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who the Trump administration has also targeted, wrote on social media. “President ​Trump is abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before an election.”

“I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement,” Omar posted on social media Monday afternoon. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

On Friday, I hosted a Reddit AMA, prompting the Internet to ask me anything about my coverage of anti-abortion activist Kristan Hawkins and the movement she represents. 

I spent months following and getting to know Kristan. I watched her debate students who were victims of sexual assault, order medication abortion pills online in a state where abortion is banned to show that it was still accessible, and discuss how to weaponize environmental laws against abortion. I also watched her fend off attacks from all sides—from abortion rights supporters to misogynists within her own movement. 

Redditors were particularly interested in the effectiveness of Kristan’s message, and curious about what the anti-abortion movement is planning next.

Here’s an excerpt of the Reddit discussion. Don’t forget to read my full story on Kristan Hawkins and watch our documentary.

Do you think Hawkins is successfully influencing college students at all? How is she perceived on campus?

AL: My colleagues and I watched Kristan in action on two very politically different college campuses—one in Texas and one in California.

What was striking to me in both these venues is that most students seemed to come to the “change my mind” debates that Kristan organized with their views pretty fully formed already. There were some conservative Christian students who strongly agreed with her and saw her as a hero…others who thought she was out of her damn mind.

We have a pretty epic clip in the documentary that shows one student shutting down her arguments, for example…and then some who were in between.

But the polling data shows that overall, young people on college campuses—and especially young women, which is the demographic Kristan cares about most—overwhelmingly support abortion rights. So while I think she’s been able to whip up a relatively small, loyal following, by and large, her message is failing to win over the majority of students.

Assuming that you don’t share Hawkins’ views, what is the relationship like between you and your subject? Is the experience one that feels very performative so as to present a very particular image of her and her movement, or does the subject relax and become more genuine? 

Is there a component of trying to be persuasive towards you? Or does the interaction have an adversarial element, like she believes she’s working with the enemy to further her goals?

You are correct in thinking I do not share Kristan’s views, and she knew that going into it. But I have a record of accurately reporting on right-wing figures I disagree with. In fact, Kristan read my book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, before our first interview. I think it sometimes helps with the source relationship when I can be open with my views, because Kristan wasn’t trying to guess where I stood.

While part of my time with her involved sifting through well-rehearsed talking points, some of which were pretty wild (i.e. her views about the dangers of abortion pills in the water supply, which most scientists think are bogus), we spent enough time together that I felt like I did get to see her with her guard down at times…like when she was exhausted, in a T-shirt, putting on makeup in an airport bathroom after we’d both spent the night in the Houston airport during the government shutdown.

This was the moment when she told me: “My brand consultant would probably say you shouldn’t be filming me.” But as a reporter, I was like…actually…I think this version of you is probably more genuine and likable than the version that’s out there posting ragebait on social media all the time.

How do you see the anti-abortion movement on college campuses and among college students evolving in our current political climate?

Young people, especially young women, are overwhelmingly pro-choice. About two-thirds of people under 30 want abortion legal. Among young women, it’s as high as 76 percent. So for conservatives like Hawkins and her followers, it’s really an uphill battle, and I think that leads to a sense of cultural embattlement that has actually been galvanizing for the minority of students who oppose abortion.

Kristan stokes this feeling with her constant stream of content showing pro-choicers angrily reacting to Students for Life displays. IMO, this kind of content shows their message is unpopular…but Kristan is a master of spin, so she’ll use it to suggest that abortion opponents are under attack by crazy pro-choicers.

To Kristan’s credit, though, there really isn’t a pro-choice parallel to Students for Life. No group on the abortion rights side has as much reach and presence on college campuses, even though that is the more popular point of view.

What is their next move? 

First, they’re coming after shield laws—the laws passed in blue states that allow clinicians in New York or Massachusetts or California, for example, to mail abortion pills into states where abortion is banned.

The Supreme Court lawsuit filed by three red states last week is the opening salvo in this major constitutional showdown. But their holy grail would actually take us back in time…to 1873.

Kristan Hawkins and her allies would like the Trump administration to revive the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law that they believe can act as a de facto abortion ban nationwide to shut down the mailing of pills, maybe even all abortion supplies, including in states where abortion is legal.

There’s also the ongoing review of mifepristone by Trump’s FDA, which will reportedly be out in March, and could disrupt access to one of two drugs used in the ideal medication abortion protocol. But no matter what happens, community suppliers say they will keep sending pills through the mail, and not even the most zealous postal inspectors can confiscate every package. 

Ultimately, one of the major reasons I think Kristan has lost is that she’s trying to stop something unstoppable: The mail and abortion pills.

Is the next plan removal of all birth control? 

Going after birth control was always, always part of the plan—it just happens to be less salient as a political talking point than going after abortion, so they tend to be more quiet about it!

Kristan Hawkins and many of her fellow abortion opponents oppose most birth control methods, because they believe (incorrectly) that they can cause abortions. What’s been fascinating lately is watching the intersection of old-school religious opposition to contraception with the MAHA movement and its crunchy online influencers who claim to eschew birth control for a whole host of other reasons.

Kristan is definitely taking advantage of this trend. I picked up a Students for Life postcard at a conference over the summer, for example, that touted getting off birth control as a way to “go green.”

How does Hawkins deal with the attacks from the misogynists in her own movement? How does she move forward without being discouraged, and would there be a point where she quits the movement because of these attacks?

This question is a big part of why I wanted to follow Kristan Hawkins in this moment! She and other women in the anti-abortion movement are getting a wave of animosity right now from a hard-right faction of their own movement that blames women leaders like her for the fact that abortions have gone up, and that wants to punish people who have abortions with jail, maybe even the death penalty.

In fact, Kristan has said she’s more afraid of being shot by these folks than by pro-choicers. Kristan’s walking a pretty wild line here, because she is a brawler by nature whose inclination is to fight off the misogynists, but she can’t sound too feminist or she risks alienating her base of conservative supporters.

So her solution has been to try to have it all. She leans into feminist talking points sometimes as a way to hook in young women and shoot down the misogynists. But then, ultimately, she still embraces an extreme anti-abortion POV.

At least for now, she disagrees with the so-called abortion “abolitionists” who want people who have abortions to be charged with murder…although in her persistent effort to have it all, she told me that there might come a time when criminalizing women makes sense. I don’t think she’ll quit the movement, but I do think she’ll increasingly have trouble navigating these divides, and she’ll spend more and more of her time fighting internal battles.

President Donald Trump keeps pointing the finger at everyone for surging fuel prices but himself. Over the weekend, he once again blamed Ukraine, asserting that the country’s retaliatory airstrikes on Russia’s oil refineries were causing prices to spike. Now Trump is urging Ukraine to scrap its leader.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said Saturday, suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to broker a peace deal with Russia.

For weeks, Trump has called on Zelenskyy to stop striking Russia’s energy infrastructure, claiming that the attacks are “hurting the world,” while saying virtually nothing about Russia’s strikes against Ukraine.

Responding to Trump’s escalatory remarks, Zelenskyy on Sunday criticized Trump’s framing, telling ABC News that it is near universally understood that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has led to higher prices—not Ukraine’s strikes against Russia. But according to Zelenskyy, it’s easier for Trump to blame Ukraine instead of acknowledging the United States’ overwhelming role in surging prices around the world.

“People have to hear reality,” the Ukrainian president said. “Don’t play games with people.” 

Later on Sunday, Trump claimed on Truth Social that there is now an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” in the war between Russia and Ukraine. But he gave little detail about what that entailed.

The head-spinning war of words follows Trump’s deal on Friday to allow Russia to supply diesel to other countries, an apparent bid to bring down prices ahead of the midterm elections. But just last month, Trump had signed a bill granting him power to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on top countries that buy Russian oil or gas, namely China and India. 

Even GOP lawmakers have voiced rare opposition to the deal. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) wrote on X that he was “concerned the lifting of sanctions on Russian oil will only fund the Kremlin’s war machine—emboldening more violence and destruction, as we have seen in recent days.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said that Trump should use his new sanctioning authority against Russia instead of allowing the country to “rake in revenues, and continue its catastrophic war in Ukraine.”

On Saturday, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) announced plans for a bipartisan bill that he said would prevent the president from lifting sanctions. “[Ukrainian] President Volodymyr Zelensky has the overwhelming support of the United States Congress, he has the overwhelming support of the American people, and he has the overwhelming support of the Ukrainian people,” Fitzpatrick wrote on social media.

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Elijah Washington pushes through wet ferns and branches left by logging, crossing the mossy forest floor on Haida Gwaii. He kneels beside a massive western red cedar stump.

The cedar was felled decades ago during the industrial logging boom that cleared swaths of old growth across the archipelago off British Columbia’s north coast, leaving a hollow, decaying stump.

Its top has since been trimmed with a chainsaw to fit a plywood sheet, capped with weather-resistant roofing material and covered with thick green moss collected from the surrounding woods. Near the base, an opening roughly the width of Washington’s safety helmet leads into a sheltered hollow lined with moss.

“You just want it to be small enough for a mother bear to move in,” said Washington, a stewardship technician with the Haida Nation. “So it’s got to be just right, just like the Goldilocks, [the entrance] can’t be too big, can’t be too wide.”

The retrofitted stump is one of seven the Council of the Haida Nation had modified this summer to provide winter shelter for the coastal black bear, known in the Haida language as taan. Found nowhere else in the world, this subspecies of black bear is among the largest in North America. 

A bear’s winter den may bring to mind a rocky cave, but coastal black bears in BC rely heavily on large old-growth trees and the hollow logs and stumps they leave behind. Decades of logging have removed many of those shelters, however—and the younger trees growing in their place have yet to develop hollows large enough for bears, said Helen Davis, a wildlife biologist working with the Haida Nation to identify and restore bear dens.

Cubs are born weighing about a pound, with their eyes still closed. They need a dry, protected place where their mothers can nurse them through the winter, and they stay there for up to 100 days. “The only place where bears can have babies is in a den,” Davis said. “And so these dens are critical to population sustainability.”

The old trees bears need for shelter are also sought-after by the logging industry. BC has expanded protections and temporary logging pauses, but old-growth harvesting continues. In August, BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said stopping it altogether would shut down the sector.

Davis has heard that argument for years. People repeatedly suggested making shelters from melted tires or culverts instead of leaving old-growth trees for bears.

“People would just sort of throw that out somewhat frequently and since nobody seems to want to conserve old growth for them, I was like, ‘Well, fine, then let’s see if we can build them,’” Davis said.

Now, the first-of-its kind program could set a model for bear conservation worldwide. But in providing an alternative to simply protecting old-growth, some worry building dens gives an easy excuse for logging to continue without pause.

Lisa White, a councillor with the Old Massett Village Council, said the sight of plywood laid over old-growth stumps was difficult to bear. “I actually cried,” she said. The plywood roofs, she said, showed how deeply the land had been damaged: bears now needed people to help provide their shelter. 

White said Haida people had needed wood long before commercial logging. Thousands used it for homes, canoes, clothing and heat, yet the forests appeared virtually untouched to the first newcomers, she said. People selected individual trees, used them fully and left the surrounding forest standing, so animals could continue living there, including northern goshawks, which are at risk of disappearing from the islands. The Haida also were known to pull entire planks from trees without felling them, leaving the tree standing.

White worries about how well the second-growth forests surrounding the modified dens will hold up through winter. She has seen extensive blowdown in those stands and is concerned about placing shelters among trees vulnerable to the islands’ storms.

“It’s also the forest around them that needs to be strong,” she said. 

Sometimes, loggers discover a bear den only after cutting into it.

Davis, who has been studying coastal black bear dens since the early 1990s, recalled stories from loggers: “They cut into trees and a bear popped out—or worse, they cut into a bear.” 

Those accounts led to a three-year provincial government study with forestry company Canfor to investigate whether black bears needed large trees for dens.

Davis tracked radio-collared bears to roughly 65 dens; her field research confirmed that bears were almost entirely dependent on large, hollow old-growth trees and that second-growth forests left them with virtually no options.

At the time, despite the rate of loss of old-growth forest in the province, the research didn’t set off alarm bells. “I don’t think they thought they’d run out of old growth,” she said.

But building a den meant manually crafting what a living cedar takes centuries to create. As a cedar grows, fungi can slowly rot the wood at its centre, creating a hollow large enough for a bear while the tree remains alive. Forests managed for timber are often logged again before those chambers develop, so the new trees do not replace the dens lost when old growth is cut.

Davis began working with Taan Forest, the Haida-owned forestry company in 2019, teaching staff to identify natural bear dens and convert suitable stumps into new ones. The company was already restoring streamside forests damaged by earlier logging and adding den restoration became a natural extension of that work, said Jeff Mosher, its chief forester.

“Protecting bears is a priority, even if it means a lower dividend,” Mosher said. 

Taan Forest has since created six dens across the Mamin River, Survey Creek and Ghost Creek watersheds on Graham Island, in northern Haida Gwaii, Mosher said.

Mosher said bears usually took about a year to start using the shelters, though they checked out one new den almost immediately. Signs of use at other modified stumps encouraged Taan to build more. Bears used one of the dens through the winter and spring of 2023 and have returned annually since. 

Those results also encouraged the nation to expand the effort, Washington said. His crew spent the summer searching previously logged forests for stumps with a hollow large enough for a bear and an entrance leading inside. Davis helped the council secure funding from the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and spent a week in July teaching the crew to scout stumps, assess their suitability and turn them into dens using chainsaws, plywood and moss.

The crew is also trying to make the new shelters smell familiar. When the Haida crew comes across a bear that has died, they respectfully collect some of its hair to place in some of the modified dens, a trick Davis has tested elsewhere in the field with encouraging results. 

By the end of October, the team plans to complete three more dens, bringing the total to 10 modified sites across Haida Gwaii ready for winter monitoring. The exact locations of the sites are being withheld to prevent exposing denning bears to hunters. 

Haida members remain concerned about black bears killed for their gallbladders, which contain bile sought for use in some traditional Asian medicines. BC bans possession of bear gallbladders or bile and prohibits their trade.

Washington said that while the nation’s presence on the land has helped protect bears from such hunting, the killings still occur. Haida members have reported seeing bears left dead on the side of the road with the paws cut off and gallbladder removed. 

Tracing his hand over a living western red cedar in a different part of the forest, Washington points to the distinct tool marks left by a traditional adze. Sometime in the early 1900s, he estimates, Haida ancestors cut into the tree to see if it could be used for a house pole. Finding rot at the core, they left it standing. Bears later widened the opening with their teeth and claws, turning the hollow into a natural den, its floor already lined with soft cedar bedding and green branches still growing above.

This den sits high in the tree, which is among the safest places for a female bear to raise cubs, Washington said. But his crew cannot recreate one at that height.

The modified dens also provide only temporary shelter. “They’re dead stumps and so they’re rotting and they won’t be there forever,” Davis said.

But shelter is only part of what a bear needs. Noel Bellis, an Old Massett member of the Haida Nation and a carver, grew up in a logging family and later worked in cedar forests. After visiting modified dens and attending workshops, he believes bears would move in but questions whether they would find enough food nearby. When bears come out in spring, they feed on green vegetation, including horsetail, fireweed shoots, salmonberry shoots, and grasses.

But in the second-growth forests he has visited, deer have eaten much of the low-growing vegetation, leaving little for bears to forage. “It’s a moss lawn between trees,” he said.

Nearby salmon streams provide a seasonal source of food, but Bellis worries about what bears will find once those runs end each year. He wants den-building accompanied by efforts to restore food plants, using cages to protect young growth from deer until it grows beyond their reach. “It will cost money, but that’s what the costs of clear-cutting are going to be,” he said.

Davis agrees bears need both shelter and feeding areas within their home ranges, where they generally remain to den. “They don’t just pick up and march off to some far-flung patch of remaining old growth and all den there together,” Davis said. 

Taan Forest is opening gaps in the canopy to encourage shrubs to grow, with at least two modified dens in or beside those restoration areas, Davis added. 

When Barney Edgars worked along Haida Gwaii’s creeks as a fisheries guardian, his crew carried air horns and flares but rarely needed them. The Elders who raised him had taught him to respect bears and speak to them when their paths crossed: “You go your way, I’ll go my way.”

“We were taught that everything we grew up with had a spirit,” said Edgars, a Haida Elder.

He recalled an older woman fishing for sockeye salmon when a bear and its cub approached her net. She threw the bear a fish and told it to leave the net alone. It never returned, he said.

Earlier generations ate bears and used the whole animal. His grandmother asked him to hunt one for her, though he never did. Travellers also followed bear trails through northern Haida Gwaii, finding routes between waterways on the journey from Massett toward Naden Harbour.

Neither Edgars nor his grandparents had heard of a bear attack on the islands, he said. But he worries that losing forests and feeding grounds will push bears into communities to rummage through garbage, increasing the possibility of conflict. 

Fears about conflict with bears are new to the Haida. “They used to sleep under the trees and there was never any fear of that… I never learned any fear from my grandfather about bears,” White said.

Washington said Haida people want to know whether bears are healthy, have enough food and have places to live. Monitoring the new dens will help answer part of that question.

Cameras facing the den entrances will record activity year-round while their crew stay away from roughly October to April to avoid disturbing bears. After winter, the crew will review the footage to see which shelters bears explored and which they used as dens.

Hair naturally caught at den entrances can be tested for DNA to help show whether the same bears return year after year or others move in.

Even if bears take to the shelters, the crew does not plan to turn every suitable stump into a den. Once one is finished, workers move to another area, leaving space between shelters to limit competition for food and places to raise cubs.

“We don’t want to create a whole community out here,” he said. “We want to have like one bear that’s safe enough to come out here.”

Big money has long dominated American politics, with wealthy donors, corporations, and special interests dumping tons of cash into presidential and congressional elections. This year is no exception. But what’s different is that the quid pro quo of campaign money for preferential government treatment is more brazen than ever before and has become part of the cornucopia of corruption running through the Trump administration. 

In this new episode of Stress Test campaign finance reporter Russ Choma joins hosts David Corn and Garrison Hayes to analyze the $1.7 billion that has been poured into the election so far—including hundreds of millions from crypto and sports betting, industries that were barely on the political map in 2020. “There’s no sign of deceleration,” Russ says in the episode. “There’s no sign of slowing down, it’s only acceleration.”

So much of what’s happening is hidden from public scrutiny, because super PACs can obscure donors, and issue ads and targeted turnout operations can go unreported. It’s like “dark matter in the universe that you can’t see,” David observes. The threat to democracy is real, because donors get to cash in by having the administration align with their deregulatory goals, or, in the case of Elon Musk, can gain control of an agency or decimate whole sections of government. “They’re getting more than total access,” Russ explains. “They’re getting inclusion.”

“There have always been a lot of people who believe that the government was corrupt,” Russ says. “But the problem is that now they’re right.” And this cynicism isn’t just a side effect of all this money. It’s a goal. After all, the most effective thing a campaign can buy, Russ notes, is a negative ad, designed “to make you not vote.”

But there could be some hope. Voters are telling pollsters they see more corruption these days, and when that collides with a sour economy, apathy can curdle into anger. Just ask Viktor Orbán, voted out in Hungary after 16 years in power due to a combo of a poor economy and rampant corruption. Might such synergy be happening in the United States?

That’s all in today’s episode of Stress Test. Find it on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/MotherJones.

And want more on how money is warping American politics? Russ Choma covers Trump’s crypto fortune, his financial conflicts, and the cash behind the midterms. Check out his latest.

This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.

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

Garrison Hayes: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the third episode of the show, David. Oh, no, no, to our audience. Welcome to you. And also welcome to you, David. How are you doing today?

DC: Well, welcome to you, Garrison. It’s great to be back with you. And I hear that when I was gone, you did a great show with Tim Murphy about the backlash to data centers and how that’s become a bipartisan issue during this campaign.

GH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a great conversation about how this is a rare bipartisan issue where you’re seeing backlash and pushback and real anger from both Democrats and Republicans and really everyone in between and beyond, especially in the state of Texas. Our colleague Tim Murphy has been out in Texas a few times, and he has another trip upcoming, where he’s been reporting from the ground on the way that these data centers and the backlash to them are really shaping the political atmosphere there. In fact, he told me about how the governor, Greg Abbott, has made this huge 180 kind of turn from being a champion of data centers to being against them.

DC: Wow, I wonder why. It couldn’t be principle, could it?

GH: You know, he actually invited, you know, Google. They had this big press conference where Google’s spending $40 billion on multiple campuses across the state. It will be their largest data center kind of AI footprint in the country, maybe even in the world. There are other huge projects out there, and none of those projects are actually coming to an end, even though the governor is talking about a pause or a moratorium on data centers going forward.

So there’s a lot to dig in there. If you missed that episode, I really encourage you to go back and watch it. It’s such an important issue during these midterms. You can catch it on our YouTube channel. That’s the Mother Jones YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss any of the episodes coming up.

Okay, listen, today’s gonna be a good show. We’re talking about money in politics, specifically campaign money—in other words, what you can and cannot buy in American politics. And we’re gonna talk about some of the big spenders, some of the big receivers of that money, who wishes they had more money, perhaps, who has more money than they need.

DC: Yeah, everybody.

GH: Everyone. Okay, so that’s an inclusive list. But we’re also gonna talk about Trump and how he and the vice president, JD Vance, are hitting the campaign trail. David, you’ve covered many, many, many, many—

DC: Don’t remind me.

GH: You’ve covered many elections, my friend. So talk to me about what you’ve seen and whether what you’re seeing from the Trump administration—so President Trump and Vice President JD Vance—is this stuff normal, the way they’re hitting the campaign trail?

DC: Well, in a way, yes, but also no. You can tell a lot about a campaign and how things are going politics by looking at a politician’s travel itinerary, right? Because right now we see JD Vance and Donald Trump hitting the campaign trail, but they’re going to places where they shouldn’t be—where they shouldn’t have to be going. Oklahoma, for instance. They’re going to states and districts where usually the Republicans would have a lock on that election by this point. So it shows that they see what everybody else is seeing: a possible gigantic blue tsunami heading right toward the White House.

There are races across the country that, quite frankly, are amazing political experts because they’re competitive: Senate race in Iowa, Senate race in Kansas, in Texas, and even the governor’s race in Texas might be within a few points. So Republicans are in, I think, the technical term, freaking out, and they’re worrying about races. And that means—you know, listen, the president, who’s not quite an asset for the Republican Party at this point in time, when he’s at 31 percent approval rating, according to the AP, still has limited amount of time and places he can go in the five weeks left in the election here, or less than that maybe. And so it makes a big—it’s a big deal where you decide to deploy him and JD Vance.

The same with money. We see Republicans taking their money out of certain states, like North Carolina, where they thought they were competitive in the Senate race there, and shoveling it into South Carolina, where they shouldn’t be competitive, and also to Texas. So that’s how you can tell what they’re thinking, by looking where the money and the president is going.

But I have to say this: When he’s at such a low approval rating, the Trump brand ain’t so strong, and you have to wonder to what degree his campaigning helps people. Now, it may help people in deep—candidates in deep-red states if you can gin up Republican turnout there. But at the same time, a lot of Republicans are running away from the president, and they don’t want their voters in their states to be thinking about Trump.

And listen, he’s out there, and I have some notes here to the side. You know, in one campaign stop recently, he said he knows more about inflation than anyone else, and he knows more about everything than anyone else. When people already are not thinking highly of you, talking about how well you know inflation when inflation is a concern to them is really not smart.

But I think this topped it for me, at least. At one rally, he said, “You need to be a student at the top of your class at MIT to turn on a lawnmower nowadays, you know? But I got rid of all that stuff. Now you can have a lawnmower.” What the heck is he talking about? I have yet to see one focus group where people are complaining about lawnmowers. But don’t take it from me. Let’s hear directly from the president of the United States.

[Clip plays.]

GH: Inspiring. Inspiring stuff.

DC: Garrison, these are not what you call ringing endorsements, right? And it’s always about him. Pretend I’m on a ballot. Most Republicans running right now would rather he not be on the ballot, would rather he be put in exile in Mar-a-Lago.

GH: Yeah, it’s hard to kind of—it’s almost distills down so well the fear that I heard from so many Republicans in the 2024 cycle that Trump was really tanking the party, that he was more or less a dead end for the Republican Party. That, yes, he’s very popular; yes, he has this magic way with the American people to get them to vote for him. He has all this charisma, but really there is no viable succession plan. There is no real plan for after Trump.

And we have, as you see on the screen, Vice President JD Vance. But even with Vance, you know, so many voters have said online, and I’ve heard them myself, that he just doesn’t quite have the it factor. And I think it really does present a real problem for Republicans going forward. And we will see. I mean, talk about “stress test”. This midterm will actually be a real stress test for the Republican Party to see how they chart a path forward after Trump.

DC: Let’s talk about one of the big issues in any campaign, and it only keeps getting bigger, and that is big money. I talked a moment ago about how Republicans are shifting and, you know, where they’re putting their dollars, but we’re talking about tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, campaigns keep getting more and more expensive, and that just gives more power to the people who can provide those dollars. So fortunately, we have with us today Russ Choma, a reporter from—for Mother Jones, who’s one of the experts on campaign finances. He’s been covering this almost as long as I have. So let’s bring on Russ.

Russ Choma: Well, thanks for having me, guys. There’s obviously a lot to talk about this year. The money gets bigger every year, and we’re here again, and it’s even bigger.

GH: It’s even bigger. One thing that’s really stood out to me is just how much AI and crypto and Polymarket and these betting markets and all of that—how much of that money is actually going into this election. We saw in New York there was a big kind of AI race there. And some of these things are kind of constantly popping up in the conversation. It feels like these industries are funneling a ton of money into politics. And I’m curious if that sense is true and what you’re seeing as you’re reporting on this.

RC: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s more than a feeling. It’s what’s actually happening. And it’s interesting because for years and years there were always sort of the same set of special interest groups. And, you know, sometimes with new technology, some, you know, new interest groups would be added, but it’s amazing how instantly both prediction, sports betting, crypto, AI have all sort of—and they all sort of merge into one industry in a lot of ways—have sort of popped onto the scene.

I think the last good count that I saw, about a $1.7 billion has been put into this election. And about a quarter billion of that is just from crypto and sports betting. That’s just the money we know about. It’s a huge, huge, huge sum. But for them to go from two—2020 basically not being on the map to that much money in a midterm, it’s not even a presidential election, is really, really stunning. So yeah, it’s more than a feeling. It’s really happening.

DC: And what strikes me, Russ, is that in the past some big donors have been more—well, sometimes they have wider interests, like, say, the Koch brothers. They want deregulation, they don’t like environmental controls, they want low taxes. It’s basically the conservative libertarian agenda, like, straight through. And we’ve seen that with other major guys who run hedge funds and people like that. The way that George Soros on the Democratic side has a wide liberal, progressive agenda.

But with these guys, it’s highly, highly specific. This is about as quid pro quo–ish as you can get. And I just want to give props to Andreessen Horowitz, the big venture capital fund with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. They’ve given over $115 million together to both an AI super PAC and a crypto super PAC.

And these two guys are just bringing this technology, this Big Tech money in in a very direct, very brazen, blatant—I would call it institutional corruption that is undeniable. They tell you what they want. They want to run free with AI and crypto, and they are putting in a lot of money to do this. I mean, to me, that seems almost a little bit different than some of the big money we’ve seen in the past.

RC: Yeah, I think that, like, the Koch brothers wanted to change America broadly, and these crypto guys and AI guys, they’ve got very specific wants. But at the same time, I mean—and I think we’ve seen this through the Trump administration—like, they’re trying to change regulation in general. And they’re trying to just have a broad, open—you know, while she always was lobbying for the carried interest loophole, they want everything, these guys. But yeah, you’re right. It does seem very transactional. They are after very specific things. And the amount of money they’re putting in is—I mean, there’s no subtlety to it.

GH: You know, there’s this sense that whoever raises more money—it’s kind of like the money race. Like, whoever just raises the most money will win. We saw that challenged a little bit in 2024, if I’m remembering correctly, Russ, that Kamala raised—Kamala Harris raised close to $1 billion, while Donald Trump raised, I think, a bit less than that, if I’m remembering correctly. And so is it really that simple, that whoever raises the most money just kind of wins? Or how should we be thinking about that?

RC: Yeah, so, I mean, for decades that was absolutely correct. And both if you were an incumbent and if you raised more money, it was, like, something like 90 percent of the time or more, you won reelection. That has been scrambled, and that does have something to do with Citizens United. It has—I mean, Trump scrambled it in a really big way in 2016. He didn’t raise more money than Hillary, and he won. And so it was scrambled. Part of it is his, as you were referring to before, his personal charisma, as what it is—for what it is.

But, you know, there’s a lot of other things going on as well. And part of it is it’s hard to track the money. So Kamala’s campaign raised a lot of money, but there were also a lot of outside actors who were on Trump’s side who didn’t necessarily get counted in with the Trump campaign money. And that’s sort of the unknown.

And that’s sort of—again, and I think, you know, with Elon Musk, like, the money he put in last time, he put it into specific places, and he put it into Pennsylvania get-out-the-vote. It was a big question mark: Would that work? Seems to have worked in some degree. And so that’s part of the problem with this one is that, you know, I just said $1.7 billion, but there’s also money that we don’t know about that could be coming in.

DC: Yeah, I want to ask you about that. I want to get to some of the most expensive races, but just to put a fine point on this, there’s something called dark money. We’re talking the money—the figures that we just talked about is money that goes to super PACs that have to declare where they’re getting money from and where they’re spending, and to campaigns, and to the Republican and Democratic outfits, the national campaigns, the Senate campaigns run by the Democrats. But there’s something else going on there. It’s like dark matter in the universe that you can’t see, right? There’s a whole possible flow of money that we may never know about.

RC: Yeah. And so one thing is the super PACs have to say that they got money, but they don’t—they can be fairly vague about who they got money from. They can get money from an LLC, and you don’t know who put that money in the LLC. So some of that money, even though it’s technically not dark money, it’s disclosed, we don’t know where it came from.

But then there’s this other class of money, and, you know, there are all these sort of arcane rules that were written for a different era, which have been applied to this one, which have allowed sort of, like, loopholes. And it’s allowed groups who maybe don’t get out and actually give money straight to the campaign but start spending money in other ways.

You know those ads, they’re called issue ads, where it’s like, “Call Congress,” and tell them that you don’t want them to, you know, and then it has some absolutely outlandish thing. And it’s not really trying to get anyone to call Congress, but it’s just trying to send, like, a scary message. And there’s—those, for instance, don’t get counted in that $1.7 billion. The things like the get-out-the-vote operation, which is just broadly get out the vote, but if Elon Musk is only targeting it at certain types of people, that doesn’t get reported. There’s all this money, and we don’t know what we don’t know.

And it’s been true every election since Citizens United. But I think the thing is—to what we were referring to before about this big influx of money from crypto and AI—is the money’s coming in on a different scale. So if it’s been there the whole time, we have to assume it’s coming in on a different scale than it’s ever come in on before.

I guess the one sort of counter to that, and this is something as a campaign finance reporter has always sort of, like, tweaked me, is that a lot of the apparent public feelings or shame about putting money into politics has gone away. And this is true on both sides. So it is possible that people are just—I mean, this thing where we have billionaires just opening their checkbooks and writing hundreds of millions of dollars. There was a time, even after Citizens United, where that wouldn’t happen because it was so unseemly. And now it just sort of seems to be the way we do politics. So, I mean, I guess that would be the one possible counter, is that everyone is just so brazen now.

But I do think that it’s very likely that there is quite a bit of money, if only because some of the ways they’re spending money are unsavory. You know, they’re sort of on dirty tricks, they’re on negative—which they might not be ashamed of spending the money, but they don’t want to give away the trick.

DC: So we may never know, really, all the deep money influences that are affecting this election or future elections. Let’s talk about some of the most expensive races that are happening now. We have Texas, we Ohio. Where have you seen the biggest influxes of money?

RC: I mean, the Ohio race is huge, and Texas race is huge. And Texas is always huge. But again, I think that this year in particular—and I think Ohio especially is seen as, like, such—I don’t wanna say bellwether ’cause that’s the cliché about it, but I mean, there’s a lot riding on this, and there’s a lot of big donors who feel very strongly about it, and they’re just spending. And—

DC: And we should say that the marquee race there, as you see on the picture here, on the video here, is James Talarico, the Democrat, running against Ken Paxton, the Republican, for a Senate seat, which once upon a time it would be almost inconceivable to think that a Democrat would be competitive for this seat.

RC: Yeah, no, and I mean, that’s, like you were mentioning before, I mean, we’re seeing money shifting. We’re seeing Republicans pulling out of some states, some of the big spenders, and we’re seeing Democrats going in. But I think there’s also—and there are competing factions as well. I mean, there are donors who don’t care what the GOP thinks, and they’re gonna send money in, and they’re gonna send money in for a certain type of candidate.

And I think that that was what we saw in the Texas primary, in the Republican primary, is we saw sort of different factions within the GOP fighting over that. The president happened to be one of the factions, and his faction won, but the money is not always universal. And—but again, like, that’s where it’s become this thing where very openly we’re using money to sort of settle these things, where I feel like before we—

DC: We should also say that there’s a competitive governor’s race in Texas too, where the Democrat’s been outspent, I think last I saw, 10-to-1, and yet Gina Hinojosa, running against the incumbent, Greg Abbott, is only a few points behind. So to your point earlier, Garrison, this is a place where even though she’s being tremendously outspent, she still has a—you know, she’s still in the fight, although that money differential might be too much for her to overcome.

GH: Yeah, it’ll certainly be challenging, as I understand it. To the point that both you and Russ are making, it’s been, what, 32, 33, 30-something years since a Democrat has won statewide there. And I guess, you know, to the point of our show, which is this idea of stress test, I’m curious, Russ, what we should be stressed about. Yes, you, you have to tell us what we should be stressed about. But, you know, as we think about money in politics, where should, you know, we be placing our attention, and what do you think should really be stressing the American people out?

RC: Yeah, I mean, I find the whole thing extremely stressful, but I think—

GH: Well, there it is.

DC: Well, you have to cover it, Russ.

RC: Yeah, yeah. I think that the—some of the specific things, actually—so here’s the thing that I find stressful, was that, you know, for years after Citizens United, and people would ask me and other campaign finance reporters, well, when are we gonna have some reform? When are we gonna have some change? And I was always very sort of cynical or skeptical about it, and I said, well, the next time we have a big scandal, the next time we have a Watergate, because most of the modern campaign finance rules are derived from Watergate.

Watergate was a campaign finance scandal, and it was one that was so bad that even people in the president’s party agreed we have to do something. And so a whole raft of changes came in, not just campaign finance, but all the big campaign finance rules came from that era. And so I always told people, well, you know, I think we’re going to need a big event, you know, something that really shocks people to get to the point where we want to have some reform and have some new serious rules and some serious thinking. And I think one thing that stresses me out is I don’t think we’re approaching that point.

I think that there are a lot of people who are outraged about this. I think that the numbers are shocking. You know, we’re seeing money come in in unprecedented ways. And I don’t have a feeling that anyone is getting that much closer to saying, all right, after this election, we’ve gotta do something about this. Like, there’s no sign of deceleration, there’s no sign of slowing down, it’s only acceleration. And it’s sort of like everything AI says, you know, it’s sort of accelerant has been put on it, and it’s taken off on a crazy level.

DC: So let’s talk about—you know, we’re talking about the quid here. Let’s talk about the quo. What examples do we see here of money coming into politics, particularly campaigns, and what people are actually getting for that? You know, Elon Musk, he has, you know, multiple, you know, billions of dollars’ worth of contracts with many government agencies, correct? You know, with NASA, obviously, but defense, and he has ideas for building a tunnel across from Alaska to Russia, all this stuff.

So the money he puts in, $100 million is nothing. Andreessen Horowitz has $100 billion in assets that they manage. If they put in $100 million into this campaign, and they’re doing more already, that’s one-tenth of 1 percent, if I did the math right. So what other examples do we see, Russ, of why this is a good investment, why people get good ROI?

RC: Well, I think it’s more than just the contracts. I mean, Elon Musk got an office, you know, and he got basically to control an agency that took apart other agencies. And I think that you’re seeing a lot of these big donors—and this is why I talk about, like, changing the whole landscape, the regulatory landscape—is they’re getting spots on seats of important commissions and rulemaking things. So it’s, you know, it’s not just I’m giving you some money and I’ll get this gift back. They’re getting more than total access. They’re getting inclusion, which is wild.

And again, I think that it seems a little weird to me as a reporter that, you know, both Elon Musk and Andreessen and a few other people, they’re surpassing what, say, George Soros has given. And George Soros has always been—for the right has been a big bogeyman, and the Kochs have been a bogeyman for the left. But I mean, those guys are being left behind by the amount of money that’s being put in. And we’re not quite seeing, like, the outrage over it, but yet they’re also getting so much more than I think that the Kochs or Soros ever imagined they would get.

DC: You just made me think of something, so I’m gonna go off the script we have for a second here. And that is, we’ve seen the Trump years just brazen corruption from Trump himself, right? And from his family. We’ve talked about that. We’ll be talking about that more as Stress Test goes on into the season. And it’s all corrupt, it’s brazen, it’s blatant. Republicans don’t say a word about it. There’s no Justice Department investigation. We know why.

And so compared to Trump making 7 billion, Andreessen Horowitz putting in a mere 100 million, it seems like chump change. I mean, he has sort of enhanced the whole culture of corruption, and maybe that’s why, Russ, we don’t see that type of reaction that you just said was absent.

RC: Yeah, no, and I think that a big thing—and this is not specifically about these midterms, although you’re seeing it play out in the midterms—is that Trump has changed the—what’s acceptable to do. And I think that also the constant headlines about his own corruption and all that, it changes the bar. But that’s a—you know, we are seeing sort of in polls people’s belief that the government is corrupt at an all-time high. And there have always been a lot of people who believe that the government was corrupt, but the problem is that now they’re right.

There’s a lot of corrupt things going on that haven’t—actually, they were the kind of things that people imagined were going on before but weren’t. And now we’re seeing them go on. And, you know, but that in itself is something that can affect the election, because it’s the kind of thing that depresses voters, and it depresses voter turnout when you don’t believe that there’s any point in voting because things aren’t gonna work out for you.

And I’ll say that a big part of campaign finance that I don’t think it’s talked about enough is that the most effective tools that a campaign can spend money on are negative ads. And the negative ads aren’t supposed to make you vote for someone, they’re supposed to make you not vote. And that’s the thing that has been proven. Positive ads don’t have very successful, if any, benefit to a campaign. A negative ad—other than name identification, I suppose. But a negative ad cannot—won’t make anyone switch to your side, but will make people stay home. And that’s, again, the more money there is, the less they’re trying to get people to participate.

GH: That’s the thing that stresses me out, Russ. Russ Choma, thank you so much for being here, joining us today. And listen, if you’re watching this, I hope you learned something. To our viewers and to our listeners, you can follow along for more of Russ’s reporting on MotherJones.com. He’s phenomenal. Thanks, Russ.

RC: Thanks, guys.

GH: All right, David. How are you feeling after listening to our colleague? More stressed or less stressed?

DC: Well, you know, I’ve been covering campaign finance for a long time myself, and it’s just always been frustrating that there’s not much more public revulsion against, you know, basically paying—you know, paying the ump, paying the referee. I mean, if there was one MLB baseball game and you found out that the pitcher was paying the ump, it would be in the news, and it would be a gigantic national scandal. But for decades, we’ve had big-money interests, you know, a lot on the right and some on the left, paying legislators who are supposed to do work for us, serve the public interest. And so it’s been a pretty corrupt, rotten system, and as Russ pointed out, it’s gotten worse.

But I’ll say this, and I’ll take issue with my colleague Russ on this one point. People do see—people are now telling pollsters that they see more corruption, and they don’t like that. And he says that depresses voting, and I think it has in the past. At the same time, though, I think it is adding a bit to voter anger. When you have corruption on one side and a bad economic status on the other side, people start making the connection.

And we just have to look to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán was voted out of office not too long ago after 16 years there and ruling as an authoritarian. And one of the major driving forces was the rampant corruption going on there. His son was driving around a car worth $100,000 or something, and the economy was not doing well, and people kind of melded those issues together.

So I think there is a sense now that Trump, you know, the crypto, the Russian guy, you know, financing Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding, and all this other stuff going on is beginning to register a bit. So I’m still stressed out about campaign financing, but I also think that maybe there’s a ray of light here, that other people out there will start paying a little more attention to the corrupt side of it.

GH: I think you’re spot-on. You know, we’ve been living in the kind of anti-incumbent kind of era in America for at least the last 10 years, maybe a little bit longer, depending upon when you start the count. But people are not enjoying the way things are, the status quo. And I think for the last decade, it’s been very much a, well, it’s the Republicans, and then when the Republicans fail, it’s the Democrats, and then when the Democrats fail, we’ll go back and choose Republicans again.

And I think sooner or later the American people will start to put the pieces together. I’d argue that they are already starting to put the pieces together, that there are these big-money spenders behind the scenes who are often influencing in ways that go beyond the ballot. And I think people will become increasingly sick of that kind of America. And so, you know, there’s always—there are always calls to end Citizens United and all of that. And maybe one day that will happen. But I do think you’re right, David, that we’re seeing a real frustration, a real anger, and people are starting to put those pieces together.

DC: That’s all we have for you on this episode. If you missed the first two episodes of Stress Test, you can go see them at our YouTube channel—that’s youtube.com/MotherJones—or wherever you get your podcasts.

GH: Remember that our great journalism, like the incredible work that Russ leads and does his reporting, and this show is made possible by your support. Yes, you. Your views and your subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video or this podcast wherever you get it. Share it with a friend. Subscribe on our YouTube channel. That’s youtube.com/MotherJones. And if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment down below. We’re reading them, even the bad ones—even the bad ones. Or at least our producers are. We will be right back here in your feed again in just a few days with another edition of Stress Test. Thanks for watching.