Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a congressional candidate and high-profile opponent of local data center sprawl, filed suit Thursday against his hometown’s City Council after the council threw him, his brother, his mother, and other locals out of a meeting earlier this month for protesting delays to a vote on a data center moratorium—and then banned them from future city council meetings. Pearson will now be locked out of a particularly important meeting on October 20, when the council will finally hold that data center moratorium vote. He and his five co-plaintiffs, including a high school senior involved in the protest, argue that the two-month ban from city council violates their first amendment rights to free expression. “Every person, whether you disagree with them or not, is entitled to speak their opinion and give their ideas in public forms,” Pearson wrote in a press release October 15. “There is no right that gives a City Council chairwoman or anyone else the ability to go beyond the bounds of Tennessee law and the United States Constitution to discriminate or retaliate against those who do not agree with their actions.” Pearson, elected in 2023 to the Tennessee House of Representatives, became known nationally in 2023 as one of the “Tennessee Three,” when he was removed from office for violating “decorum rules” after co-leading a personal protest for gun reform on the statehouse floor. He later won back his seat in a special election. Now Pearson is running for Congress in a freshly-gerrymandered congressional district, seeking to woo a district where Republicans now have an estimated nine-point advantage, according to the Cook Political Report. Pearson has made opposition to Elon Musk’s Memphis-area xAI data centers and their polluting onsite gas plants a cornerstone of his campaign. xAI has installed 59 gas turbines in Memphis to power its data centers, as Reuters recently found. People living near the site say they’re plagued with poor air quality and constant noise.  On October 6, Pearson attended the city council meeting where the data center moratorium vote was pushed back for the second time this year, and where the scheduled public comment period was cancelled, leading chants of protest as police officers tried to remove people from the chamber, Memphis’ Fox News affiliate reported.  About 200 other people attended the protest. To Pearson, the city council’s actions constitute an “ongoing pattern of intimidation.” With the moratorium vote approaching next week, he told Mother Jones he’s urging them to resolve the issue. “Our right to attend Council meetings should be restored and these bans rescinded,” he said. “I welcome an opportunity to meet to discuss how we move forward with protecting the First Amendment rights of the people as a priority, especially as we stand up against these hyperscale data centers.” The city council policy under which Pearson was banned says that “members of the audience and persons addressing the council will not be permitted to engage in gossip, make defamatory, personal, slanderous, or profane comments or use abusive or vulgar language.” That, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue, is a vague attempt to “suppress disfavored viewpoints, particularly criticism directed at City Council and its officials.” “While they’re working to keep us out of city council meetings, neighbors in Westwood and Boxtown are still dealing with the impacts of having xAI in their community,” said Amber Sherman, a local political organizer who was banned from the meeting alongside Pearson. As I wrote in August, data center backlash isn’t strictly a left-of-center issue. And that matters for Pearson, who—having stayed in the race after a Trump-backed redistricting went into effect in May—is running as an unabashed progressive in a Trump-leaning district some analysts think is Tennessee Democrats’ best shot at a flip. > The backlash draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, > and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition > to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among > Democrats. > > That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a > Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered > and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling > that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act. > > Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, > Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district.  Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. “Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a press conference this summer. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”  Garrison Hayes contributed additional reporting.

Watch: Elon Musk is trying to bail out Republicans while flooding X with lies. Election Day is less than three weeks away, and panic is setting in for the GOP. “We see Republican groups pulling money away from House incumbents,” says host David Corn on the latest episode of Stress Test. “They’re cutting them off. They’re saying, ‘So long, Charlie! We don’t think you’re going to survive this blue tsunami.’” The one lifeline Republicans have right now is big money—and nothing gets bigger than Elon Musk, who has poured $366 million into this election cycle in an attempt to rescue at-riskRepublicans, making him the biggest known political donor in midterms history. But David warns, “It’s not just money with Elon Musk. It’s also disinformation.” On this episode, David and fellow host Garrison Hayes check the state of the race as we hurtle toward November. They’re joined by senior reporter Anna Merlan, who has been tracking Musk-amplified disinformation attacks on Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who’s been the target of a MAGA operation that falsely claimed he left the campaign trail for a secret stay in an Ohio mental hospital—as well as a homophobic smear from Vice President JD Vance. “This new stuff about him being gay and mentally ill—that’s an escalation,” Anna says. And she’s watching for more: “What tends to happen on X.com these days, especially after Elon Musk took it over, is that there is a lot of disinformation in October leading up to elections—purported leaks of consequential information.” Meanwhile, Garrison and David discuss the epic fall of Kimberly Guilfoyle, ousted as U.S. ambassador to Greece after a report that she asked a donor to pay off a $100,000 Amex bill in return for providing him access to administration officials, and the shocking DHS raid on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC., home. They explore the Trump administration’s pattern of targeting prominent Black women and what David dubs Trump’s “personal vendetta” against Omar. You’d think a president staring down lame-duck status would have bigger worries than settling scores. After all, reality on the campaign trail is biting hard: “Trump is running around the country trying to shore up Republicans in states where he should not need to be campaigning,” David says. All that, and your audience questions answered, on this Friday edition of “Stress Test,” our special midterms video podcast. Subscribe: youtube.com/motherjones. This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors. David Corn: Elon Musk, a disinformation agent. Garrison Hayes: Trump sics the DOJ on a Democrat. Kimberly Guilfoyle— DC: What a story. GH: Yeah, and is it time for the GOP to panic? DC: This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m David Corn. GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome back to the fifth episode of Stress Test. We are three weeks away—can you believe it?—from the midterms and approaching the midpoint of this kind of pop-up video podcast that we’ve been on. So we thought it’d be a good time to come back together and to try to think about, like, what’s going on, do a little bit of a status check on how things are going. David, what’s on your mind? DC: Well, we see that the polls are not changing. They’re all moving in the same direction. They’re all benefiting Democrats, and it seems kind of baked into the cake. Trump is running around the country trying to shore up Republicans in states where he should not need to be campaigning. He went all the way to Alaska, and he took half the cabinet with him because the Democrats are looking good in the Senate race there. And we see Republican groups pulling money away from House incumbents, Republican House incumbents. They’re cutting them off. They’re saying, so long, Charlie, we don’t think you’re going to survive this blue tsunami. So people like Thomas Kean Jr., who’s a representative in New Jersey, and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who’s in Iowa, they’re cutting them off, leaving them to their own devices. The one lifeline the Republicans have right now is big money, and the big news in big money this week, Garrison, was Elon Musk, right? He’s putting in 300—so far, $366 million into this campaign, making one of the largest donations ever in the history of American politics. I think he’s gonna top half a billion dollars. It’s going to Senate races. It’s going to get-out-the-vote campaigns and for senators and Republicans in the swing states, the key states. And it’s not just money with Elon Musk. It’s also disinformation. GH: Indeed it is. And so big money, Elon Musk, disinformation—to talk about all of this, we’re going to have a good conversation with our senior reporter here at Mother Jones, Anna Merlan. Anna, welcome to the show. Anna Merlan: Hi. Thanks for having me. DC: Yeah. I mean, everybody this week is going on and on about the money he’s pouring in—$158 million into Senate races—but you had a different take. Not only is he pouring money into this campaign, he’s a major force of disinformation. Explain. AM: Well, so this week we saw Elon Musk engaging pretty heavily with a story about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. There was some scuttlebutt on the right because Talarico had not been seen on the campaign trail for a couple of weeks. That’s because he had the flu. He was really clear that he had the flu. He was appearing remotely via Zoom at several campaign events because he had the flu. Instead, a couple of far-right, self-styled journalists started to make a different claim: that he had actually been secretly committed to a mental hospital in Ohio for an extraordinarily short period of time before reappearing on the campaign trail. So this story didn’t work for a bunch of reasons that we can get into, but one person who was very excited about it was Elon Musk. He was engaging directly— DC: So what did he do? AM: He was engaging directly with Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher, who are the two self-proclaimed MAGA-leaning journalists who were promoting this story. When they released a purported phone call between one of them and the mental health treatment center they claimed Talarico was at, he responded with two exclamation points. He also said at least twice in tweets that the Talarico campaign was hiding something that voters deserved to know about. So it’s pretty obvious that he had probably become aware of this story prior to Sortor and Amacher breaking it publicly. So he was a primary driver of people seeing this story. I mean, Sortor has a pretty good audience, but nothing like what Elon Musk has on the platform that he owns. GH: I’d love to get into why this story doesn’t work, because often, Anna, when these conspiracy theories come up, they’re based in some kind of thing that gives people a clue that there might be something going on. And so there are kind of this hodgepodge of facts that are unrelated, and they pull them together to make a story. But why are you saying that this story doesn’t make any sense? AM: There is a really basic timeline issue, which is that supposedly Talarico, according to Sortor and Amacher’s self-proclaimed reporting, had been released from this mental hospital in Ohio on Saturday night. That was a really big issue because he had been seen campaigning in person in Texas on Friday and Saturday. So they were crowing about a call that they had with this mental health treatment center in Ohio where, after asking someone at the facility several times if somebody by the name of James Talarico was there and getting several denials, eventually the person on the other end of the phone says, oh, he was discharged Saturday night. This person doesn’t sound clear, and this is after what turned out to be about six minutes of them asking this question in various ways. But regardless, that’s not how time works. If you see him in Texas on Friday, he cannot be in mental health treatment on Saturday. The other thing that happened is that the mental health treatment center, the Lindner Center, tweeted, James Talarico has never been treated here. Like, they were more than willing to just say, this is not real, this is not true. And this happened immediately. But that was apparently not enough for some of the people involved in the story to declare it not to be true. DC: Well, you know, it’s interesting because this is a mental health attack that they’re trying to put on to Talarico, and the other things that they’ve gone after him for, claiming he’s a vegan when he’s not—not that there’s anything wrong with that. And also, we saw what came from our own vice president, JD Vance, this week. Let’s look at that video and how he whipped up an attack against Talarico. [Clip plays.] DC: So he’s not only mentally ill and a vegan, apparently he’s gay. Wow. It seems to be the best they have at the moment. AM: Well, so there’s been a lot of this type of thing about Talarico, and some of it, again, Elon Musk has engaged in. There have been a bunch of quotes recirculated, for instance, about him denouncing white supremacy during 2020 and expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, him talking about, you know, trans inclusion in sports, him talking about the ills of capitalism—things that are taken to be extremely frightening by the right. And there’s been a lot of recirculating of those quotes. But this new stuff about him being gay and mentally ill, that is—that’s an escalation, I would say. DC: And we talked earlier about the money he’s putting in—10 million—tens of millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote efforts in Texas, and a lot of those are focusing on these sort of issues, claiming that Talarico has a radical trans agenda. AM: Correct. I mean, part of what’s interesting here is that after Elon Musk spent millions of dollars helping to get President Trump back into office, he said he was going to pull back on political spending. That was probably the result of a couple of things. One was that he put a lot of money into the Wisconsin Senate race, which didn’t turn out the way that he wanted it to be, including at one point he offered to essentially pay voters to vote, which you’re not allowed to do. He had to walk that back very quickly because it is illegal. And the other thing that happened was that he put a lot of support behind Germany’s far-right AfD party, even appearing to speak at an AfD rally, and during that election, again, AfD didn’t do particularly well. So in 2025, he said, you know, I’m going to pull back on political spending, I’ve done enough. But now here he is again, you know, a year later, getting more involved in the midterms, I think, than any other single donor ever has in history. GH: Yeah, and I guess the question that everyone’s wondering is, will this work? I mean, obviously he’s had some failures in the past, but do you think, here we are in this position again where Elon Musk is dumping a bunch of money into an election, do you anticipate that it’ll work this time? AM: I don’t actually think there’s a direct 1-to-1 predictor between amount of money and success, which I do think is what Elon Musk thinks. I think he assumes that a large enough amount of money will result in the outcome you want, but he should know that that’s not the case. That’s not what happened in Wisconsin. That’s not what happened, you know, with him appearing to speak on behalf of AfD. Like, it just doesn’t seem to work that way. But I guess we’ll see. And, you know, I guess he’s welcome under the laws of this country to spend as much money as he wants trying. DC: Well, Anna, we ask this question of all our guests: What’s stressing you out, or what are you watching for in the next few weeks before the election hits Election Day? AM: I feel like if I let anything stress me out at this point, I would be dead, so nothing. Just, I’m good. I will say I am paying a lot of attention to purported October surprises. You guys both know that before consequential elections, there’s often this thing termed the October surprise, a last-minute, consequential piece of information. What tends to happen on X.com these days, especially after Elon Musk took it over, again, is that there is a lot of disinformation in October leading up to elections—purported leaks of consequential information. You might recall, like, the Macron leaks that were attempted to float before a French presidential election a few years ago on Twitter that didn’t quite work. So I am paying a lot of attention to narratives that take hold on X in the next few weeks, especially things that Elon Musk is promoting. For instance, right now he’s very engaged with allegations about Ilhan Omar—either, you know, hiding the source of her wealth, you know, changing her last name. There is a lot of attempts right now to just kind of attach general suspicion to her in the lead-up to the election. So I would say that’s the primary thing I’m looking at today, but who knows what it’ll be next week. GH: Anna Merlan, thank you so much for joining us. We’ll definitely be paying very close attention to your reporting, and we appreciate you being here. AM: Thanks for having me. Thank you guys for your work. DC: Well, she mentioned Elon Musk going after Ilhan Omar, and this week, in what was a shocking move, the investigators from DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, raided the Washington home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, apparently looking for material relating to immigration forms filled out years ago, maybe even tens of years ago. This is unprecedented, Garrison, because, as you know, there’s a Department of Justice guideline that acts like these—investigations, raids, subpoenas—should not come so close to an election unless they are unavoidable. There’s a danger present. Someone may run away to, you know, flee the cops, go to another country. If there’s no reason to move this quickly before an election, so close to an election, you basically lay low. But the Trump administration is doing the opposite here. GH: They’ve, of course, you know, been targeting Congresswoman Omar for a while now. It’s a part of a larger anti-immigrant thing that they’ve been on. Obviously, we know Ilhan Omar represents a congressional district in Minnesota, and so all of this is connected to this larger project that the Trump administration has been pushing for quite some time now. But we also know that Ilhan Omar is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She is a Black woman. And there have been a number of these kinds of targeted attacks from this administration on Black women. We have the Fed Gov. Lisa Cook. We, of course, have Letitia James in New York City. We have LaMonica McIver, who is facing 17 years for her interactions with ICE just last year. And so this is something that’s kind of been going on for a while, David, and it does feel in some ways unprecedented, but it also feels like something that they’ve been pushing. It feels very related to the objectives of this administration. DC: Yeah. And one small point that I see here, because I just came out with this book, How Russia Won, about the Russian intervention in the past elections to help Donald Trump, and in 2016, the FBI was conducting an investigation of interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia throughout the 2016 general election period. And they were assiduous about not issuing subpoenas, not even bringing in people to interview, because they thought that might tip off the investigation to the public, and they did not want to affect the election in that way. The deep state, as Trump would say, was actually protecting the Trump campaign, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Of course, at the end of that campaign, James Comey revived the investigation of Hillary Clinton, and that had an impact on the campaign, and that’s the reason for this rule that they are violating. But Trump, you know, has made, you know, this crusade against Somali Americans a tremendous imperative for him—targeting her, but just the whole idea that Somali Americans are committing fraud, that they’re evil, terrible people. He said that, and they should all be shipped back to Africa. So this is racism. It’s a personal vendetta, and what it does, I think, also is just send a message that we’re in favor of cruelty, and if you get on the wrong side of us, we will come after you. GH: Yeah, it is, I think, a lot of those things. As I said before, there is this kind of personal fixation that the president has with Minnesota. To your point, the story around Minnesota, you know, quote-unquote, fraud—some of it legitimate, some of it illegitimate. We know that that’s all kind of a part of this story as well, that we’ve seen play out for at least the last nine, 10 months. But really, it kind of goes back. We know, of course, Ilhan Omar was a part of that kind of Squad group of folks elected to Congress during Trump’s first term. She has been an unapologetic opponent of the president, quite antagonistic and unapologetic in her kind of prodding of the president. So all of that feels deeply, deeply connected. David, I’m curious, what is Omar’s reaction to all of this, to her home being raided? How is she responding to this? DC: Well, she’s leaning into it. I mean, I’ve gotten many fundraising letters or emails from her. GH: Never miss an opportunity to raise a few bucks off of this stuff, right? DC: Yeah, don’t put a crisis to waste, ever. And so she’s, you know, defying Trump, standing strong, and using it to try to bolster her support. And indeed, this is, you know, elevating her. I don’t think there’s a question about her winning her election. But it is, again, you know, this is happening through DHS, and there are people who are worried about DHS agents or ICE agents showing up at the polls to try to dissuade people from being there, creating crisis, creating chaos, which is what Trump is looking to do. And, you know, they keep trying to bring this back to fraud, but let’s talk about corruption. Where’s the real corruption? I would say it’s coming from within the house. And we had no better example of that this week than—drumroll, please—Kimberly Guilfoyle. She was selling favors. The big news was that she asked a Republican donor to pay off her $100,000 Amex card while she was trying—well, while she was trying to get him favorable treatment within the government because he had a few tax issues. And, you know, she didn’t last too long, right, Garrison, once this news came out? GH: There’s a story within a story here about who gets the boot when there is, you know, controversy. I mean, I am thinking a lot in this situation about Tom Homan, who we know was also involved in some suspected corruption and money, and there’s, like, $50,000 in a paper bag, I believe was the part of the story, from Cava. DC: It was a bag from Cava, the fast-food joint, $50,000 in it, in cash. GH: A bag from Cava. Exactly, in cash. And the question is, like, did he get the boot? Has Trump done the work of distancing himself from Tom Homan? I think the answer is, of course, no. And so there’s always kind of this interesting tension, and maybe even to some degree a gender tension here, around who Donald Trump decides to punish and distance himself from. I’m thinking about Kristi Noem, of course, in this instance as well. None of these are excuses for the behavior, but I think there is kind of a meta-analysis, actually, that needs to happen here as well. DC: Well, let’s see what Trump once had to say about her and what he has to say about her now. [Clip plays.] DC: Well, the interesting thing here might be, you know, they were close, and they were close through all this period of time that Donald Trump Jr. is cutting assorted business deals, using the family name to get connections in the defense industry and elsewhere—what we might call grifting. So I bet Kimberly Guilfoyle has a lot of inside information about how Donald Trump Jr. has amassed the wealth he has gathered over the last few years. You got to be careful who you throw under the bus, particularly if they know something. In any event, the House Democrats take control of any of the investigative committees, she might be someone they look to talk to. GH: I wouldn’t be surprised if, you know, for Kimberly Guilfoyle to get a subpoena of some sort if Democrats do take back the House. But, you know, David, the thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s really hard to turn MAGA-world people against Trump. I mean, even if for a time they seem to move away from him, we’ve seen time and time again people kind of move back into his orbit. And so I would be curious to see if this situation and any pressure that Democrats can exert on Guilfoyle, if it would result in anything meaningful coming out of this from a probing perspective. DC: Well, the interesting thing is that Trump is sunsetting, right? You know, people—after the election, he will be lame duck. So his magnetic attraction to pull people back into his fold that he kicks out—you know, we’ve seen this with Steve Bannon, we’ve seen it with Michael Cohen—that gravitational force might weaken. And I think, too, you know, we’re here to talk about the midterms, and it’s my sense—and we see this—the Democratic candidates are leaning more into making corruption an issue. We talked about Talarico. He’s running campaign ads against Ken Paxton on all sorts of corruption fronts, including that he’s been bought off by big data to put up data centers that are very unpopular in Texas. We see other candidates across the country, Democratic candidates, using the theme of corruption. And I think it hits strongly now. It’s often hard to make corruption an issue for people, but when they’re having their own economic difficulties and they see Trump and his family literally pocketing billions of dollars in shady deals while he’s in the White House, and now we see Kim Guilfoyle using her power, her influence, to line her own pockets, I think these corruption themes might resonate a little stronger. GH: My question for you, David, then, is when or if Democrats, you know, take back the House—perhaps in 2028, if they are able to take back the White House—what power do they have to change things in a way that would prevent something like this in the future? DC: Well, they have two different things they can do. If they win back even the House, let alone the Senate, in this election, they can use the power of congressional investigations to start digging into some of the stuff—you mentioned Tom Homan. They can go back to all sorts of things. They don’t have to investigate them as crimes, but they still have the right to investigate them. And of course, if the Democrats should win back the White House in 2028, which seems a long time from now, they will control the Justice Department, and they’ll be able to look at all sorts of things that went on during the Trump years. But on the other hand, I would not put it past Trump to issue a blanket-wide pardon covering almost every political appointee who served in either one of his administrations. So that’s kind of far down the road at this point. But there is a lot they can start looking at, whether it’s Elon Musk, whether it’s Kim Guilfoyle, whether it’s Tom Homan—a lot of things out there. The problem that the Democrats are gonna have on these investigative committees, if they gain control, is deciding which investigations to launch. GH: Wow. Well, those are the things that we’re interested in and thinking about, but of course, we’re always curious what you are interested in and thinking about. We have a few audience questions that I want to tee up for us, David. We’re enjoying, of course, your comments. Go ahead and drop a comment now for something that’s on your minds, maybe something that’s stressing you out. And so we have a few comments that we wanna get into. I’ll start us out, David, and then you can take one and I’ll take another one, and we’ll get through these as quickly as possible. This is from someone who goes by FrankHodge7654. They say, the biggest stress test to our democratic republic in our history was the Civil War. The second-biggest stress test was the economic collapse of the 1930s. They say, the current crisis is a very important test. When the people in office do not respect the Constitution—that’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about today—and no one is responding effectively, Frank says. They’re asking, I guess, in a way, what would be the appropriate response? We kind of got into that a little bit, David, but I’m curious what your thoughts are on the appropriate response to the disrespect, as Frank puts it, for the Constitution. DC: You know, ultimately it boils down to you and you and you and you—to all of us—to vote for people who will uphold the Constitution as they swear to do when they take the oath of office. And, you know, we’ve had a president who got into power, you know, got into office not once, but twice, I think, by, you know, by hoodwinking the public in many ways, who has no respect for the Constitution. And what we might have thought in the past, that a political party—even his own political party—would put up guardrails to keep him in place and not let him tear up the Constitution too much, well, that wasn’t there, and they just folded and caved and became part of the Trump cult. So it’s really up to Americans, if they want to keep the democracy that they’ve been bequeathed by our founders and by people who gave their lives for this democracy in years past, to make this a priority for them and vote for people who they think will uphold the rule of law. I mean, it’s kind of Civics 101, but I don’t have much more to say than that. Let’s turn to—go ahead. GH: I’ll add one additional point here, David. I think you’re spot-on, but the thing that I’ll add—I mean, as FrankHodge7654 points out, you know, so much of this is directly connected to the unfinished business, I think, that this country has around its relationship to race and racism. I mean, obviously the Civil War was about slavery, and these things kind of create these chinks in the armor, these little kind of vulnerable points or vulnerability points for someone who does not respect the Constitution to come in and to lean into anti-immigrant sentiment or maybe racist rhetoric in order to gain power. And so all of these things are in their own way connected, and I think you’re totally right that the people, voters in our country, have to be thinking strategically about who they give power to. DC: That’s a good point. And until we resolve some of those issues, we will be vulnerable to demagogues who don’t respect the Constitution. So let me turn to a viewer who goes by the name Disky, DISKY01. I’m gonna read it off the paper here. Flock cameras are for license plate reading specifically, but I think this is an indication that people are finally beginning to understand the consequences of general mass surveillance. We can’t trust the federal government to do anything right now, and so it must be a local government issue. We have to ensure that our local governments enact stronger spying and surveillance laws against corporations, law enforcement, and governments. I think that’s true, but I think we’re gonna see this with AI as well. There’s going to be a big fight between who gets to regulate these new technologies, and Big Tech doesn’t want it to be state by state, locality by locality. They have a much easier chance of influencing the process if it’s done at the federal level, where they can throw in a lot of money, as we’ve seen and as we’ve talked about with Elon Musk, and as we’ve discussed on earlier episodes, big super PACs being funded by crypto and AI. GH: Okay, I think that’s enough for our audience section. I wanna move us to our final question that we always talk a little bit about, which is: What are you stressed or maybe not stressed out about this week? David, let’s start with you. Go ahead and tell us what’s stressing you out, or maybe what are you less stressed about than you were before? DC: Well, I’m less stressed out about the polls being really wrong. I mean, they may not be fully accurate, but they are moving in the same direction. They all show the same overall trend across the country in different races when you ask the question in different ways, so I’m not as worried about them missing something. What I’m, you know, stressed out or what I would be concerned about is something that Anna said earlier on the show, and that is an October surprise of some sort, but more or less being funded by a lot of money. The money coming in is just tremendous, and, you know, there’s hundreds—maybe tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars that we can’t track. That’s dark money that we don’t even see, and the ability of that money to finance an October surprise. Another story about James Talarico being, you know, taken off to a mental health institution—things that break on the weekend right before the election and where it’s harder to counter them, you know, whether it’s from Russian disinformation bots or from Elon Musk and MAGA influencers making things up on X. I worry about that coming and being pushed out with a lot of money. GH: Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly the thing that I’m stressing out about as well, David—this idea that people with the largest megaphones on social media are able to push these election-influencing bits of dis- and misinformation, and that these things get shared so widely. I mean, part of the reason, I think, why Elon Musk just amplifies stuff that’s, as Anna pointed out, just nonsense is because at the end of the day, we are susceptible, we are influenceable, we are able to take in this information, and a lot of times it does have an impact on our behavior. And so that’s kind of stressing me out, and how we kind of fight and push back against these things is kind of interesting to me. And of course, one of the ways to do that is to subscribe to Mother Jones, to subscribe to Stress Test, to stay in the know by being right here every single week. So that’s one of the things that you can do to lower your stress, and that’s what I hope—that’s what I’m allowing to lower my stress, is that we’re doing the good work of getting good information out there. DC: Well, that’s all we have in today’s episode. If you missed previous episodes of Stress Test, go to our YouTube channel. You can go there at youtube.com/motherjones, subscribe there as well, and find us wherever you find your podcasts. GH: Of course, a huge shout-out to Anna Merlan for her incredible reporting. Our great journalism and the work that we do here, like Anna’s reporting—this stuff is only made possible because of your support. Your views and your subscriptions keep us going, so don’t forget to like and to share and to subscribe to our YouTube channel, as David says. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave them down in the comments. We love to read your comments and to answer your questions, so make sure you ask a question down there in the comments today. We’ll be right back here in a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test. Have a good one.

“Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider. Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.” Within minutes of President Trump telling reporters that he had effectively encouraged Katie Zacharia, his new press secretary, after only five days on the job, to step down amid widespread ridicule over her job performance, the New York Times reported that Zacharia had already been fired. The unceremonious ouster sets a new record for the Trump administration, besting Anthony Scaramucci’s fleeting, 10-day tenure as press secretary during Trump’s first White House. It follows a brutal first-day performance at the podium on Monday, followed by an equally disastrous appearance on Sean Hannity’s show. All against mounting questions about her claims of being a lawyer despite never passing the bar. So how did she manage to even get the job in the first place? As I wrote earlier today: > In hopes of replacing Karoline Leavitt, [Zacharia] reportedly > cross-referenced the president’s public schedule to book her TV spots, just to > make sure that Trump would be watching. Clearly, it worked: On October 9, > after weeks of these logistical gymnastics, Trump named Zacharia to the post. The firing once again demonstrates a singular truth: Aesthetics may be an entry point to power. But against the backdrop of a wider misogyny, they only leave a trail of crusty lashes and hair extensions. In other words, Mar-a-Lago face will never save you.

It is rarely an auspicious occasion when a White House press secretary becomes the subject of headlines. But, by attempting the simple act of uttering words that is exactly what unfolded when Katie Zacharia stepped up to the podium on October 13 for her very first briefing. The appearance by the former conservative political commentator drew widespread ridicule, adding to the already existing charges that Zacharia’s resume was much too thin for someone occupying the president’s most visible communications’ role. But watching her take the podium, it was instantly evident that Zacharia had met the more unspoken but essential qualifications for landing a high-ranking position within the Trump administration. In other words, she had mastered the look: long barrel blond curls, severe makeup, aggressively high heels. Some on social media even marveled at how much Zacharia appeared to resemble the president’s daughter, Ivanka, with whom Trump has long appeared to be infatuated. > It’s against this trail of bad hair extensions, used-up Botox needles, and > crusty fake lashes that a familiar question returns to me: “What happens to > the self when surgery is embraced for the purpose of political conformity, > consciously or otherwise?” As with other members of Trump’s top brass, male and female alike, it is unclear if Zacharia has undergone the cosmetic procedures that have become central to the reigning aesthetics of Mar-a-Lago face. Her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, certainly appeared to have done so in preparation for high-profile magazine shoots. Yet, one can easily imagine Zacharia strategically amplifying the MAGA aesthetic during the weeks of auditioning, when, in hopes of replacing Leavitt, she reportedly cross-referenced the president’s public schedule to book her TV spots, just to make sure that Trump would be watching. Clearly, it worked: On October 9, after weeks of these logistical gymnastics, Trump named Zacharia to the post. But the same White House briefing that exposed his new press secretary’s near-total incompetence also underscored the apparent limitations of this aesthetic in helping to keep one’s job. “We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia told reporters, referring to the embattled US ambassador to Greece amid an increasingly widening grifting scandal. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.” The unceremonious ouster marked quite the downfall, considering Guilfoyle’s MAGA credentials, and the fact that her erstwhile romance with Don Jr. meant that she almost became the president’s daughter-in-law. It also added to the growing list of women, once heralded by the right for “blazing a trail to empowerment” with their occupation of top roles, who have either been discarded or somehow convinced to leave the Trump administration: Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt, just to name a few. Curiously, the men in Trump’s administration who have attracted the same, if not more, unflattering headlines of apparent corruption, drunkenness, and generally abhorrent conduct have remained effectively unscathed. All of which points to a major theme: Aesthetics may serve as a key entry point to power in the Trump administration. But they take a backseat to the inherent misogyny that animates every corner of the same administration—starting with the top. Against this trail of bad hair extensions, empty syringes, and crusty fake lashes, a familiar question returns to me: “What happens to the self when surgery is embraced, consciously or otherwise, for the purpose of political conformity?” Do the subjects register regret, or are they happy with what they see in the mirror? It’s impossible, of course, to know the inner lives of women like Guilfoyle and Noem. But last week, it seemed notable that, just as Guilfoyle’s ever-expanding scandals were seizing headlines, two older Republican women in Trump’s outer rings of orbit attracted their own derision for their apparent physical transformations. As I wrote in March of last year, I’m far from immune to what must be similar pressures when it comes to trying to maintain the look of youth. Still, it’s hard not to see the ridicule of these conservative women as a foreshadowing for the women who have adopted the look favored by a political movement to gain purchase in the president’s inner circle. As Zacharia stumbles, humiliating herself and the White House despite having won Trump’s gaze, it feels as though it is only a matter of time before we watch another MAGA woman get canned. In the end, the real winner in this group always seems to be pervasive misogyny.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. Last month, when The New York Times published a news article reporting on Tucker Carlson’s recent statements defending Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, and assailing former Rep. Mike Rogers, the GOP contender in that race, the paper described the former Fox host as an “influential far-right podcaster…known for his nativist rhetoric [who] once said immigrants were making the United States ‘poorer and dirtier.’” (Carlson had slammed Rogers as a “toady to Israel” and the “embodiment of the cruelty and stupidity of the national security state.”) A few days later, NPR named Carlson a “Newsmaker”—that is, one of the “most influential people of our time”—and posted an hourlong interview with him conducted by host Steve Inskeep. At the start, Inskeep introduced Carlson as a commentator who “has commanded an audience for decades as a cable TV pundit, as a Fox News star, and then, after his firing, as the head of an independent network frequently broadcasting from this barn in Maine.” During the interview, Carlson argued that President Donald Trump should be removed from office for launching the war in Iran (“the most profoundly destructive thing any—any single decision a president has made in our history”) and for threatening to annihilate that country with nuclear weapons. He railed against Israel and its influence on US policy, denied he was antisemitic, and slammed Trump for being corrupt. (He also called the Trump–Russia scandal a “totally absurd plot to discredit Trump.”) At the end of their conversation, Inskeep said to Carlson, “You’re a thoughtful guy.” In both The New York Times piece and the NPR interview—especially the latter—Carlson’s bigotry and conspiracy kookery were downplayed, and he was cast as a respectable political opinion influencer. The Times did note that Carlson has embraced conspiracy theories, been accused of antisemitism, and once “conducted a friendly interview” with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. But even that does not capture the fullness of his extremism. > Two years ago, Carlson disgustingly called Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper “the > most important popular historian working in the United States today.” In recent years, Carlson has become a leading champion of right-wing racism and nuttery—a matter Inskeep avoided in the one-on-one. He has been a proponent of the “great replacement theory,” which claims nefarious elites are trying to replace white Americans with dark-skinned migrants. (Some ultra-right adherents of this notion assert Jews are responsible for this anti-white plot.) When he was a Fox host, Carlson supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, though he privately denigrated election denialists pushing that crap. He peddled the bonkers idea that the January 6 riot was a false flag operation orchestrated by the Deep State so it could round up Trump supporters, and he said the rioters were “right” to believe the election had been rigged. There’s practically no limit to Carlson’s ideological thuggery. Two years ago, he hosted on his podcast Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist, who claimed that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Holocaust was merely the result of poor planning on the part of Hitler’s regime. The Nazis, Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners…They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps.” Accidental concentration camps, right? That was why “millions of people ended up dead there.” Carlson disgustingly called Cooper “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” And Carlson has been an adoring fan of Vladimir Putin. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he noted he would root for Russia over Ukraine in any war between the two nations, and, once Putin attacked Ukraine, he amplified Kremlin disinformation that claimed the United States had been operating biological weapons facilities within Ukraine. > In an appearance on RT, Carlson proclaimed that diabolical forces within the > US government were deploying “mass migration” to destroy “the English-speaking > West.” Carlson was also sued by a booker and producer who alleged that she had been bullied and subjected to antisemitic remarks while working on his Fox show. Carlson maintained he had never met her. Fox settled the lawsuit for $12 million, according to the accuser’s lawyer. In 2022, on his Fox show, Carlson promoted the quackery of “testicle tanning.” Yes, Carlson’s been a real thoughtful guy, bolstering Trump’s attempt to destroy our constitutional republic, providing a platform to Nazi apologists, and amplifying Russian disinformation. Several weeks prior to the Times article and NPR interview, Carlson appeared on RT, the Russian state-controlled propaganda mill that also runs covert influence and disinformation operations. On that show, he proclaimed that diabolical forces within the US government were deploying “mass migration” to destroy “the English-speaking West” and trying to whip up a war with Russia because it was “the last big white Christian country on the planet.” That is, an evil Deep State wants to annihilate Russia because it’s white and Christian—and it was willing to risk global nuclear warfare to do so. He didn’t identify who in the United States was perpetrating this evil scheme. Could it be…the Jews? While on this RT show, Carlson never once mentioned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Russia’s attacks on civilian targets, its alleged war crimes, or its kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children. Ukraine is “not a sovereign country fighting for its freedom,” he argued, just a “client state of NATO and the United States” that’s being used to wipe out Russia. That’s Putin’s BS line. And he praised Putin for practicing restraint in response to attacks on Russian soil. Carlson called Russia “a beautiful country, an amazing country, my favorite country I’ve ever visited.” There was no talk of Putin’s repressive ways or suppression of democracy. He’s all in on Putin. > He may not be a secret Nazi. But he’s an overt racist, conspiracy monger, > Hitler defender, Putin supporter, and far-right extremist. Earlier this month, Carlson again got into Hitler trouble during an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a far-right British politician. He questioned why Britain had entered World War II, and Rees-Mogg countered, “Otherwise, we’d be speaking German.” Carlson shot back: “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” Racism and Nazi apologia go nicely together. Arguing with Rees-Mogg, Carlson declared that Hitler “repeatedly said, ‘I do not want to go to war with the UK’”—as though the Nazi dictator could have been taken at his word and there was no reason for the Brits to honor their alliance with Poland and declare war on Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. (In 1934, Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, vowing not to attack the country.) Rees-Mogg observed that Carlson was “verging on defending Hitler.” He added, “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.” Carlson answered with snark: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi.” He may not be a secret Nazi. But he’s an overt racist, conspiracy monger, Hitler defender, Putin supporter, and far-right extremist. Because he has an audience and influence on the right, the media ought to pay attention to him and his comments. But they also should remember that viewership does not equal legitimacy. He poses as a thoughtful fellow, but he slings false, bigoted, and dangerous swill. Journalists who do not characterize and contextualize Carlson accurately aid and abet his malignant agenda.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg broke the news that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which helps regulate the securities market, was told to stop investigating an eye-popping case of potential insider trading. The direction came from a top adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, who ordered investigators to retract a referral to the agency’s lawyers surrounding suspiciously timed and lucrative oil trades that were executed minutes before the president sent social media posts rescinding threats to attack Iranian power plants. This sidelined CFTC investigation is just the latest in a growing pattern: Enforcement of financial crimes is dropping in Donald Trump’s second term, unraveling offices and reforms that will be difficult to rebuild. It also is laying the groundwork for more corporate fraud, or even a broader financial crisis, in the long term, experts say. This trend has affected each federal agency that handles financial crimes—including the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees Wall Street, the Justice Department, and the White House itself. Just a few months after Trump’s reelection, the SEC dismissed a case against crypto exchange Coinbase, then halted a prosecution against a Chinese crypto entrepreneur who bought millions in tokens from a Trump family crypto venture. Several months later, the White House pardoned crypto giant Binance and its ex-CEO. > In May, a private-sector analysis found that the SEC had initiated just five > enforcement cases against companies in half a year—the lowest number in the > first half of a fiscal year in at least 16 years. This spring, Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent letters to the SEC expressing concern: The director of the enforcement division that brings cases against companies quit after just six months on the job, reportedly over disagreements with the agency about acting against entities that back Donald Trump. Staffing at the corporate watchdog had also fallen by 17 percent, with much of that coming from the enforcement arm. In April, the SEC quietly released data showing that in fiscal year 2025, the agency had brought nearly 30 percent fewer new enforcement actions than the prior year. In May, a private-sector analysis found that the SEC had initiated just five enforcement cases against companies in half a year—the lowest number in the first half of a fiscal year in at least 16 years. Some drop in enforcement activity when a new president takes office is normal, says Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies white-collar crime and corporate compliance. That’s true regardless of party affiliation, because each new administration shifts its priorities and enforcement staff in the initial months after inauguration. But the current waning enforcement of white-collar crime, he says, goes beyond the typical dip that comes with a new presidency. “I think it’s been clear that the current administration has been very vocal about having a lighter footprint and lighter-touch approach to disciplining companies,” Soltes says. “This seems to be a direct output of policy shifts.” > “I think it’s been clear that the current administration has been very vocal > about having a lighter footprint and lighter-touch approach to disciplining > companies.” The administration has continued to find new ways to avoid punishing corporate misbehavior. One month after Trump’s inauguration, he signed an executive order temporarily pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a bedrock of anti-corruption law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign officials to benefit their business interests. The law was enacted in response to a series of bribery scandals in the 1970s that embarrassed the United States on the global stage, and it inspired other countries to pass similar rules. Yet Trump’s order argued that the law was hurting American business opportunities. When his administration lifted the pause in June 2025, it did so with new guidelines that say FCPA enforcement should focus on cases where the actions of a US company abroad disadvantaged one of their competitors. In other words, bribery on its own isn’t that bad—if it hasn’t hurt a different US business. Beyond just enforcement, the administration has also been issuing proposals to scrap corporate guardrails that have existed for decades. In September, for instance, the SEC issued a proposal to rescind what’s known as the “pay-to-play” rule: a nearly 20-year-old measure that prevents private equity firms and other investment advisers from buying access to billions of dollars in pension funds that belong to public employees. Last year, the SEC announced that it would mostly stop enforcing an 84-year-old agency rule that ensures shareholder concerns about a company have to be disclosed in some of their public filings. This September, the SEC proposed scrapping the rule entirely. In the spring, the Justice Department also commenced a major overhaul in how it handles corporate crime. Attorney General Todd Blanche directed the agency to consolidate several divisions that investigated different kinds of financial crime. Over the summer, that consolidation became something called the “National Fraud Enforcement Division,” with plans to use enormous manpower—about 500 attorneys and staff—to deprioritize white-collar crime and instead pursue four main pillars: healthcare fraud, trade fraud (evading tariffs, for instance), tax evasion, and fraud against the government, particularly by taxpayers exploiting public benefits. This last piece has been of particular importance to the White House, which appointed Vice President JD Vance to oversee the effort, pulled together a task force to study the issue, and claims to have uncovered $260 billion in federal benefit fraud already. > Drops in corporate crime enforcement and regulation have often preceded some > of the country’s biggest financial crises, Garrett says. “There are a lot of parts to the Department of Justice that have been dramatically altered,” says Brandon Garrett, a professor at Duke University’s law school who tracks corporate prosecutions. “Department of Justice simply is not doing what it used to do, and corporate prosecutions are an example.” The impacts of reduced corporate crime enforcement often don’t become visible for years. Soltes notes that a decline in enforcement doesn’t necessarily mean companies immediately begin committing fraud; instead, there is often a gradual culture shift, in which companies and their boards invest less of their resources into internal compliance. Longer term, though, drops in corporate crime enforcement and regulation have often preceded some of the country’s biggest financial crises, Garrett says. In the late 1970s, for instance, lawmakers deregulated the nation’s savings and loan industry. By the late 1980s, roughly a third of the country’s S&Ls had collapsed, leading to bank failures and a taxpayer funded bailout of more than $120 billion. During the following decade, the SEC granted waivers that avoided deeper financial oversight to an energy company called Enron and also didn’t review its annual SEC filings for years. By 2001, investors and journalists exposed Enron’s massive accounting fraud, and the company went bankrupt in what is still one of the largest bankruptcies in US history. Not long after, a regime of lax financial regulation and predatory lending led to the financial crisis of the late aughts, in which roughly 10 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. “We’ve had these bubbles of corporate fraud in this country,” Garrett says. “The question now is: By pulling back on prosecutions, are we blowing a big bubble of potential corporate fraud that will come to harm us all?”

In late September, a Los Angeles Times poll of that city’s mayoral race showed the upstart candidate, LA city councilmember Nithya Raman, up 11 points over incumbent mayor Karen Bass. It was a shocker. But what was really interesting was Bass’ response. Asked about the poll, Bass touted the more than 10,000 units of affordable housing built during her administration. “And we’re not slowing down,” Bass said. “I’ll continue accelerating housing production across LA to build the housing people can afford.” Funny, that. Raman’s an MIT-educated urban planner who has built her campaign around building more housing and attacked Bass for not building enough. Though Bass started her tenure as mayor with an executive directive that sped up new home construction, she faced huge backlash—mostly from the city’s wealthier and whiter west side—and ultimately softened the policy. Observers say that Raman’s entry into the race made housing into its central issue, so much so that Bass is now campaigning on it, too. Meanwhile! Up the coast in San Francisco—where rents have gone up about 25 percent this year, a one-bedroom apartment rents for about $4,000 a month, and the median single-family home sells for $1.9 million—state Sen. Scott Wiener is running against city Supervisor Connie Chan for a congressional seat that iconic Rep. Nancy Pelosi has held since Ronald Reagan was president. Like Pelosi, Wiener has a reputation as an effective legislator, in part built on his ability to get big laws passed requiring California communities to build more homes and making it much harder for local opposition to nix them. > A third of California renters—1.5 million households—pay more than half their > income in rent. Chan, on the other hand, has a history of voting against housing and transit-related laws in San Francisco in defense of local control and for all kinds of other stated reasons, like averting displacement of poorer folks (even from low-income homes to be built on a former Nordstrom’s valet parking lot), protecting buildings with historical significance, or just making sure new buildings don’t cast big shadows. It’s a record that the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board called “abysmal” and “a case study in why San Francisco has the nation’s worst housing crisis” in a full-throated endorsement of Wiener.  So of course they’re all talking about housing. Experts disagree on the exact size of California’s housing deficit—estimates have ranged from a shortage as small as tens of thousands of units to upwards of 3 million, but the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development says that California builds an average of 80,000 new homes a year when it should be building 180,000, especially in attractive coastal cities with jobs. A third of California renters, 1.5 million households, pay more than half their income in rent. The state has 12 percent of the US population (itself remarkable) and 22 percent of the nation’s unhoused people. It’s a disaster wrapped in a tragedy, and a grim look at the future of places similarly resistant to new construction. Housing is a totalizing issue—if you care about homelessness, affordability, taxes, public transit, public school funding, social justice, sprawl, and the environment, a good answer is “build more homes in cities.” Yet every local elected, in every state, who wants any of those things must also dodge flak from their own constituents who don’t want new buildings in their neighborhoods. Ladling more irony over the top: In these California races, all the candidates are Democrats. (The state’s furshlugginer “jungle primary” system sends the top two to the general.) Their point of divergence—semantic yet crucial—is whether the solution is to build more homes, and what the word “affordable” really means. The past couple decades have seen a lot of surprising questions break along partisan lines—but housing policy actually defies ideology and identification. In poli-sci speak, it’s a “cross-cutting cleavage,” and the fault line runs right through Los Angeles and San Francisco. Wiener’s an unabashed YIMBY—that’s “Yes in My Backyard,” the obverse of NIMBY. Alongside a couple other Northern California pols, he waged an epic, decade-long fight to pass laws that forced communities to accept lots of kinds of housing “by-right,” with no lawsuits or meetings to delay them to death, as I wrote about last year. The peak was last year’s SB79, which made big new buildings near public transit largely invulnerable to challenges from self-appointed defenders of neighborhood character. In San Francisco, that marks him as a “moderate.” “There are some Democrats who consider themselves, like Connie Chan, very progressive, who are progressive on some issues but are conservative on others,” Wiener told me in June. “I’ve said for a long time that being pro-housing is the progressive position, and opposing or making it harder to build housing is the conservative position.” Wiener name-checked leaders of the Democrats’ progressive wing who’ve also gotten more YIMBY-pilled—Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani…and Nithya Raman.  > Earlier generations of progressives kept the Bay Area from turning into > Shanghai. On the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai. In a debate in early October, moderators asked Chan about her district’s poor record of building new homes; she answered that new homes needed to be built citywide, and they had to be affordable. That’s a linguistic signifier in this fight. For-profit developers won’t build entire projects to sell or rent below market-rate, Californians regularly decline to fund bonds to cover affordable housing construction, and nothing brings people together like the prospect of fighting a new apartment building. So calling for 100 percent affordable housing combines progressive purity in defense of poor people with the conservative fear of having to live near one. Wiener pushed Chan on her opposition to new construction, and Chan accused him of being in the pocket of billionaires and real estate interests. And it’s true he (and the YIMBY movement) get support, financial and otherwise, from tech-aligned machers in San Francisco. Chan said that while the city needed more housing, it also needed tenant protections—housing couldn’t be “winner-take-all.” Chan’s campaign director Rudy Gonzalez, also the treasurer for the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades union, tells me that Chan has, in fact, championed a pipeline for new housing in other parts of the city—on Treasure Island, at a former power plant in the Dogpatch neighborhood, near the Stonestown Galleria mall. “If she was so against housing, wouldn’t there be evidence to support that? It’s that she doesn’t fit neatly into their curated narrative of what it means to be pro-housing, which is build at all costs and any costs,” Gonzalez says. “If you’re ‘yes-and,’ it’s like you’re an obstructionist.” That “and,” he says, is paying attention to things like infrastructure funding, streetscaping, and unionized construction labor.  San Francisco is a strange town, socioculturally liberal in the extreme but small and resistant to change. Politics there is local, personal, and grudge-filled—a knife fight in a phone booth, as the cliché goes. (In its endorsement of Weiner, the Chronicle flicked at the local gossip that Pelosi is supporting Chan over Wiener because Pelosi wanted her seat to someday go to her own daughter, and that Wiener angered Pelosi by announcing his candidacy before she announced her retirement. The relationship has been fraught.) More relevant here, the electeds most likely to resist changes to the built environment are still likely to be called progressive, possibly because they follow the tradition of midcentury tree huggers who—to their credit—saved redwood forests and staved off a 1950s plan to dam the Bay and fill it with concrete. They kept the Bay Area from turning into Shanghai, but on the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai. So while the spiciest parts of that Chan-Wiener debate were about AI policy and Gaza, housing policy may decide the race. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing his mildly YIMBYish plans to increase housing production; in a Chronicle poll of voters during the primary, just 48 percent of Chan’s supporters approved of those plans, while 85 percent of Wiener’s voters did—as did 73 percent of those who voted for the third-place finisher, a tech millionaire and former Ocasio-Cortez staffer named Saikat Chakrabarti, who now backs Chan. They also tended to be younger and newer to the city—typical markers of YIMBYism. Los Angeles is different. The Bay Area has its alliance between YIMBYs and technocratic-moderate Democrats, but “that’s less of the case down here,” says Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, a nonprofit housing advocacy group that endorsed Bass in her first term and is now supporting Raman. “Most of the moderate Democrats are not particularly pro-housing, and I think that most of the pro-housing energy comes from the progressive side of the political spectrum in Los Angeles.” The Democratic coalition that undergirds LA politics is largely funded by rich white people who live on tree-lined streets in single-family homes, their property taxes held artificially low by Proposition 13 restrictions. San Francisco has them, too, but they’re counterweighted by move-fast-and-break-things disruptovating tech guys. Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, popular with the progressive wing of the party that has typically aligned itself with leftist opposition to housing construction. In fact, Raman’s advocacy for homebuilding put her at odds with the DSA for a while; the group didn’t endorse Raman over Bass until September. Bass still sides with councilmembers trying to fight Wiener’s SB79. Her spokesperson touted the work Bass did on streamlining affordable housing, and told me that the mayor is “just as frustrated as everyone else is” at how hard it is to build in LA—and said that Raman’s district had been among the worst at building new affordable housing. > The places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, > which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue. In 2022, in her first week in office, Bass announced Executive Directive 1, a greasing of permitting wheels that made possible those 10,000 homes. She also presided over a much-needed citywide rezoning effort. “It was more broad than anything her predecessor did,” says David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “The difference between her and Nithya Raman is that Mayor Bass faced pretty strong backlash over Executive Directive 1 and the fear that there would be multifamily buildings in traditionally single-family neighborhoods.” In 2024 Bass softened the provisions of ED1 so it didn’t apply to “historic” (read: wealthier) neighborhoods. “At the same moment the mayor was moving to walk back that program, Councilmember Raman stood up for several projects proposed in her district that received a lot of intense pushback, and made sure they got built,” says Jesse Zwick, Southern California Director for the advocacy group Housing Action Coalition and a surrogate for the Raman Campaign. That gave Raman a political opening. By saying she was a yes on all of Bass’ homebuilding policies plus homebuilding in every neighborhood, at every price point, she cast herself as a change candidate. It’s a bet on what Angelenos care about: In that same poll showing Raman 11 points up, 26 percent of people said “building more affordable housing” was a top priority for the next mayor and 32 percent said “moving homeless people indoors” should be, too. Not everyone sees homelessness as a direct consequence of a housing shortage, but for what it’s worth, most of California’s unhoused folks are from California and from the county where they’re living. LA’s latest count showed more than 45,000 homeless people in the city, up 3.4 percent over 2025. That’s not a statistically significant increase, but still not good. Mayor Bass’ response to those new numbers was to fire the chair of the city’s housing and homelessness committee: Nithya Raman. California cities have a long history of land use policies explicitly designed to exclude nonwhite and poorer people. Proposition 13, the 1978 law that limits state property tax increases, dramatically favors current residents. So LA and San Francisco are pretty weird. “You have rich individuals, longtime homeowners who have accumulated significant amounts of wealth in their properties, in both places. And in both places they are apprehensive about embracing these kinds of zoning and land use changes,” Garcia says. “But then it gets tricky—and this is the funny thing about housing in general. You have business interests who understand that a housing crisis is bad for business, bad for their employees, and makes it harder for them to secure a workforce. And in many cases those groups are not always aligned with traditional Democratic values.” So greedy corporate types want to liberalize housing, and liberal homeowners are little-c conservative about it. Meanwhile, younger voters who do align with those traditional Democratic values can’t afford places to live, no matter how they label themselves politically. They tend to go YIMBY—until they get older and become homeowners or renters themselves, at which point they are more likely to oppose new home construction in their neighborhoods. It’s the circle of life.  If you ask people whether they believe people have a right to housing—as a team of political scientists did in 2024—a strong majority say yes. If you ask them about specific policies to make that happen, they lose their minds. They love rent control. They also love down payment assistance and home mortgage tax deductions—what an economist would call demand-side subsidies. The policy idea people are most tepid on? Making it easier to build new housing. “Ask people, ‘do you support a federal guarantee of housing for all?’ About half the public says yes. Those are the liberals,” says Clayton Nall, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of the paper. But there’s a catch, Nall adds. If you then ask those liberals if they support building apartments in their own community, just half of them say yes. > “Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than > wanting ‘affordable housing.’” Incontrovertibly, all that means less housing that costs more. But often, all those NIMBY-coded ideas are what politicians mean when they say they support “affordable housing.” “They don’t mean making more supply,” Nall says. “They instead mean building deed-restricted affordable housing, or public housing, or social housing with income or means-testing restrictions.” The language, in other words, gets confusing. “Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than wanting ‘affordable housing,’” Zwick says—if “affordable housing” means the kind you have to be below a certain income level to get. “A lot of Angelenos wouldn’t qualify, in the deed-restricted sense, for that housing. What they’re actually saying is, they want their housing to be affordable.” That’s the real trick. A left-YIMBY-type person might blame housing’s scarcity and cost on historically racist zoning, or a hijacking of California’s landmark environmental quality laws. A left-leaning NIMBY, on the other hand, might call out private equity ownership of homes, or say that homes are sitting unoccupied as the owners await rising rents. (This is a common conspiracy theory, by the way; California’s rental vacancy rate has been below 5 percent since 2013, and the statewide ownership vacancy rate is 1 percent. San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate is 2.2 percent; LA’s is 5.4 percent. And even those low numbers are optimistic—you need a certain level of vacancy to account for people moving and to alleviate overcrowding.) “Shockingly, not everyone is in the weeds of housing policy like some of us are, so it’s actually not that obvious that these candidates differ significantly on their approach,” Garcia says. “While each of them can acknowledge housing as a top issue, where they place blame and what they say the resolutions are will resonate with different people.” LA and SF are indigo-blue, politically. Liberals may broadly value a socioeconomically dynamic and polyglot city, want the unhoused to get housed, want to fight climate change and support public transit, and want to pay less for housing. Those are all things that building more homes in denser urban areas accomplish. But they also want to protect their home’s value and the look of the neighborhood, and they’ll line up to speak at city council meetings opposing construction of a new five-over-one at the end of their block. Nall and his co-authors have described this inconsistent approach as “folk economics.”  Still, the mayoral race in LA and the congressional race in San Francisco suggest that may be changing. Years ago, Nall and colleagues hypothesized that because national Democratic leaders simply weren’t saying much about housing, partisans had no “elite signals” on what to believe, and defaulted to defending their single-family homes and zucchini gardens. But now the housing crisis is more evident, and progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Warren and Mamdani are cuing those cues. Big-deal Democratic candidates are running for office on pro-housing platforms—even if their messaging is a bit muddled. They have to—right now, the places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue. That’s the thing about fault lines: Eventually, they cause an earthquake.

For all the despicable acts Elizabeth Holmes carried out as the CEO of Theranos, that long list of criminal behavior somehow manages to feel small under Nathan Fielder’s analytical masterpiece, You Can See Everything. Which is not to say they are treated trivially; Holmes’ dramatic fall from entrepreneurial wunderkind to convicted fraudster, along with her unshakable claims of innocence, loom over nearly every turn of the three-hour documentary. But after effectively moving in with Holmes in 2023, just 34 days before she is set to report to federal prison, Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim have turned their extraordinary access into an interrogation of heady questions that go far beyond Holmes’ guilty conviction. (In 2022, Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors but acquitted of defrauding patients. Earlier this year, her legal team asked President Trump for an early release.) The result is a documentary that wonders: What shapes our realities? Do we really know the depths of someone’s inner life? And perhaps critically, is it possible, even with near-total entrée into the lives of your subjects, to see everything? > When it comes to Elizabeth Holmes, what profundity could be wrung out of a > backstory that has been rigorously reported on and turned into an Emmy > Award-winning Hulu series? And yet, the film manages to be jaw-dropping. But back to Holmes for a moment. The film opens eerily, almost like a dream, capturing the disgraced tech leader as she tends to her two young children, including a newborn, while taking anguished Zoom calls with lawyers to discuss the logistics of her upcoming prison sentence: the timing of bathroom breaks, wake-up calls, etc. In several scenes that make up the first two hours, we see Holmes crying, something she tells Fielder she long had trouble letting others watch her do. These moments are arresting, visually striking in their fragility. But are they authentic? Are we, instead, witnessing yet more fraud in an attempt to curry sympathy with the public? Such doubt is warranted, perhaps necessary, considering Holmes’ record. But in some ways, I found them to be beside the point. Watching a mother weep, a waterfall of wet snot dripping from her nose as she considers her family and prison, it is nearly impossible not to want to reach out and embrace her. I felt this same mix of pity and tenderness kick in, repeatedly, when we bear witness to apparent abuse between supposed loved ones, again having the effect of wanting to protect a convicted fraudster. The filmmakers might complain that I’ve already revealed too much. Until last month, when the film made its surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, it had been a virtual secret that Holmes, in 2023, invited Fielder to document the final weeks of her freedom. And since the film’s stealth arrival, A24 has been exceptionally tight-lipped about the project, urging attendees and critics to abstain from revealing too much to anyone before its wider October release. Having been a fan of Fielder’s since the first days of Nathan for You, I understand that absurdist, slow-building intrigue is central to his work. Still, I was skeptical: When it comes to Elizabeth Holmes, what profundity could be wrung out of a backstory that has been rigorously reported on and turned into an Emmy Award-winning Hulu series? And yet. You Can See Everything is jaw-dropping, earning every effort at secrecy its executives doggedly sought to protect. I’ll stop before I end up blurting out more. It is ideal for viewers to go in knowing nothing more than what the trailer offers, especially any details of the final hour. But leaving the theater into the crispness of an October evening, a confounding mix of affections swirling in my brain—compassion, confusion, delight—I couldn’t help but feel a touch emotional. “Were there mostly good guys or bad guys?” my five-year-old asked when I returned home. I started to answer, but then realized I had no idea.

Two months after swimming across the breakwaters to Ceuta, Spain, Mohamed learned that his asylum claim was denied. In late July, at his home in Tangier, Mohamed didn’t hesitate when he received a social media alert that the border crossing between Morocco and the Spanish enclave had opened. He hopped in a friend’s car, drove four hours to the border, and jumped into the sea. “I swam for three or four hours, I was so cold,” he said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. You can’t even imagine.” He carried nothing but his phone and 14 euros.  I first connected with Mohamed through a friend in academia, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to him while he’s lived in a Ceuta shelter along the border. The facility has ten showers and four phone charging ports for over a thousand migrants. Mohamed was initially optimistic while waiting for his pending asylum application, but that’s changed now that his case has been denied. “I’m so sad, I have no mood,” he told me over WhatsApp. “All of our claims, they’re getting denied.” Mohamed (not his real name) is one of the estimated 80,000 people who crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over 48 hours last summer—the largest recorded migrant crossing which took place at one of only two land borders between Africa and the European Union. The other is the Spanish enclave Melilla and both locations have experienced migrant crossings. Over two days in May 2021, 8,000 people entered Ceuta, and in June 2022, 2,000 people attempted to cross the Melilla border fence. But the sheer number of people who made the crossing in July eclipses previous attempts by an order of magnitude. Like Mohamed, many migrants this summer waded into the sea and swam around the breakwaters of Tarajel Beach and Benzú into Ceuta. An estimated 141 people died, some by drowning and some were crushed as they attempted to climb around the border fence. “It was a disaster,” said Francesca Fusaro, a volunteer for No Name Kitchen, a humanitarian NGO that provides aid to migrants crossing borders. Within a matter of days, over 70,000 people voluntarily returned to Morocco, but thousands still remain in Ceuta hoping to be granted asylum. More are being rejected every day. Photo Mohamed shared with me on WhatsApp of migrants protesting for their asylum cases to be heard in Ceuta after crossing the border. Photo taken sometime in September 2026.Courtesy Photo When news of the mass crossing first broke, headlines describing the events went viral: “Taxi drivers called it an invasion; NGOs described it as a humanitarian crisis; local politicians faced with handling the situation labeled it a national emergency,” Carmen Morán Breña wrote in El País. Meanwhile, far-right Russian and Israeli networks fueled right-wing social media narratives online, calling the crossing an “assault” and pushing Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Media attention may have focused on the geopolitics behind the crossing, but another reality was in the background: climate change.  That is not to say that the effects of climate change caused tens of thousands of people to risk their lives by attempting to swim to Ceuta. Economic forces were much more urgent motivators for Mohamed to leave his home. “I am suffering in Morocco,” he told me. “There are no job opportunities. I have a degree in British literature. I speak English, German, and French. I work as a painter.”  But after another summer of extreme temperatures and wildfires in the northern and southeastern provinces in Morocco, severe flash flooding and landslides in rural communities throughout the High Atlas Mountains, and the culmination of a seven-year drought after a winter of heavy rainfall across the country, climate change also may be an underlying factor in creating the economic crisis forcing so many to leave their homes. As Lauren Herzer Risi pointed out in her piece for New Security Beat, “60,000 [plus] people don’t just cross a border when a guard points to an open door.” I spoke to several experts focused on the intersection of climate change, migration, and border security. They explained the nuanced interaction between the warming world and migration. “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or not,” said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and researcher who has spent years documenting what she calls “border necrotechnics”—the lethal blend of law, racism, and technology at borders. “Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate element built into it.” > “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or > not. Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate > element built into it.” Whether within or across borders, “no one calls themselves a climate migrant,” said Amali Tower, the co-founder of the organization Climate Refugees. Legally, there’s no such category because international law does not consider climate displacement to be grounds for refugee status. Add to this the fact that data on international climate displacement is lacking; it’s easier to measure displacement after a distinct disaster, such as a hurricane, rather than the slow onset of rising temperatures or sea levels. Today, North Africa and the Middle East are warming faster than the rest of the world, and Morocco’s agricultural sector—the cornerstone of the country’s economy—is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts like soil degradation and depleted groundwater. Many Moroccan farmers have had to adjust their lives in response to extreme weather events, planting different crops, or eating different food, or reducing livestock holdings. A January 2026 Afrobarometer survey showed that almost a fifth of all those surveyed considered moving to a new place due to climate impacts. A 2021 World Bank report found that by 2050 in Morocco, 1.9 million climate migrants would be moving internally in the country. “The relationship between environmental change, climate hazards, and aspirations to move is incredibly complex,” said Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, a migration researcher who studied climate displacement in Morocco. In Syria, for example, the decade-long civil war and subsequent refugee crisis was the result of systemic political and sectarian repression. But, just before the civil war broke out in 2011, the country experienced the worst multiyear drought in nearly a millennium, decimating Syria’s economy and livestock. Climate change is what Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and Stimson Center fellow, calls the “mood music” behind events like Ceuta, not mass migration’s main driver, but a constant presence. “It puts a proverbial thumb on the scales that amplifies the pressure exerted by a whole bundle of other things,” he said. “This is the bitter reality of climate-induced crises.” Coupled with stressors like rising housing costs, growing wealth inequality, and youth disenfranchisement laid bare during Morocco’s 2025 GenZ212 uprising, “the difference between the bright lights of Casablanca and some of these really, really quite deprived areas is stark in the extreme,” said Schwartzstein. Before even reaching another country’s border, climate migration typically starts with internal movement within a country. “They move from village to small town, from small town to bigger city,” said Sobczak-Szelc. “Only later, when the city doesn’t fulfill their changed expectations, do they think about moving further.” Mohamed followed a similar trajectory. He was originally from Fez, a city in central Morocco with high rates of income inequality and poor public infrastructure in comparison to its coastal neighbor. When he was unemployed and in his twenties he moved north to Tangier—only to find similar circumstances. “It’s reductive of international law and policy to expect people to fit into one neat lane,” Tower says. “People have always moved, and they’ve moved for no one singular reason.” After the mass crossing, Morocco’s Association for Human Rights issued a statement saying that it “[reflected] the profound despair among young people fueled by the lack of prospects, endemic corruption, the rise of authoritarianism, the absence of social justice, and the lack of employment opportunities and decent conditions.”   Todd Miller, a journalist for The Border Chronicle in Tucson, Arizona, has covered the intersection of border militarization, surveillance, and climate change. In his 2021 Global Climate Wall report, Miller wrote that wealthy countries would rather spend on average over 2.3 times more to arm their borders than on efforts to mitigate climate change, using the so-called threat of “mass migration” to justify increased surveillance. “Attention isn’t going towards helping people adapt to climate change or move them into better situations,” Amali Tower, from Climate Refugees, says. “Instead, we’re putting all our money and effort into how to keep people out.”  In some ways, the regional response to July’s mass crossing illustrates their points. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s visa-free region known as the Schengen Area, writing on X that the mass crossing demonstrated “that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders.” Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria supported Meloni’s call. And, in late September, the European Commission floated plans for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, to lead a rapid-response team that could deploy within 24 hours in a crisis. The Chief of Frontex said its agency could deploy satellites, aircraft, and observers on the ground “to improve our situational awareness.” For the first three weeks after Mohamed arrived in Ceuta, he slept in a forest on the edge of the city with limited food and water. For several nights, Spanish military guards patrolled the forest for migrants. “Some friends near us, the military found them and started beating them, they smashed their phones,” Mohamed said. “Those first few nights, I was very scared.” As Ceuta has faded away from public attention, No Name Kitchen has continued to report similar stories of law enforcement violence against migrants waiting to have their asylum cases processed in Ceuta.  Photo shared with me via WhatsApp by Mohamed of migrants sleeping in the forest in Ceuta in August 2026.Courtesy photo And for the people most affected by climate change, leaving is not a choice, even when faced with violence from law enforcement and the security state. “There’s a desperation that leads to migrants wanting to leave, so, they’ll take any avenue available to them, even if it’s short-lived,” Tower said. “They do so when circumstances become untenable, when everything they’ve tried has been exhausted, and it’s now beyond their means of coping.”  Fatima Zahra Znioi, a researcher at Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research who moved to Poland from Morocco several years ago, compares the situation for many Moroccans to being trapped inside a burning house. “There are two ways of dying,” she said, “you can just burn to death, or jump out the window.” Znioi misses her home in Agadir, but understands why so many others have tried to leave. “I believe these people were completely desperate. You have to be to throw yourself into the sea.”  In my last video call with Mohamed, climate change never came up. Instead, Mohamed tells me he’s “fed up,” and even though he still has the right to appeal his asylum denial, he’s getting ready to return to Tangier. Then I ask about his plans for the future. “This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed into Ceuta,” he says. “I’ll just try again.” 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an unusual warning this week to the country’s largest asset managers and a climate-focused investor group over their roles in a 2021 campaign that replaced board directors at ExxonMobil. The commission published a letter saying it had concluded a probe into the entities, and while it found no evidence of violations, it expressed “serious concerns” about their actions. Investor advocates and some former SEC staff say the letter clearly aims to suppress shareholder advocacy on climate change and pressure large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, each of which were named in the letter, to steer clear of the topic entirely. It is only the latest move by the SEC this year to limit investors’ ability to address climate risks and engage with corporate boards more broadly. The Trump administration and Republican officials across the country have spent years clamping down on efforts to press corporations for climate action.  In 2022, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives opened an antitrust investigation into some of the same groups, accusing them of acting like a “cartel.” More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general also launched probes. Oil industry campaign contributions have gone overwhelmingly to Republican candidates. Mika Morse, who was a policy counsel on climate risk to former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, said many investors and asset managers view climate change as a significant risk to their portfolios and feel a fiduciary duty to engage with companies on the topic, but may now hesitate to continue that work. > “This is just part of this pressure campaign to ensure that the financial > system doesn’t take climate into account.”  “Investors are feeling really inhibited because of this fear that they will become the target of investigations,” Morse said. “And this type of harassment is really effective, unfortunately.” SEC Enforcement Director David Woodcock, who began that position in May, was an attorney at Exxon during the investors’ campaign, according to his LinkedIn profile. An SEC spokesperson said the investigation began last year and that Woodcock recused himself. The investigation probed the communications of some of the country’s largest asset managers and pension funds—including BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund—with a group called Climate Action 100+, an investor initiative that pushes for climate action by large corporate emitters. The report traced what it called a campaign by Climate Action 100+ beginning in 2019 to change Exxon’s board because of the company’s inaction on global warming. The California and New York pension funds were active in the climate group, and BlackRock and State Street joined the initiative in 2020. By 2021, a small activist investor firm called Engine No. 1 had launched a campaign to replace some of Exxon’s directors. That campaign focused on what the firm said was the company’s poor financial performance—Exxon had been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average the previous year as its stock price lagged—rather than inaction on climate change. But the SEC letter said Engine No. 1 had communicated with some Climate Action 100+ members and with Ceres, a sustainable business advocacy group that helps coordinate the climate investor organization. That year, the campaign succeeded in appointing three new members to Exxon’s board, in large part by convincing large asset managers like BlackRock to vote yes.  It was a huge blow to Exxon and came at a low point for the oil industry. Profits had plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some analysts were predicting peak oil consumption had passed. Major investors lined up behind the notion that climate risks were systemic, and President Joe Biden had won election the prior year after pledging to shift away from fossil fuels. In the following years, the oil industry and its allies in public office and think tanks pushed back forcefully, filing lawsuits, launching investigations, and pushing legislation that targeted opponents in the financial sector, academia and elsewhere.  The Trump administration has incorporated this effort as public policy through the Department of Justice, SEC, and other agencies, siding with the oil industry in numerous lawsuits, for example. The SEC investigation examined whether the asset managers and other members of the climate organization coordinated their votes, which could have triggered onerous reporting requirements under SEC rules meant to give public insight into campaigns by activist investors to influence companies.  > “Climate Action 100+ supports investors as they assess and address the > financial risks that climate poses to the companies they invest in.” Firms like BlackRock are exempt from these reporting requirements even though they hold large stakes in many companies because they are considered passive investors. The SEC letter raised the question of whether the firms should have been required to report more extensively in the case of the Exxon campaign. Experts in securities law say the difference is significant and that a finding of violation could have had serious implications. Ultimately, the commission did not find evidence to support any of these claims but still issued a public report. Jim Moloney, director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, said the “report reminds asset managers and investors of their responsibilities with respect to shareholder engagement, especially in the context of organized efforts that follow a playbook similar to that of Climate Action 100+.” Shareholder advocates have criticized the SEC report, arguing that it sought to intimidate investors. “What we’ve seen in the ongoing investigations and attacks on climate groups is simply an opinion that shareholders should not be considering climate,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group that is part of the Climate Action 100+. “This is just part of this pressure campaign to ensure that the financial system doesn’t take climate into account.”  Andrew Behar, As You Sow’s chief executive, said the campaign to remake Exxon’s board was an attempt to reverse the company’s declining financial performance, and it worked. He pointed to a sustained increase in Exxon’s value that coincided with the addition of new board members. Overall, Behar said, the campaign showed how capitalism is meant to work. Michael Boudett, general counsel at Ceres, said in a statement, “Climate Action 100+ has always operated within US securities law. It supports investors as they assess and address the financial risks that climate poses to the companies they invest in. It is up to every participating Climate Action 100+ investor to make their own decisions, including how they vote their shares.”  He added, “Understanding material risks, including financial risks from climate change, is central to that duty.” Many shareholder advocates have criticized the SEC more broadly under the Trump administration. It is generally supposed to have five commissioners with at least two from each party, but there are currently only two total, and President Donald Trump has not appointed any Democratic commissioners. Last week, the commission issued a rule saying it can reach a quorum with only one commissioner. BlackRock and State Street declined to comment, with a BlackRock spokesperson pointing to the SEC report’s declaration that the investigation “did not develop evidence that BlackRock or State Street agreed to vote proxies in certain manners or shared their proxy voting intentions with investors or others associated with” the Climate Action 100+. Exxon did not respond to a request for comment. As conservatives have targeted BlackRock, its positions have shifted. The asset manager left the Climate Action 100+ in 2024. Behar said that a few years ago, BlackRock voted in favor of nearly half the proposals his organization supported, which cover numerous social and environmental topics. Last year BlackRock backed hardly any. Morse said the SEC has identified all the ways investors try to press companies to manage climate risk and is working to shut down each path, from limiting their ability to file shareholder resolutions to making it harder for investors to meet with companies. “The total picture is pretty stunning,” Morse said.  After the commission proposed rescinding a rule on climate-related disclosures, Morse said she heard from many investors and people at corporations that they disagreed with the proposal but declined to submit comments because they feared retribution.  While she understood their position, she said, “This is such a low point for our democracy, that companies and investors would disagree with a policy but be afraid to comment.”