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.

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new committee to investigate Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, even after those claims were shown to be incorrect, and after the US Supreme Court in June rejected his previous attempts to fire her.

In a written memo, Trump announced that this new committee will hold a hearing at the White House two days after the midterm elections in November and demanded that Cook show up to testify. Trump’s ongoing effort to oust Cook represents the first time the president has tried to fire a member of the Fed’s board in more than a century, since the central bank was established as an independent entity that sets monetary policy free of political influence.

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote in the memo. “To assist me in carrying out that responsibility, the Committee shall investigate the allegations against Governor Cook and report to me whether there is ’cause’ for Governor Cook’s removal.”

This is the latest development in a saga that began more than a year ago, when Trump loyalist Bill Pulte—the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—leveled thin accusations of mortgage fraud against Cook and other prominent Democrats who have clashed with Trump.

Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has fumed that the Fed won’t lower interest rates, a move that would ease the costs of borrowing money for homes and businesses—and make some voters happy ahead of the midterms.

Then, in August 2025, Pulte—a vigorous defender of the president that some have called a “mini-Trump”—claimed in a social media post that Cook had designated two homes as her primary residence simultaneously in order to get a better mortgage rate. Pulte posted screenshots of Cook’s mortgage applications on social media when making these claims, raising questions of whether he was using his position atop the FHFA—which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to access private housing loan information on Trump’s political foes.

Pulte referred Cook for criminal prosecution by the Justice Department and Trump piled on, saying the allegation was enough to fire her. But no criminal case ever materialized. Additional loan documents showed that the alleged mortgage fraud was instead probably a clerical error. What’s more, Pulte’s efforts to weaponize mortgage information against Trump’s political foes led to formal scrutiny: The Government Accountability office said it is investigating whether Pulte misused his position to access mortgage data, and the FHFA’s inspector general is also reportedly looking into his conduct.

Reporters also found that Trump himself and others in his cabinet appear to have made similar errors to Cook in their own mortgage applications. Cook sued over the attempt to fire her, and two separate courts blocked her removal. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which also said the way he’d tried to fire her was not allowed.

But that Supreme Court ruling did not bar Trump from trying to fire Cook again. Trump has every reason to attempt a redo: American dissatisfaction with the US economy and historic inflation is at an all-time high ahead of November’s elections, and Trump’s appointee to run the Fed, Kevin Warsh, recently raised rates instead of lowering them. Trump’s announcement on Friday appears to be his latest effort to exert some control over the central bank by ousting Cook, which would enable him to appoint a loyalist in her place.

Last year, Rep. Mike Collins, a second-term Georgia Republican who is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall, posted a meme that appears to have gone largely unnoticed.

On the left was a photo of Donald Trump in the Oval Office, pointing to someone just out of the frame. The photo was accompanied by a quote from the president: “Can you turn the lights down? I want to show you something.” Next to it Collins had attached an image and a snippet of dialogue from the 2006 film Blood Diamond. It comes just after Leonardo DiCaprio’s grizzled mercenary tells an American journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, he’s from “Rhodesia.” 

“We say Zimbabwe now, don’t we?” Connelly says.

“Do we?” DiCaprio responds.

The reference—a one-off post with no accompanying context or follow-up—might have gone over the heads of most of Collins’ constituents. But the implications were obvious to plenty on the online right. A poster with the handle “X Wigger” responded: “We are all Rhodesia now.” Another user replied to Collins with a faded photo of three shirtless Rhodesian soldiers, and the words, “PATRIOTS IN CONTROL.” 

“[W]e’ve got a sitting congressman rhodesia-posting now boys,” wrote a staffer at the right-wing outlet The Blaze. “[I]ncredible things are happening.”

Collins, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been dogged by his close associations with white nationalists, including a Nazi-posting son-in-law who lives next door. But he is far from alone in expressing his affinity for Rhodesia. The now-defunct white supremacist state in southern Africa is having a moment on the right. Bo French, the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, wrote last year that “We need to be Rhodesia.” The Washington Post reported in September that a now-former campaign staffer for Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted created a Spotify playlist devoted to songs about the country. Donald Trump Jr. is peddling Rhodesian lifestyle apparel. Some of Silicon Valley’s leading lights are Rhodesia-posting, too.

There was a time not so long ago when public support for Rhodesia was “morally untenable,” as The New York Times put it in a 2018 story about a resurgence in interest among “white supremacists.” Although their governments differed in their particulars, Rhodesia was, then and now, closely linked in the popular imagination with apartheid South Africa—two white-minority nations that violently resisted Black self-determination on the continent. But the former British colony had found “new life” on the far right, the Times reported. Before murdering nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Dylann Roof posted his manifesto at a website called “The Last Rhodesian.” In a photo he posted on the site, he wore a jacket with the apartheid-era South African flag over his right breast; the Rhodesian flag—green and white, with two antelopes in the middle—was right below it. (Roof was himself following in the footsteps of an earlier white supremacist gunman. James Earl Ray attempted to flee to Rhodesia after assassinating Martin Luther Luther King Jr.)

You don’t have to spelunk in the darker recesses of the web to find Rhodesia-posting today. Collins isn’t even the only battleground candidate who’s dabbled in it. Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee in a competitive House district in West Texas, filmed himself doing what he called “Rhodesian LARP” in a 2023 episode of his YouTube firearms show, as part of a series in which he fires off historical weapons. (Herrera has previously been criticized for goose-stepping to a prominent Nazi song during an episode on German guns, which he has defended as satirical and “funny as hell.”) For his Rhodesia video, previously reported on by the Texas Observer during his unsuccessful 2024 campaign, Herrera dressed in Rhodesian camouflage and shot a “based” Rhodesian light automatic rifle while reciting dialogue from Blood Diamond with his buddies. Later, he appeared back at his studio in front of a large Rhodesian flag—an emblem that the Anti-Defamation League has classified as a “hate symbol.” 

Herrera, who did not respond to a request for comment, told his viewers he didn’t want to get into politics, but went on to describe the Rhodesian Bush War—the bloody, decade-and-a-half long conflict between the white government’s soldiers and Black guerilla forces—as “basically a civil war between the Dutch people of that area and the locals and/or communists.” (He acknowledged in the YouTube comments that they were, in fact, British, not Dutch.) 

“Pretty much no matter what kind of take you have on that, someone will hate you for it,” he said of the conflict. “But, long story short: The side that was sympathetic with communism won, and now Zimbabwe doesn’t have food. Shocker.”

Cade Lamb, the son of Arizona Republican congressional candidate Mark Lamb and himself the founder of a border vigilante organization called the Sonoran Asset Group, promoted his father’s 2024 campaign for US Senate on Instagram by sharing a T-shirt design that featured the slogan, “BE A MAN AMONG MEN” in big red letters. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a recruiting poster for the Rhodesian army—one the ADL has said is used by “[w]hite supremacists, as well as some others, generally on the far right.” The Lamb campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“BE A MAN AMONG MEN” is a frequent reference point for Rhodesia fans. For $12 you can even buy a version of the poster that features Kyle Rittenhouse in the place of a Rhodesian soldier. The Department of Homeland Security, which has mined extremely niche far-right iconography frequently during Trump’s second term, appeared to get in on the act last year, posting a recruiting announcement for Immigration and Customs Enforcement featuring the tagline, “BE A PATRIOT AMONG PATRIOTS.”

DHS did not deny the connection when I reached out for comment on the provenance of the slogan.

“Western men have always been asked to stand between their homes and the forces that would overrun them,” an anonymous “DHS SPOX” responded in an email. “The people who find that sentence unforgivable are usually not the people standing the post. DHS will not outsource its vocabulary to communist activists who cannot distinguish a sovereign people from a hotel. We will not pretend that ‘Western civilization’ is a slur.”

“Comparing recruitment efforts aimed at filling critical public safety roles to extremist rhetoric is not only absurd, but it also dangerously undermines the mission and sacrifices of federal officers,” the spokesperson continued. They suggested that “[t]hese types of smears are contributing to our officers facing coordinated campaigns of violence against them.”

Footage from Rhodesia slots comfortably into the ambience of the contemporary right—slightly faded and surprisingly emo, eliciting feelings of nostalgia in an audience too young to have experienced the thing they’re reminiscing about. Seeing the writing on the wall, Rhodesia briefly rejoined Britain before holding open elections and re-emerging as the independent nation of Zimbabwe in 1980. But the Rhodesia-pilled speak of a country that spent most of its 15-year existence slowly losing a war as a sort of lost Eden, whose fall presaged the ongoing twilight of the West—a cautionary tale, to put a finer point on it, about the suicidal danger of choosing equality over merit. According to the Post, the 25-year-old Husted staffer who made the Rhodesian playlist described himself as “homesick for a place that no longer exists.” 

The pro-Trump website American Greatness published an essay this year titled “We Are All Rhodesians Now,” arguing that “as the nations of Europe and the Anglosphere grapple with their own crises of identity, demographic replacement, and institutional decay, the Rhodesian experience has moved from the periphery to the center of conservative analysis.” Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec included a chapter on Rhodesia in his 2024 book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). “[W]hen the unhumans come, they leave their victims without property, liberty, and life,” Posobiec wrote of the progression from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. The book was praised by JD Vance.

That American conservatives would see themselves in the Rhodesian cause is fitting, says Elizabeth Schmidt, an emerita professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, because white governments in southern Africa drew inspiration from American conservatives. “Rhodesian whites modeled their discriminatory segregationist policies on those of apartheid South Africa. South Africa was modeling itself on us. And now we’ve come full circle,” she said.

The conservative style of the 1970s and ‘80s is popular among the sorts of twentysomething right-wingers most actively sharing this stuff online. DHS’ propaganda arm has deliberately echoed the 1978 white supremacist book, Which Way Western Man? Another recent recruiting post—“Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?”—was accompanied by a vintage advertisement for a 1982 Ford Club Van. Rhodesia-core photos feature young white men in short shorts and headbands, often shirtless, toting long guns while holding the line against the enemy lurking in the bush. The vibe is half frat house, half Rambo.

It’s aesthetic. But it’s also literally an aesthetic. As Herrera’s YouTube video demonstrated, the Rhodesian army’s distinctive brushstroke-patterned camouflage attire is easy enough to get these days. For $149.99 you can even buy “Rhodie camo” flip-flops from Field Ethos, the outdoorsman lifestyle magazine and brand c0-founded and published by Donald Trump Jr. The president’s son himself has promoted the company’s Rhodesian-style “gin” shirt, which Field Ethos calls “our toast to this legendary pattern and the men of the RLI,” or Rhodesian Light Infantry—an all-white unit. Field Ethos published an essay on the clothing’s namesake, observing that “The white European farmers of Rhodesia were of a rare stock.” 

After a writer at Slate drew attention to the company’s interest in Rhodesia, the company addressed the subject in a 2023 note titled “Racist…camouflage?”

“We’ve printed exactly one article on Rhodesian homestead defense, but we do sell several apparel items in Rhodesian Brushstroke camo. Our company is neither fixated nor ‘right wing,’” CEO and co-founder, Jason Vincent, wrote. Far from “a sign of racist ideology,” the camo was “a very cool retro pattern that is so basic in design that it looks simple and vintage from a mile away. The colors are warm. The brushstrokes are haphazard. The vibe is casual.” In fact, he wrote, Rhodesia was an unlikely story of racial harmony, because—notwithstanding Black Africans’ lack of power and agency in the government itself, and their conspicuous absence from nostalgic memes—half its soldiers were Black.

But the current Rhodesian moment may be best encapsulated by the owner of the forum on which so much of the frenzy of Rhodesia-posting happens. As Elon Musk’s criticism of the current South African government intensified in recent years, you could find users speculating about when the defense contractor, Republican megadonor, and world’s richest man would finally start talking about its former neighbor to the north. One Rhodesia-centric account even posted a poll asking followers if it would happen; 91 percent of respondents said “yes.” 

They didn’t have to wait very long. Musk has shared or discussed posts about Rhodesia at least four times this year. His comments—like most of his posts—have generally come in the form of short replies to other people’s thoughts about the country. But more so than Collins’ meme or Don Jr.’s shirts, his posts lay bare the significance of the southern African nation to the modern right.

One 2026 post—which Musk replied to with a simple “yes”—included a photo of shirtless white Rhodesian soldiers and warned that the “anarchotyranny, expropriation, and race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into the Global Favela.”

Musk responded to another post last January, which credited colonialism with bringing “normal clothes” to Africa and framed Rhodesia as a “litmus test”—a choice between a society “that discriminates on the basis of human capability” and a society built on “the doctrine of equality.” False morality had destroyed a “paradise,” according to the original poster. Below it was a photo of the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, staring off into the distance, and the words, “I tried to save you.”

“Envy drives so much of human behavior,” Musk wrote.

Two days later, in January, he responded to yet another piece of Rhodesia-core. “High civilization existed for a brief flicker of a moment in Rhodesia, a few decades where the primordial darkness of the Stone Age was vanquished,” the original poster wrote. “But then it returned, in the name of equality, and Zimbabwe is once again a ruin.” It included a meme—a series of before-and-after images of Rhodesia and South Africa—with a watermark for the website, “NoWhiteGuilt.org.”

“We can take things back the right direction here,” the Palantir co-founder and Trump-allied podcaster Joe Lonsdale responded. About six hours after that, Musk shared the original post to his 246 million followers with a warning for the present from the Rhodesian past.

“Unfortunately, this is where America is headed,” he said.

“We tamed electricity, invented the light bulb, developed the airplane, harnessed the atom, unleashed the power of personal computers, created the Internet, pioneered superintelligence, and invented almost everything else of genius and great importance anywhere in the world,” President Donald Trump boasted on Thursday. “We will always be on top. There is nobody that can compete with us.” 

The remark came from the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit, an initiative by the Trump administration to accelerate American scientific research and development with artificial intelligence technology. 

Trump announced that a group of companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, and Amazon—have committed over $2.4 billion to the Genesis Mission, which advertises itself as uniting Department of Energy labs with “industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.”

The additional investment into the Genesis Mission, which the president launched in a November 2025 executive order, comes as his administration continues to eliminate government funding for critical scientific research, among them, as my colleagues have extensively reported, studies into chronic diseases and climate change. 

Trump also awarded several leaders of those tech companies with the National Medal of Science: Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices’ CEO Lisa Su. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell CEO Michael Dell were given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

As CNBC pointed out on Wednesday, each of the medal recipients has contributed financially to Trump or Republican causes. Musk was Trump’s biggest financial supporter, at nearly $300 million, in his 2024 presidential campaign. Nvidia’s Huang donated to help fund the White House ballroom and gave $1 million for Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony. Microsoft, under Nadella, also contributed $1 million to the inauguration. Dell is a longtime Trump donor who provided $6.25 billion for “Trump Accounts”—$250 seed contributions for 25 million children.

And according to his most recent financial disclosures from September, Trump bought or sold shares in Nvidia, Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Tesla, Advanced Micro Devices, and Dell.

Trump, in other words, is replacing established research institutions with the for-profit corporations who have curried favor with him. Whether AI will be able to replace millions of dollars in lost federal research funding at bulwarks like the National Institutes of Health is less clear.

When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president. 

On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him.” “The list of his failures,” El-Sayed wrote, “goes on.” 

It’s not that people are calling El-Sayed’s criticisms wrong. They’re pointing out that they exist.

In a statement to CNN, El-Sayed praised Obama: “He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine.” 

“Despite all he did, there remains so much left to do,” he added. “That’s where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, picks up.”

The New York Post extended the supposed concerns to other Democrats, pointing again to El-Sayed campaigning with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, despite El-Sayed publicly endorsing the Uncommitted movement in 2024, supporting calls for Democrats to withhold their primary votes from Joe Biden in protest of US military aid to Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the movement declined to endorse Harris ahead of the national election—instead urging supporters to “vote against” Trump—El-Sayed actually did endorse her, in a marked break.

El-Sayed, the implication runs, is not such a good friend to his fellow Democrats after all. But intense critiques of Obama are something he has in common with both wings of his party. Countless Democrats and progressives have previously criticized Obama, in private and in public, from the former president’s left and right flanks, and supported him afterward (or, for some of those who actually held national office at the time, during). In party politics, done right, political alliances cut across ideological and policy disagreements. That’s just strategic campaigning—which Obama still plans to do alongside El-Sayed in October.

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

More fire, more ash, more crime, more death. And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election.

This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest, and most biodiverse nation.

The far-right son of the former president and jailed coup-monger Jair Bolsonaro won 47 percent of the vote, putting him in pole position before the October 25 runoff with the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was backed by 44.2 percent.

The result is an unnerving jolt to climate and nature campaigners. Taken out of context, this appears to be a vote against the forest. The current administration of Lula (as the veteran Brazilian president is best known) has reduced deforestation in the Amazon by almost 50 percent.

But that success secured little noticeable electoral traction for either Lula or pro-forest candidates in other polls held the same day. The former environment minister Marina Silva lost a bid for the senate and Joenia Wapichana, a former head of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, failed to win a seat in the nation’s congress. Out of 57 Indigenous candidates, only two won.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the heir to the political legacy of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose four years in power resulted in a 59.5 percent increase in Amazon deforestation, roughly equivalent to destroying 2 billion trees.

If he wins, Bolsonaro has promised to free his father, who was imprisoned for plotting a military coup and attempting to annihilate democracy in Brazil. He has said that his father could have any position he wants in his administration.

Flávio Bolsonaro has shown that he will be just as willing as his father to dismantle protections for climate and nature and allow illegal miners, loggers, and land grabbers to invade Indigenous territories. As a lawmaker, he backed a 2019 bill to eliminate requirements for landowners in the Amazon to conserve a proportion of native vegetation. In his manifesto, he completely ignored the climate crisis. And he has courted support from some of the most predatory landowners in the rainforest.

He is also part of a movement—Bolsonarism—that is geared towards maximizing profits for extractive industries regardless of the environmental cost. Take its victorious candidate for the Amazonian state of Pará, Daniel Santos, who was fined $275,000 for deforestating 690 acres of his land without authorization and is now promising to waive such penalties. As a result of Sunday’s election, Bolsonarists now control seven of the nine states in the Brazilian Amazon, and could win an eighth in the runoffs.

Bolsonarist influence in the legislature, which is dominated by agribusiness interests, is also growing. Flávio’s brother, Carlos, and mother-in-law, Michelle, were elected to the senate, while an uncle and brother won seats in the lower house of deputies.

Even before the election, the National Congress had been pushing hard to weaken environmental protections. Now it will be almost impossible to stop, particularly given the current chaos in the supreme court, which has been a partial check on untrammelled expansion by miners, ranchers, and monoculturalists. Against these forces, Lula would struggle to govern even if he wins the runoff.

As a result, it is not just the Amazon that is in peril, but all of Brazil’s biomes, its traditional peoples, and the stability of the global climate. The question now is why voters paid so little heed to these concerns.

That inquest is already under way. Many focus on the influence of social media, which has been used far more effectively by the far right. During the Bolsonaro administration, his sons were part of the “hate cabinet” that spread fear and disinformation via WhatsApp groups and other online channels—Bolsonaro’s second son, Carlos, was indicted by federal police for leading the group. Environmentalists were often the target.

Another factor is the expansion of US-style Pentecostalism, which is steadily supplanting Catholicism across Brazil, particularly in the Amazon. The political and environmental consequences of that religious shift can be seen by comparing the pro-nature treatise of the past two popes with the sermons of many evangelical preachers who encourage followers to seek wealth today as much as, if not more, than following moral creeds to ensure a good afterlife.

Lula, 80, has been slow to adapt. Although he is arguably the most iconic and successful Latin American politician of the 21st century, his messaging seems less attuned to the people than it was in his heyday. The Workers party has struggled in an era of weaker unions and in some ways been the victim of its own success—with education and social policies that raised millions out of poverty and created greater expectations for consumption and entrepreneurism; and huge subsidies to farmers, who now support the right wing because they chafe at environmental limits.

Tied into those explanations are the geopolitics of the climate and nature crisis, which is exacerbating great power rivalry between the US and China and amplifying extreme ideologies as much as extreme weather. In this light, the Brazil election is just the latest in a broader pattern of the far right taking control to expand extractivism despite growing evidence that the capitalist economy is breaking planetary boundaries.

In the past two years, Donald Trump has ripped apart environmental regulations in the US and treated the rest of the Americas as his sphere of influence. Argentina was already onboard. Venezuela has been invaded for its resources, while in Colombia, Peru, and Chile there has been a sharp shift to the right.

Will Brazil be the next domino to fall to Trumpism and its bonfire approach to nature? The Bolsonaro family certainly hope so. Jair went so far as to salute the US flag. His son Eduardo urged the US to apply tariffs on Brazilian people to “punish” the government for imprisoning his father. The Brazilian intelligence agency has warned that the US was trying to interfere in the election.

That election isn’t over yet. Lula stands a small chance if he can win over the many millions of voters who chose not to mark their ballots for either candidate. But the odds are stacked against him. Most of the eliminated candidates were on the right so their supporters are more likely to switch to Bolsonaro. No first round leader has ever failed to win the runoff of a Brazilian presidential election.

Voters, of course, are allowed to change their minds. Either on October 25 or, constitutionally, in four years’ time. But for how much longer will that be possible? If Bolsonaro wins, it won’t just be Lula that is finished, it could also be the Amazon and democracy itself.

America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions.

But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time.

Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.”

On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote.

“It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”

Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat.

So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day.

For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip through the towns living in the shadow of the AI boom: “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale,” from our May+June issue.

Subscribe to Stress Test at youtube.com/motherjones, and read the full transcript bellow.

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

Garrison Hayes: Hello, hello, everyone. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the second episode of this show. If you didn’t catch the first episode, I really think you should go back and listen to it. It was me and David Corn and our colleague Ari Berman, where we talked a little bit about this upcoming election and all of the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the election, to strike fear into your heart. But this is the thing: If you go back and watch it—or listen—I actually think that we came away from it, at least I did, little less stressed than going into it. We were really able to pull it apart, the efforts that they are making and where they are failing.

It’s a really, really good, informative listen. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It’s just right behind this one in the feed, or you can go check it out on YouTube. Maybe you’re on YouTube, youtube.com/motherjones.

Okay, I am really excited to get into today’s conversation because there are these strange moments in the American political arena where oddly, people across both the left and the right, across the political spectrum, come together in some weird, kind of bizarro-world way. And we’re talking about exactly one of those topics today with data centers and Flock cameras and AI. And so today I am joined by my colleague, Tim Murphy. Tim is a national correspondent here at Mother Jones. I’m so excited to be talking to you, Tim. Thanks for being here.

Tim Murphy: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.

GH: Tim, I have to tell you, whenever I read your reporting, which is always so smart and so in-depth, I always, like, laugh a little bit. And I don’t know if that’s a bad read, but there’s always, like, a little bit of humor kind of infused into the really often kind of grim things that you cover. You bring a really fresh perspective. Am I misreading that? Are you trying to be funny?

TM: A hundred percent. My entire life I’ve just wanted to be taken seriously, Garrison.

GH: [Laughs.]

TM: No, you know, I mean, I like to try and kind of keep things a little entertaining, you know, when the story kind of calls for it.

GH: I love that. Okay, so we’re bringing you on to talk about the rare bipartisan voter issue that we are seeing this election cycle, specifically data centers. But before we kind of dig into that, I feel like it’s important that we get a better idea, not only of, like, terms, but the way it’s kind of related to the news in general. We’ll get to all of that, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear, like, what’s stressing you out—something that we’re asking all of our guests.

TM: Well, I think probably germane to the topic at hand, I just looked at the calendar ’cause I was planning out, you know, what I have to do over the next, turns out, like, five weeks and realized that there’s absolutely no way that I’m gonna get to every single thing that I need to file. I always think of the election as God’s deadline. Like, there’s no fudging it. Anything that you didn’t finish before the election immediately becomes irrelevant, and so you just have to get it done. So I’m kind of mapping out my caffeine intake and just trying to kinda get through it.

GH: Amazing. Amazing. I mean, you could always do the postelection “Stop the Steal” effort that we saw in 2020. Okay, let’s dig into—

TM: Right, if Mike Pence has the courage.

GH: Yeah, right. Exact. Let’s dig into this. Okay, but everyone’s kind of talking about and certainly hating on data centers right now. But as I understand it, Tim, it wasn’t always this way. What have you seen on the ground and how things have shifted over the last year or so?

TM: It’s one of the more kind of stunning about-faces that I’ve seen in national politics. You know, I was in Texas last year and last summer, and I actually went to the site of one of the largest data centers being built in the world. It’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison’s Stargate complex in Abilene. This was a project that passed, that was created almost, like, virtually unnoticed when it was first kind of developed. You know, I went and I went back and looked at, like, the community meeting, the various government agencies that approved this thing. Basically nobody showed up. Very little debate about this, and it just kind of went into play. And then Donald Trump talked about it at the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, and it started to blow up into a bigger thing.

But even as recently as last summer, this was an issue that not even the people talking the loudest about oligarchs, and tech oligarchs specifically, were necessarily, like, beating the drum about. This was something that in fact data center supporters were playing offense on. You had, you know, in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, proudly an advocate for making Texas the epicenter of the data center boom. You know, people were talking about this as, like, this massive job creation construction strategy. It was kind of the getting in early on the future by—you know, flash forward to where we are now, and I’d say it’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms, like, this side of, you know, gas prices.

It’s like a 3-to-1 opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it. And candidates who were for them are hastily beating a retreat, like Greg Abbott, and people who didn’t stake out that position are throwing millions of dollars into kind of brutal attack ads on the subject.

GH: What do you think it is that has led to that kind of 180, that big switch? I guess the more specific question is: What seems to be the issue here for voters that’s turning them against data centers?

TM: One of the things with data centers is there’s so many ways that it can kind of reach you, that it can connect to your life. And so I think different people are engaging with it in different ways. Certainly over the last year and a half, AI oligarchs, and data centers as their No. 1 project, have become kind of like one of the main kind of features of the Trump administration. And so a lot of people are just straight up negatively polarized against those.

But if you’re living in a lot of states, you know, the rising utility costs are often associated with data centers. The pollution effects are associated with data centers. A lot of these are being built in rural and exurban areas where people do not expect to have, like, an Air Force engine and a diesel turbine as their neighbors. And they’re really, really, really fired up about that.

These projects are invariably kind of done kind of on the sly. They’re sort of pushed through anonymously. People don’t really know who they’re dealing with. And so it sort of brings all these different kind of things, from affordability to straight-up NIMBY complaints to political distrust, and gives kind of something for everyone. And what they see on the political side is that a lot of people who were supposed to sort of have their back and be their advocate let this happen or openly kind of brought it to pass.

GH: One of the really interesting things about your reporting is that you’ve actually seen data centers—like, a data center—in person. You’ve actually visited one. Many people, I imagine, haven’t been inside of one of these, kind of, these hyperscaler facilities. And so can you tell us what do they look like on the inside? What is it like being inside of one?

TM: I’ve not—I should clarify, I’ve not been inside. I’ve been outside, and like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve been able to kind of go right up to one and just hear what it sounds like. And you know, it really does, it sounds like an aircraft engine. I mean, if you go to one of these big hyperscale sites—so for instance, I went and, you know, drove down a cul-de-sac in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Colossus II, which is one of Elon Musk’s xAI, you know, Grok-powering engines. It’s burning gas on what they say are temporary generators. It’s, you know, pissing off a lot of neighbors, and it’s, you know, officially, like, a US Army contractor.

So these things, I mean, they’re enormous. And here’s, like, one of the main things that’s driving this shift, I think, when we talk about this 180: It’s that 10 years ago, five years ago, the data centers that they were building were, like, maybe half the size of an Amazon warehouse or something like that. They were kind of in the terrestrial building space. Now they’re measuring them out in, like, you know, multiples of Manhattan. Like, these are—they’re absolutely enormous.

And, you know, they’re not just many, many, many, many football fields, but they all come with natural gas power plants, you know, to go with them. They come with maybe solar power plants to go with them, which has also, you know, driven a little bit of unrest in some areas. You know, they require transmission lines, they require kind of a whole rebooting of everything, you know, depending on where you live. And so they’re incredibly intrusive spaces. It’s no longer just your kind of casual neighborhood server farm.

GH: Hmm. Interesting. I want to come back to what you were talking about with Texas. You mentioned Gov. Greg Abbott and his kind of big switch on this. Can you say a little bit more about that? But then also talk about some of the other politicians and efforts happening in the state of Texas.

TM: Yeah, I mean, Texas is a good way of looking at it because for a very long time the pitch for Texas to the rest of the world, and particularly to corporate America, has been that you can come here and build anything and do anything. And we basically don’t care—like, give us some revenues, let us, you know, have a big press conference about it. But you can do carte blanche. They lured, you know, Elon Musk to Texas and basically let him make his own town. Data centers were one feature of that.

So, like, in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo, there’s something called Project Matador, which purports to be one of the world’s largest data centers. It’s complete with, like, a nuclear reactor. They’re gonna call the—final data center is, like, the Donald J. Trump Center for Intelligence or something like that. It’s—the company is called Fermi USA, and one of the guys leading it is Rick Perry. Like, all these things are things that should not go together, but in Texas, they just kind of can, and they’re gonna build this.

You know, we talked about the Stargate project in Abilene. You can go to, like, a town, you know, outside of Dallas, and there’s just, like, seven new data centers outside of town. So it was the face of this giant, giant building boom. And it’s this building boom that, like, has very few parallels in modern history. It’s almost, like, up there, you know, you have to go back to the railroads of the 19th century to find this much investment in a private business, in a private enterprise.

So Texas was the face of this. But you’re doing all this development in rural areas. You’re taking people’s water, you’re taking people’s power, or you’re just building your own, you know, fossil fuel–polluting power plant in their backyard. And you start to get this backlash. People are complaining about what they have to live next to. People are complaining about what’s happening to their water, to their utility bills, and it just builds and builds and builds. And recently Abbott announced a series of steps, like, basically a moratorium, until we can figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see from somebody like Greg Abbott, who’s made that his entire M.O.

GH: Yeah, yeah. So now Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is on the same kind of political, you know, march as the governor of, let’s say, New York or Massachusetts, who are also, you know, leading these moratoriums.

TM: Yeah, it’s that kind of Kathy Hochul–Greg Abbott policy consensus we’ve always talked about.

GH: The one that we’ve always been going for. My question is, like, who is this appealing to? I mean, obviously we know that folks across the political spectrum are against data centers, but are voters actually responding to, say, a Greg Abbott moratorium in a positive way?

TM: Yeah, the jury’s still out. You know, Abbott is in a really surprisingly close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been pushing data centers really hard. I mean, she went out to Project Matador in Amarillo and walked the grounds that it’s going to be on. She went out, you know, to these Dallas suburbs and talked to the people who were organizing against it and really, I think, probably forced Abbott’s hand on this issue, and he’s very belatedly trying to kind of co-opt it and salvage, you know, a five-point win or whatever.

So I think there’s definitely a lot of evidence that it’s working in ways that maybe conventional, like, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire, even anti-tech attacks aren’t working. One of the races that I’ve been looking at, that’s, like, kind of a really funny example of this, is in Ohio. Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic congresswoman who was kind of miraculously held on during the Trump era, she’s in a rematch with the same guy she ran against in 2025. For is former state Rep. Derek Merrin. And in 2024, all the attacks are like, Dirty Derek is in the hands of, you know, big corporate America or whatever, and she won by about 2,300 votes. This year, running against the exact same guy, every single ad is about Data Center Derek. It’s about Dirty Derek, Data Center Derek, and how he sold out Ohioans for $2 billion of incentives for building data centers.

Even when you’re facing the same candidate that you beat last time, it’s a radically new message because data centers have come on and become this huge issue.

GH: Okay, so Dirty Derek—we’re talking about big money and the oligarchs and the folks who are funneling money into their big project with data centers and all of the people who are against it. But we know there’s one person who really marches to the beat of their own drum, for better or for worse. There’s one person who is maintaining that he loves this widely unpopular technology, and that’s President Donald Trump. He called data center opponents backwards and poor, which is a choice. And so Tim, I want you to listen to what he has to say about Flock cameras here.

[Clip plays.]

What do you make of that reaction from the president?

TM: I think he’s sort of starting to slip a little bit in, you know, his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and Flock cameras are a good example of this in the same way that I think his general approach to the data centers has been. You know, there might be an environment in which there’s a huge anti-crime panic like we’ve had in a few recent election cycles, where suddenly this thing that a lot of police departments are adopting becomes maybe more favorable terrain. But right now people hate Flock cameras, and I think they hate them for some of the related reasons to data centers, right? I mean, it’s kind of this AI-powered, all-seeing thing that we don’t really trust the people who are in charge of it. You know, it seems like it’s often just being deployed as a way of, like, surveilling cops, ex-wives, and things like that.

And one of the things that you’ve seen in a lot of races around the country is candidates literally taking aim at Flock cameras. So, like, there’s a guy, Seth Bodnar, who’s an independent candidate for Senate in Montana, kind of the de facto Democrat, even though there’s a Democrat in the race. And he literally just takes a gun and blows up a Flock camera as a way of signifying, like, well, one, that he’s a gun owner. But two, I’m not gonna have it with this kind of government surveillance state. So Flock cameras have really become such a—in part because they are so pervasive, because they’re kind of everywhere—you know, they’ve become this thing that, you know, people can kind of use as a symbol of what they’re against.

GH: Yeah, you know, we were saying Flock cameras. I think people understand that to mean, like, these kind of surveillance cameras that are often used by local governments. But is there a tidier definition that we should kind of understand Flock to mean? Like, what is a Flock camera?

TM: Yeah, what makes it different from, like, the camera outside your bodega or subway station or whatever is that it’s all tied into a vast national network, and that anybody who has access to this thing can just look up anything happening in this kind of all-seeing eye. I mean, it’s not literally everywhere, but that’s the kind of crux of it. It’s the kind of—it’s what the security camera network looks like in the movie.

And so you’ve seen a lot of pushback. And again, this is something that in a place with sometimes libertarian leanings like Montana, like Texas, where James Talarico has talked a lot about Flock cameras, it’s something that’s a way to kind of—it’s kind of a—not necessarily a crossover issue, but it’s an issue that is not strictly partisan, that people in kind of whatever place on the political spectrum can feel the same way about.

GH: And we’ve been talking a lot about Texas specifically. But to zoom out a bit, is this an issue that is bigger than just that one state?

TM: Yeah, I think so. And I think this is, like, the type of thing that you’re gonna see more and more people talk about because it is such a potent symbol. Because this is a way of connecting, you know, how people feel, you know, to some extent how people feel about policing, but also how people feel about, you know, tech and government. And at a moment where there is this conversation about how much power is being, you know, accumulated in the hands of a few people in government, Flock cameras are kind of a way of really drilling down on that and picking a villain.

GH: Yeah, if I were to kind of maybe give my take here, I think that Flock cameras and data centers are both a part of this kind of anti-establishment, you know, instinct that’s in the American public right now in the electorate. You know, one, it feels as though the United States government and corporations are more or less one and the same, you know, corporate interests. And so people are certainly bucking against the corporate interests and in turn bucking against, you know, our government establishment. That’s my take. Is that the sense you’re getting when you report on this from the ground.

TM: Yeah, and I mean, I think—and you see that in these campaigns, right? Like, the villains have shifted. You know, to take on Data Center Derek for a second, you know, two years ago it was, like, the corporate boardroom kind of rich dudes, and now he’s depicted as a puppet, and it’s, like, a guy in a gray hoodie like Sam Altman holding one thing, and it’s a guy in kind of, like, a black shirt like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, holding the other end of the puppet. I mean, Trump has deliberately kind of fused the highest echelons of Silicon Valley with his administration.

And so people, I think, rightly see kind of pervasive surveillance tech as kind of connected to this broader, unchecked corporate and government power. And I think, you know, there’s like—we’re at a real kind of nadir of trust in politics, like, at the moment, and that’s driven a lot—I think that’s probably driven Trump’s success in a lot of ways, is a bottoming out of trust. But now that’s kind of bottomed out even further, and Trump is sort of one of the people that people distrust even more so. It’s—the corporations he’s allied with are things that people trust. And so, you know, I think people maybe aren’t as worried about the security—the surveillance state maybe when they feel a little bit more trustworthy about the system. But right now people are just done.

GH: Bottomed out even further is so hard to believe. But here we are. So I want to ask about what’s being built down there at the bottom. It feels like the anti–data center coalition could be a new coalition. Should we be stressed out about this coalition? And what do you think this kind of coalition may build?

TM: It’s tough to say. I mean, right now we’re at a moment where just no one has an incentive to take the data center side in public. Even if you are kind of looking at it and saying, well, you know, we gotta build some of these, maybe we can make these different exceptions, nobody really has an incentive to come out and say, like, you guys are going too far, no more moratoriums, things like that, at least not for another five weeks. I’ve only seen one candidate kind of saying, like, vote for me so I can, you know, stop the Democrats from ruining AI. That’s Roger Marshall of Kansas, and he’s probably running one of the worst campaigns of the cycle.

So I think right now a lot of people are kind of saying a lot of the same things. Some of that is just very defensive. Some of that is just to kind of get through the next five weeks so that they can kind of go back to setting AI policy with the Trump administration and Big Tech, you know, kind of on their minds. So I’m not sure a lot of people are mad at the same thing, but I don’t think they’re all mad in the same way. So it’s not necessarily to me a coalition, you know, that can take landowners and ranchers and everything and necessarily, you know, fuse that with, like, a progressive criticism of Big Tech in a way that, like, leads to the sweeping, you know, perfect AI legislation of 2027.

I think what you’re gonna get is a real fight in the next few years about what this, you know, next step is gonna be. I mean, I had a chance to talk with Greg Casar, the congressman from Texas, from Austin, recently about this. And he’s, like, really interesting because when I talked to him last year, AI didn’t come up. Which is not, you know, not a knock on him, but you know, he had other things on his mind. He had immigration on his mind, he had redistricting on his mind. He is in Austin and it just was not, like, something he was banging the drum about. Now he is all in on this stuff. It’s, like, the thing that he wants to talk about is introducing bills on this, he’s talking to everybody about this. He is obsessed with AI right now. So I think there has been a real kind of learning curve for a lot of people over the last year, and that’s really kind of only the beginning right now.

GH: Well, one thing that I’ve seen online as we kind of come to a close here—I’ve seen this conversation online, particularly on Twitter or X. They’re basically saying if you’re anti–data center, you’re anti-masculine, and you’re pro-China. Is there a risk—which I think is the question underneath it—is there a real risk that our, you know, the folks that we’re in competition with—you know, America’s constantly in competition with China over, you know, technological advancement. Is there a risk that if we do continue to fight against data centers as a country, if voters do choose anti–data center candidates, that America may fall behind in the tech, I don’t know, space race of its—if you could even call it that?

TM: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the major arguments that you get from the tech industry. And of course, loaded into that is, like, you know, this idea that we can’t let China have this technology. We need to let Donald Trump have this technology, which doesn’t necessarily track. And I think what you would hear from somebody like Casar is, like, actually, like, you know, again, thinking about this like bioweapons or nuclear weapons at its most extreme lens, like, treaties exist, you know, diplomacy exists. You should be able to kind of work with your competitors to set constraints by which you can compete. And so I think that’s one of the arguments that I think you would hear on the other side of that.

But it’s so interesting that you talk about the Chinese narrative because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of with the data center opposition, is this accusation from people like, you know, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, Kevin O’Leary, the guy from Fox News or Fox Business, you know, that data center opposition is actually, like, this astroturfed Chinese propaganda psyop. And, like, you hear enough of it that I think some people actually do believe this. I don’t think that they spent enough time in their districts or in these places talking to the people, because it’s just like a—there is just a very inherent organic opposition coming out of there. But that’s certainly the line that you’re hearing a lot.

GH: Wow. Okay. Well, Tim, the good thing is that we have you actually on the ground talking to people, and your reporting is so important. I hear that you’re headed back to Texas for another reporting trip very soon. What kind of stories can you expect to kind of gather while you’re there?

TM: Yeah, Texas has emerged as, you know, one of the, you know, tipping point states for the midterms, right? So I’m gonna be looking at, you know, the Texas Senate race, trying to track down Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then, you know, I mentioned the governor’s race. This is not a race we expected to be close heading into the cycle. But Gina Hinojosa has run a really impressive campaign and again has really emphasized, you know, data centers and sort of tried to tell this story of a kind of a low-key corruption from the Abbott campaign and—or the Abbott administration, I should say. So I’m gonna be looking at those two top races, but also just kind of broadly taking the temperature of what is kind of the ultimate 2026 battleground.

GH: Well, we will be paying very close attention to your reporting and excited to have you on the show today. For everyone watching, make sure you follow Tim’s great reporting over on MotherJones.com and catch him on our Instagram account as well. Tim Murphy, national correspondent. Thank you so much for being here.

TM: Thanks for having me.

GH: Okay, that’s it for this one. Great conversation with Tim. Again, you can go back and check out my conversation with David Corn and Ari Berman in our last episode. Our great journalism work, like Tim’s reporting and this show, is only possible because of your support. Your views and subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video, this piece of content, share it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and let us know what you think of this episode in the comments down below. Our producers are eager to know your thoughts on this show, Stress Test. We will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test from Mother Jones. Thanks for being here.

The Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids.

Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients.

“I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract.

The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work.

Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act and other federal regulations require that they be assigned independent lawyers.

This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux.

The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied.

In a statement to the Associated Press, HHS said the new lawyers would “give the Department an additional mechanism to provide these children direct legal support while dedicated public servants work around the clock to safely reunify them with their families.” But immigration advocates fear—not without justification—that the administration will instead work to deport the kids. As our earlier piece mentioned, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night last year, but a court intervened. And ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

The administration’s plan to represent migrant kids in court was announced after months of upheaval over who should play that role. At the end of July, the longstanding contract with the network of independent legal nonprofits expired. Then, the administration awarded a contract to Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm with far less experience in such matters, but greater ties to Trump: one of Burke’s co-founders served in the first Trump administration and one of its founding partners works for the second.

Facing backlash, Burke Law Group pulled out and the administration instead awarded the contract to Our Rescue, a nonprofit founded by a former ICE agent that had no experience representing immigrant kids in court.

Last month, dozens of federal lawmakers signed a letter expressing concern that the administration would give such an important job to “firms so plainly unqualified for the task.” The Our Rescue deal was put on hold after the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice filed a bid protest, whereupon the administration awarded another contract to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But in recent court filings, immigration advocates said USCRI was not representing kids in court, and its lawyers often sat silently as judges considered the children’s cases.

“There are rules in place…to protect children, but those rules rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, also part of the nonprofit network that lost its contract, said in a press conference last month. “Instead, the administration has chosen to fracture this network of experienced child-centered advocates that existed, with no plan in place to replace it.”

A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.

Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.

GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.

Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.

Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.

In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.