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.

BRUSSELS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Friday that as many as 20 million Ukrainians could be forced to flee to Europe if his country falls to Russia. “Russia is killing us,” Zelenskyy told reporters at a press conference on Friday during a summit of European Union leaders, adding Ukrainians were being “pushed” out of their country. “They [Russia] don’t want to stop.” In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, millions of Ukrainians fled their homes in Europe’s fastest and largest refugee crisis since World War II. Today, over 4 million Ukrainians live in EU countries under temporary protection status, with the largest populations in Germany, Poland and Czechia, according to Eurostat.  Zelenskyy’s stark warning comes as Ukraine heads into a brutal fifth wartime winter under Russian bombardment. Kyiv faces a budget shortfall of $30 to $35 million next year, according to projections from the International Monetary Fund — even accounting for a €90 billion loan Brussels agreed to provide last year.  The Ukrainian president traveled to Brussels to meet with European leaders and shore up financial support for his embattled country. While the EU is Ukraine’s staunchest backer, the bloc’s list of priorities is stacked with rising energy costs, looming elections, geopolitical crises and an impasse over its €2 trillion budget. 

Christian nationalism—the idea that strict adherence to Christian theology should govern American political life, separation of church and state be damned—has been on the rise in America for years. Some vanguard elements of this revolutionary movement believe adherents are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States, seeking command of schools, public policy, and even the courts. Its ascendancy helped propel Donald Trump into the White House the first time, and it continues to find purchase at the highest rungs of government, including inside Trump’s second-term cabinet. How is the movement impacting the midterm elections? Our guest on this new episode of Stress Test is Kiera Butler, a Mother Jones national correspondent who has tracked Christian nationalism for years and documented the shifting fortunes of its top leaders. In Trump’s first term, the charismatic prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation held sway. In his second, the ascendant figures are more ascetic, chief among them Doug Wilson, pastor and founder of Christ Church, a more Calvinist congregation in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson also co-created the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one attended by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “Pete Hegseth, who has started these worship sessions in the Pentagon, brought Doug Wilson in earlier this year as a speaker,” Kiera says. “You have this very clear line from this Christian nationalist leader, Doug Wilson, right to Pete Hegseth, who is very close to President Trump.” Kiera joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss the movement’s rising political influence, and the current state of religion in politics more broadly: how it is shaping leaders like Hegseth and JD Vance, and how the right has pushed to rebrand basic Christian empathy as a sin. Garrison, himself a former pastor, observes how the left is trying to reclaim the space: “You have a candidate like James Talarico, who is actively talking about Jesus as a person who invites the stranger and the immigrant. And so you have this kind of warring and competing vision of Christianity playing out in American politics.” What’s stressing Kiera out? “Fundamentalism in all of its forms,” she says. “When I look around and I see people who are against religious pluralism and who are actively trying to undermine the separation of church and state, that’s what freaks me out.” This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors. Garrison Hayes: Talk about faith during these midterms is kind of everywhere. We’re talking about Islam and Judaism. And of course, if you’re anything like me, you’re interested in the conversation about Christianity that’s happening again during the midterms. If you’ve been keyed in on the political conversation that we’ve been having here in America, then you know that you’re well aware that this conversation about Christianity and faith isn’t only limited to the right wing. Both Democrats and Republicans are leveraging the common language of faith to appeal to voters in this time. And so, who better to talk to than my colleague Kiera Butler? She’s been diving deep into Christian nationalism, following it closely for a very long time. Welcome back. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes, and we’ve been talking about the midterms kind of nonstop. That’s what this show is all about. And I’m really, really excited to dig into this conversation. I’ll tell you, in the last episode, David Corn, my co-host, and I had a great conversation with Mother Jones reporter Russ Choma on the money side of the upcoming midterm election. There’s so much there around who’s funding who, campaign finance, potential malfeasance, all that stuff is kind of there, and you definitely want to go back and check it out. If you missed it, you can watch that on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/motherjones. Definitely go check that out. But I think this conversation is also really interesting and really, really important. We’re talking about the role of faith in the current political economy. So without further ado, I want to welcome national correspondent Kiera Butler onto the stage here with me to talk about today’s topic. Kiera’s been keeping a close tab on extremism and Christian nationalism here in the United States for a while. Kiera, welcome to the show. Kiera Butler: Thank you so much for having me, Garrison. GH: Of course, of course. I want to start with where we are right now. You know, I made something a little over a year ago after Charlie Kirk’s death. I watched his memorial service, and it felt like a revival. It also kind of felt like the kind of peak of Christian nationalist fervor in this country. I don’t know if I’m misreading that. You’ve been, of course, staying close on this. And so a year later, heading into the midterms, are we still seeing that same momentum that many Christian nationalist types were riding after the unfortunate and untimely assassination of Charlie Kirk? KB: Yeah, you know, that was certainly a flashpoint. Charlie Kirk’s murder hit a lot of people really hard in the Christian community, and not just Christian nationalists either. You know, I think that was a real reckoning in that community. And in some ways it was a unifying force, and in other ways, you know, we saw new divisions kind of coming to light after that. I would say that since then it’s not that there’s any less Christian nationalism, it’s just that it’s looking a little bit different, and we can get into that. GH: Yeah, I’d like to get into it. And it felt like in some ways some people were trying to use that as a way to advance a more stringent Christian nationalist agenda. And I’m curious if you were seeing the same thing up close. KB: Yeah, so I like to put the Christian nationalists into kind of two different buckets, right? You’ve got the kind of more old-school evangelical charismatic Christian nationalists. These are folks, I’ve done a little bit of reporting on the New Apostolic Reformation. This is a movement where, you know, self-proclaimed prophets will talk about politics as kind of a mountain to be conquered. There are these seven mountains that, you know, culture and entertainment and politics and education. There’s, you know, several more as well. And these folks, you know, if you picture kind of your evangelical megachurch, you know, the worship band, people kind of swaying back and forth, it’s a very kind of interactive style of worship. This was the movement that really defined Trump’s first presidency. You know, this is Paula White-Cain, who is actually still Trump’s spiritual adviser, but this movement was ascendant, and you saw January 6, 2021, was a big moment for these folks. You know, that this movement was very influential in that storming of the Capitol and in election denialism. In Trump’s second term, we’ve really seen the emergence, or I guess the ascendancy, of a different kind of Christian nationalism. We’ve seen a group of folks who I wrote about about two years ago for the first time called the TheoBros. These folks are Reformed Christians, and Reformed theology is a whole thing, as you know, Garrison. It’s—there’s a lot to it. But basically, these folks believe that God decides in advance who’s going to heaven. Their worship style is much more restrained. They sing hymns and psalms, you know, that they are not the, like, you know, soaring worship band, pastor in jeans, like, you know, strutting back and forth. They’re very almost puritanical in their worship style. These folks, though, are pretty extreme in their beliefs. A lot of them believe women shouldn’t be able to vote. A lot of them believe in bringing—they call it prison reform, but by prison reform they mean bringing back public flogging and public execution, which, you know, we’ve seen—we’ve just seen a whole news cycle about that recently. And, you know, they also—they’re self-proclaimed Christian nationalists. They will come right out and say, you know, I believe that the Ten Commandments should be replacing the US Constitution. So I should say, you know, that was kind of a long-winded way of explaining these two Christian nationalist camps that I notice and, you know, really saying that the latter, the TheoBros, I see as more influential politically these days. GH: Yeah, that’s a good point to kind of transition, because the idea here, you know, as you’re saying with the folks who are more influential, is to really have the ear of the president, the people who are really wanting to have a little bit more influence on exactly what kind of comes out. And I guess my question in all of this is, who are the people who have the ear of the president in this time, and who are the leaders that are influencing those who will likely be elected in these midterm elections? KB: One of the most influential Christians who has Trump’s ear is Pete Hegseth, secretary of, as he says, war. He is a Reformed Christian. He certainly belongs to this camp of TheoBros that I was just talking about. His faith—he belongs to a church that is in a denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. This is a Christian nationalist denomination. It was started by a guy named Doug Wilson, who’s a pastor in Moscow, Idaho. I’ve spent a lot of time reporting about Doug Wilson and his beliefs, and he is the spiritual adviser of Pete Hegseth. And in fact, Pete Hegseth, who has started these, like, worship sessions in the Pentagon, brought Doug Wilson in earlier this year as a speaker at the Pentagon. So, you know, in Pete Hegseth, you have this very clear line from this Christian nationalist leader, Doug Wilson, right to Pete Hegseth, who is very close to President Trump. I will also say that JD Vance, even though he’s a Catholic, so he’s a kind of a different flavor, he mixes pretty freely with this group of TheoBros. A lot of the TheoBros have connections to Silicon Valley. And JD Vance became acquainted with them during his time in Silicon Valley with the world of Peter Thiel, another Christian thinker. And so JD Vance is—he’s very influenced by this, by the TheoBro movement, by some of the, I would say, like, postliberal intellectual circles that JD Vance moves in have influenced him quite a bit. GH: Yeah, well, Kiera, you kind of undersold yourself. You haven’t just been reporting on Doug Wilson. I want to come back to JD Vance and the folks inside the White House in a bit, but you haven’t just been reporting on Doug Wilson. You actually went out to Moscow, Idaho, to talk to him. You interviewed him, and I’m curious what that was like, and what did you see when you were there? KB: Yeah, I’ve actually been to Moscow twice now. So in Moscow, it’s—I have to say, it’s an adorable town. I felt so at home there. I used to live in Berkeley, California, and it reminded me of, like, a mini Berkeley, like college town, you know, think, like, little cozy cafes and, like, couches on porches, and, you know, the University of Idaho is the big college that’s there, and their mascot is the Vandal. And so you see this, like, little Vandal things everywhere. Super cute town, really beautiful part of the country. It’s kind of in the northwest corner of Idaho. But Doug Wilson has this project there. He’s trying to make Moscow, Idaho, into his own little Christian fiefdom. He’s said this. This is something that he’s, you know, fully, you know, states as a goal of his, and he’s done a pretty good job. He started this church, which is now a whole denomination of Reformed Christians. I think there’s something like 160 churches around the world in this denomination. In the county, Latah County, in Moscow, where he is, there are seven churches that are related to his original one. He started a publishing house that’s now a media company. It’s called Canon Press, K through 12 Christian school, a college called New Saint Andrews— GH: I’m jumping in only because, Kiera, I imagine someone watching this is like, okay, he has a, you know, a press and a media company and he has a church that’s maybe growing, perhaps. What are some of the things that a person or someone who subscribes to Doug Wilson’s beliefs, or maybe just Doug Wilson himself—he can speak for himself—what does he believe? As I understand it, there are things that they believe about women and about the gender roles and all of this stuff. Can you get into some of the beliefs? KB: Yeah, absolutely. So Doug is a proud—well, I’ll say Doug is a fan of the patriarchy. His religion, his denomination is patriarchal. Women do not hold leadership roles in his church. He believes in household voting, which is actually something JD Vance has mentioned too, where the head of the household would vote for the entire household. And Doug Wilson believes that men should be the heads of households, and that wives should be submissive to their husbands. That’s a strong core of his belief. Related to that, he also believes that women are ill suited for combat roles in the military, which of course gets important when you think about what Pete Hegseth is doing with the US military. And in addition to that, you know, he has the sort of beliefs that you would expect from a kind of a fundamentalist Christian. He believes gay marriage should be illegal. He believes abortion should be illegal, that abortion should be considered murder. GH: It actually may be helpful, Kiera, to just hear from Doug Wilson. I’d love to play a little bit of tape, a little snippet from your interview with Doug Wilson back in September, where you asked him about his relationship with the defense secretary, or the secretary of war, as he calls himself. And then I want to ask you about what you thought of his answer. So let’s hear from Doug Wilson first. [Clip plays.] GH: You know, it really strikes me that he is almost trying to downplay his kind of connection and role. That’s what kind of stood out to me. What stood out to you, Kiera? KB: Yeah, you know, what stood out to me in all of my interactions with Doug Wilson when I was there in Moscow is that he is kind of very different when I’m interviewing him, like, you know, when I’m talking to him in person, than he is in some of the viral clips of him that have gone around. You know, he famously said to CNN, like, women are the kind of people who people come out of. In it—I don’t know, like, in his speech at a National Conservatism Conference two years ago, he said, I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian. He talks about the tranny flag a lot. He, you know, uses the word retarded, retard. He, you know, he is so much more measured when I’ve been talking to him one-on-one, or, you know, you saw his wife Nancy there in that clip, with her as well. It really is, like, I’ve been thinking of it as, like, a tale of two Dougs. GH: That’s fascinating. You bring out the—like, maybe you have, like, an energy that brings the respect out of him in some way. I don’t know what you think that is. KB: Well, I think part of it is that he knows who he’s talking to, right? Before I ever went to Moscow, I’d been emailing back and forth with him, and to his credit, like, he will always answer my emails, but he’ll often work in, like, a little dig at the end. Like, he’ll be like, Okay, and that’s what I think, and you can go write that in your commie publication. So he certainly is aware of the Mother Jones readership, I guess. The other thing I think that is relevant here is that he—every time he’s—he told me during that same interview that you just played a clip from, I asked him, like, is there any part of this when you have a clip that goes viral or, you know, when you say something particularly controversial and there’s a lot of media scrutiny, like, is there anything that’s good for you and your movement when that happens? And he said, absolutely, it’s great for us. You know, people see what I’m saying and they, you know, want to move to Moscow, Idaho, or they want to, you know, find their nearest Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches church. Another one of his core beliefs is that Christians—like, Christian nationalism is very literal to him. So in his ideal version of a Christian America, people of other faiths would not be allowed to hold office. And he gave me an example: Like, Muslims in his Christian America would be able to practice their faith, but they would not be able to build a minaret. So this is a very kind of muscular version of Christian nationalism that he’s imagining. GH: Yeah, there’s something about it that, you know, I don’t think it always goes unsaid, so I won’t make that statement, but it isn’t said enough that there’s something, I think, deeply bigoted about a lot of what Christian nationalism is trying to advance. I mean, you have—obviously this is Islamophobic in nature. We know that there is actually a ton of anti-Blackness that kind of pops up among some of these, quote-unquote, TheoBros, as you call them. And obviously we also have seen a great deal of antisemitism present in Christian nationalism. In the conversations that you’ve been having with Christian nationalists, have any of those elements of bigotry come up when they aren’t being polite, good little boys? KB: Yeah, you know, anytime you ask about immigration, that’s kind of the tell, right? That, like, you know, the both kinds of Christian nationalists, both the New Apostolic Reformation, kind of the charismatic, Pentecostal evangelicals, and the TheoBros, these Reformed guys, like, none of them are, you know, pro-immigrant in any way. And the only—well, no, definitely will not say the only, but an interesting tension comes when you think about Catholics, right? And, you know, JD Vance has gotten himself into some trouble with this. JD Vance obviously is very—it’s kind of a hard line on immigration, but his Catholic faith is in conflict with that. You know, there’s social justice teaching in Catholicism, that, you know, to be welcoming to immigrants, to, you know, extend empathy to immigrants is a core tenet of that faith. So there’s been some interesting tension there. And I’m actually curious, Garrison, what you’ve noticed along those lines as you’ve been looking at folks on the left and Christians in those circles. GH: Yeah, I mean, well, you have this big showdown happening in Texas, where you have the Republican Party has, of course, taken the position of being anti-immigration and taking pretty hard lines on immigration. And then on the Democratic side, you have a candidate like James Talarico, who is actively talking about Jesus as a person who invites the stranger and the immigrant. And so you have this kind of warring and competing vision of Christianity, I think, playing out in American politics. You know, it’s really interesting to see the way that scripture is leveraged on both sides of this conversation. I, of course, have my own perspective in all of this, but I’m really curious to see how Americans who have obviously voted now for Donald Trump—some subset, some section of Americans have voted for Donald Trump, who always ran on an anti-immigration kind of platform—they voted for him now three times, right? And obviously elected him twice. And so I’m kind of interested how a state like Texas, where this conversation isn’t just theoretical, it’s very much kind of playing out in the practical—I’m curious how that will play out from an electoral perspective. But it is interesting to see how Christians on the center left are thinking about Christianity as a way to advance their political agenda. And I don’t think it’s necessarily new. I wouldn’t describe it as new. Black Christians have absolutely across the South been using and leveraging their faith in electoral politics for a long time. I mean, the Souls to the Polls movement has been a really significant way to get Black voters out to go vote, but I’m seeing it in kind of outside of Black circles in a way that does feel a little new, and I’ve been really curious where that’s coming from. KB: I’m curious if you’re hearing in your circles anything about empathy, because one of the big themes over the last year or two, I would say, in the right-wing Christian nationalist circles is the notion of empathy as a sin. The idea that kind of an excess of empathy and/or misplaced empathy is sinful and is something that, you know, Christians need to repent for. And this, particularly with immigration, I would say, you know, folks are saying, like, you know, if you’re welcoming everybody and if you’re, you know, if you’re having a, you know, a bleeding heart for, you know, all of these people who are flooding over the borders, then that is a sin. You’re sinning. What are you hearing in your circles? GH: You know, I’m certainly hearing the opposite of that. This idea is, of course, a part of, to your point, a kind of certain type of Christian nationalist thinking. It’s certainly a talking point. There’s a commentator named Allie Beth Stuckey who wrote an entire book around this called Toxic Empathy. And so I’ll take the reporting hat off for just a moment here. And as a former pastor, I will say that the notion of having some kind of empathy for the stranger, for your neighbor, understanding, welcoming them in, that is a very common theme throughout scripture. You know, whatever you do to the least of these, you’ve done unto me, and, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a really common theme throughout the synoptic gospels. And so it’s hard to kind of wrap my mind around, as a former pastor, it’s hard to really wrap my mind around this as a sin. Okay, that’s kind of difficult to find, I think, in scripture. But I will say, you know, I’m really curious, you know, what—you know, putting the reporter hat back on, you know, maybe for a moment here—I’m really curious if this is cutting through. And I, you know, Kiera, maybe you have access to some polling data and what people are actually feeling here in the moment, but I’ve been really curious to learn more about how Christians are responding to this. I mean, truly, love thy neighbor feels so fundamental to the kind of ethic of Christianity that it’s hard to imagine what Christianity is without it. And I would, you know, use that term, love thy neighbor, as kind of a proxy for this concept of empathy. KB: Yeah, I mean, that’s—to me, when I first heard about Allie Beth Stuckey’s book, and also a co-pastor of Doug Wilson’s, Joe Rigney, wrote a very similar book, and when I first heard about it, I thought to myself, just like you were saying, it seems incompatible with basic Christian teachings. But, you know, I think it was maybe it was last year when JD Vance was talking about this, when he sort of got into it about the ordo amoris, the Latin for rightly ordered love, I guess. He was talking about, you know, how you should love, or God wants you to love your family first and then, you know, your extended family, and it kind of is, you know, this concentric-circle model of who you should devote your care and empathy to, and the farther out you get from your kind of core nuclear family, the less you should love. And he used that to sort of explain his stance on immigration. And the pope actually came back and was like, That’s not what that means, which was—it was just kind of a funny little disagreement. But I agree, you know, I don’t have any polling. I don’t know whether there’s polling on this issue of empathy or not, and if there is, I don’t have it at my fingertips, but I am very curious about how Christians are receiving that notion. GH: You know, I think a lot of this really depends on something that I’ve heard pastors say for a long time, which is that people aren’t really reading their Bibles anymore, and that there’s this kind of—there’s a real concern that Christians are getting further and further removed from the kind of primary source text in all of this. I will say, as a person who again has kind of studied this stuff and was a pastor for a while, that a part of the Ten Commandments is, you know, the fourth commandment talks about the extension of rest, and it really goes all the way out to the stranger that’s in your country, the stranger in your gates, and then it works backwards from there all the way to the person who lives in your home, a family member. And so this kind of notion that one is supposed to love closer and then maybe kind of work your way out, it kind of, like, there’s something, I’d say, maybe intuitive about that, the idea of proximity, but I think the Bible writers go out of their way to invert that as a way of, I think, reaffirming the importance of loving those far away from you. Okay, this isn’t Bible study, Kiera Butler. KB: I do want to say, though, this made me think of something, and I can’t help but mention it. There is a Progressive Baptist church—and I live in Atlanta, and there’s a Progressive Baptist church in my neighborhood—and they have a bunch of signs outside the church, and one of the signs is, like, somebody drew, like, almost like a child’s drawing of Jesus, and the speech bubble says, Y’all, that is not what I said. GH: Right. Right. Okay. I want to move us on. You just kind of closed out a big investigation about this organization called Life Surge. I loved your episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. It was so good. You went to this event, you kind of dug deep. If you don’t know, Life Surge is a Christian roadshow that’s tied to the former star quarterback Tim Tebow, and it was great. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about that and where we can go find it. What’s kind of interesting about that investigation? KB: Yeah, so Life Surge is—their main event that they draw people in with is, like, a roadshow. It’s, like, a one-day event that’s where they kind of mix, like, worship and motivational speakers. Many of their speakers are, like, athletes, like really famous athletes like Tim Tebow, and, you know, they’ve had Magic Johnson, they’ve had David Ortiz, just, like, you know, super famous people. And during that day they try to get you to sign up for these—what they call Impact Classes, and they’re, like, financial—like, they teach you how to invest in the stock market, teach you how to, like, flip houses and, you know, allegedly make a bunch of money in real estate. And then once you go to the three-day classes, then they try to sell you on packages of investment training that cost, like, you know, packages that range from, like, $10,000 to, like, $50,000. And so my investigation focused on how folks who have done these classes have said that the salespeople are using faith to sell them on a product that they can’t afford. So I’ve, you know, talked to people who have ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt and said things like, you know, that the salesperson said, If you’re having doubts about whether you want to buy this financial package, that was the devil. The devil was putting doubts in your mind. So that was the investigation. You know, an interesting thing, I guess, just in the wake of the investigation, Tim Tebow cut or paused his ties with Life Surge, and a bunch of the other high-profile speakers did as well. So that was—it was really interesting to see that impact there of our investigation. But, you know, I think because the investigation really got a lot of attention, I’ve gotten a lot of tips from people and, you know, threads to follow, and it really does seem like this is sort of the tip of the iceberg, the world of Christian finance seminars that people are, you know, spending a lot of money and at times losing a lot of money. This is a real wing of, I guess, the right-wing Christian movement that I had not explored before. So I think it’s something to keep an eye on going forward, for sure. GH: I think so, Kiera. I’m excited to see more of what you uncover. Okay, before we let you go, I want to ask you the question that we’re asking all of our guests here on this show: After all of your Christian nationalist reporting and all of that, what’s stressing you out the most? KB: What’s stressing me out the most? Fundamentalism in all of its forms. You know, I think—and that is not unique to Christianity, of course. To me, when I look around and I see people who are against religious pluralism and who are actively trying to undermine the separation of church and state, that’s what freaks me out. GH: Listen, to our viewers and our listeners, Kiera has another Doug Wilson story in the works, along with some of the excellent sneak preview reporting that you heard here today. It’s important, it’s fascinating. These stories are so, so important. They have incredible impact, as you already heard. So make sure you follow her reporting on MotherJones.com. Kiera Butler, thank you. KB: Thank you so much for having me. GH: That’s all we have for you in today’s episode. If you missed the previous episodes of Stress Test, you can watch them on our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts. Our great journalism here at Mother Jones—Kiera’s reporting, Russ Choma’s reporting, Ari Berman’s reporting—all of that is made possible with your support. Your views, your subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like and to share and to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them for us down in the comments below. Our producers love reading your comments. We’ll be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test. Until then, take care.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is facing new accusations that he never fully severed ties with his agricultural empire, after publicly promising to do so in order to avoid major conflicts of interest in both Prague and Brussels. On taking up the Czech premiership in December, Babiš pledged to cut all links with his company Agrofert, one of Central Europe’s largest agri-food and chemicals groups. President Petr Pavel required him to take that step before approving his government, and Babiš insisted his children would only take Agrofert stakes after his death. The commitment was meant to address long-standing conflict-of-interest concerns. During Babiš’s previous term, EU and national auditors found the company had improperly received at least €208 million in EU and national agricultural subsidies, triggering payment suspensions and repayment demands. At the EU level, the stakes are heightened by the fact that as prime minister, Babiš is now helping to negotiate the bloc’s next long-term budget, including farm spending from which Agrofert has previously benefited. Babiš’s pledges of a total rupture with Agrofert are now coming into question, even though the prime minister insists he has done much more than the law required. A leaked legal document that purports to map out his new relationship with the company describes a trust structure that removes him from day-to-day decision-making only while he remains in office, and that transfers decision-making powers to a family-run governance mechanism once his political career ends. The 18-page document, dated Dec. 17, was first reported by Czech outlet Seznam Zprávy. POLITICO has seen a copy. The document says the trust is meant to ensure “independent administration during the period in which the [establisher of the trust] holds the office of a member of the Government.” Once that period ends — whether through Babiš’s departure from office or, eventually, his death — the business would automatically transition to “family administration” Opposition lawmakers seized on the document as evidence that Babiš would still have strong personal and family interests tied to Agrofert during his lifetime, potentially motivating his decisions on both the domestic and EU levels. “The news about Andrej Babiš’s unresolved conflict of interest is really just the proverbial cherry on top,” Pirate party parliamentary leader Olga Richterová said in a legislative debate in Prague on Tuesday. “It is becoming clear that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The old practices used when Agrofert was previously parked in trust funds appear set to be applied again in a very similar way.” Danuše Nerudová, a European Parliament lawmaker from the Mayors and Independents party, told POLITICO the arrangement preserves a personal incentive to protect family business interests. “His companies benefited improperly from EU agricultural subsidies in the past,” she said. “That incentive does not disappear simply because the structure is renamed.” Given the implications for the EU budget, the European Commission said it was monitoring developments and underlined its rule that “anybody nominated in a member state to be involved in budget implementation … shall not take any action which may bring their own interests into conflict with those of the union.” POLITICO requested comment from Babiš’s office, but did not receive a response before publication. Danuše Nerudová told POLITICO the arrangement preserves a personal incentive to protect family business interests. | Martin Divisek/EPA Babiš responded to the Seznam Zprávy story in another newspaper. He did not deny the authenticity of the document and its reference to a continued family interest, but claimed he was doing nothing wrong. “What I said earlier clearly applies. I did much more than the law required of me. The shares of the company that I built for almost 30 years will never be returned to me,” he told the Deník N newspaper. POLITICAL DEBATE IN PRAGUE When Babiš made his pledge to keep out of Agrofert last year, his language was definitive. “I have decided to irrevocably give up the Agrofert company,” Babiš said in December. “I will never own it, I will not have any economic relations with it, and I will not be in any contact with it.” He added: “My children will only get Agrofert after my death.” Babiš reiterated his defense this week, telling Czech news agency ČTK that the Agrofert shares would never return to him and that he would not benefit from them for the rest of his life. He said the arrangement complied with both Czech and European law, and accused critics of trying to deprive him of his property. The prime minister has previously insisted any conflict would be resolved once the trust takes effect. He missed a self-imposed early-January deadline to complete the share transfer, saying he was still awaiting approval from financial authorities in two EU countries. David Kotora, executive director of Transparency International Czech Republic, said the trust “is currently an inactive shell” because the share transfer has not taken place. Once activated, he said, it would still fail EU standards. “This structure clearly cannot withstand European regulations concerning conflicts of interest in the redistribution of public funds,” Kotora said. During the parliamentary session on Tuesday, Babiš dismissed the renewed scrutiny as a “festival of hypocrisy.” “This is not a spontaneous defense of democracy. It’s political theater,” he said, stressing that Agrofert is not receiving any subsidies until the trust is in effect. “You invented the conflict of interest because you’re incapable of beating me.” Lawmakers from Babiš’s ANO party have rallied behind him, rejecting assessments of unresolved conflicts of interest. In a joint statement to POLITICO, MEPs Ondřej Knotek and Klára Dostálová said the prime minister had taken steps “well beyond what is required by Czech and European law.” He has relinquished ownership and control of Agrofert permanently, they said, and would not benefit from the company for the rest of his life. “If someone finds this insufficient,” they added, “it is no longer about the essence of the matter, but about an effort to constantly question it.” Economist Petr Bartoň, a regulatory and public policy expert, noted Czech conflict-of-interest rules were never designed for politicians with business empires on the scale of Agrofert. “The law does not aim to permanently separate politicians from their assets,” Bartoň said. “It aims to manage conflicts while they are in office.” Promises to go further, he added, may have political value but “no legal force.” Ketrin Jochecová contributed to this report.

LONDON — Britain’s Labour MPs are talking furtively about ousting their leader. There’s just one hurdle: they need to work out how. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing renewed outrage in his party after he admitted knowing that Peter Mandelson continued his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but appointed him as ambassador to the U.S. anyway. It’s the latest crisis for Starmer, whose personal popularity has tanked despite Labour winning in a 2024 landslide. Yet while MPs have anonymously thrown around potential challengers’ names for months, nothing has happened. They include former Deputy PM Angela Rayner, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Defence Secretary John Healey and 2024-entry minister Al Carns. (All publicly insist they are loyal to Starmer.) The upshot is that Starmer could remain in office for months or even years, even while his own MPs drift from his leadership. The hurdles are mostly political, given local elections looming in May and there is no single heir apparent, but procedure is to blame too. Labour’s internal rules, which have changed since the last time a sitting leader was challenged in 2016, are notorious for being far more opaque than in the opposition Conservative Party. Challengers need 80 fellow MPs to back them in order to trigger a contest, but the exact process is “concerningly vague” and “muddy,” one Labour official said. They added: “Everyone is fumbling around in the dark, hoping that they get enough momentum that it’s overwhelming and carries them over the line.” A second Labour official said: “I would assume that 95 percent of MPs don’t actually understand how this works, hence there are widespread fantasies about being able to have a coronation.” They added: “I’m reasonably confident that people just won’t get their shit together.” So POLITICO is here to help. We spoke to four Labour officials with knowledge of the process to clarify exactly how a hypothetical challenge would unfold, if it ever happens. All were granted anonymity to discuss internal processes. STEP 1: FIND 80 FRIENDS — IN SECRET It will kick off a mile and a half from Downing Street, in the office of a Labour Party official who is seldom seen in the public eye. Any challenger or their supporters must write to General Secretary Hollie Ridley with the names of 81 MP backers, including the challenger themselves. This can happen either by email or with signatures on paper delivered to the party’s London headquarters. “I assume they would walk in and dump 80 letters on Hollie’s desk,” said one of the four officials noted above. It’s unclear whether challengers should send one message signed by 81 people, or 81 letters (some officials who spoke to POLITICO were unsure; others thought either would be fine). Either way, this means plotters must sign up one fifth of their party to a coup … without their efforts leaking and fizzling out midway through. And backers must be ready to be named publicly hours later. Given the level of gossip among Labour MPs, good luck with that. These are much higher hurdles than in Britain’s Conservative Party, whose MPs can submit no-confidence letters anonymously and don’t need to attach them to a named challenger. Politics will probably overtake the process in the end. The last leadership challenge, against left-winger Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, was plain for all to see before it reached the formal stages — because a wave of ministers resigned and MPs passed a symbolic no-confidence vote in his leadership. STEP 2: A PAUSE — THEN A WHIRLWIND  There will be a short pause while Ridley seeks internal and legal advice before the 81 names are published — and Labour hits a thousand miles per hour. The party will convene a meeting of the 10 officers of Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), which will make recommendations on the timetable and procedure to the wider NEC to wave through. Other MPs will be invited to nominate rival challengers. As the sitting prime minister, Starmer will have a place on the list automatically. But they will have to act fast. During the contest to find Labour’s new deputy leader in the fall, formal MP nominations were only open for three days and the entire contest was over in eight weeks. NEC officers are largely pro-Starmer — they include Starmer himself, though any candidate would be recused from discussions — and were the same people who blocked Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from attempting to return to parliament in January. They may have an interest in moving quickly, to avoid destabilizing the prime minister on the world stage or allowing a left-wing candidate to gain traction. STEP 3: CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTERS CAREFULLY One piece of advice to warring MPs: Get it right first time. The four officials all said that once MPs pick who to nominate, they are “locked in” and cannot transfer to another candidate unless their pick drops out of the race. The full tally of MP nominations — with names — will be published daily on the Labour Party website, unlike the Tory system which uses a secret ballot. STEP 4: GET YOUR RUBBER CHICKEN OUT Candidates who pass the 81 MP threshold will then go through to a second stage, where they spend weeks touring the country to persuade local parties and unions to back them. They must win the support of 5 percent of Labour’s constituency parties, or at least three of the party’s formal “affiliate” bodies including two trade unions. This is not always a formality, as Emily Thornberry — now chair of the Commons’ foreign affairs committee — discovered when she failed to reach the local party threshold when running against Starmer in 2020. Two of the four officials noted above suggested that Wes Streeting — despite being widely seen as a frontrunner — could struggle during this stage, as many unions and constituency parties regard his politics as not left-wing enough. A third official said this was inaccurate, given there has been an exodus of left-wing members from the party. STEP 5: GO TO THE PARTY Whoever pulls through the initial stages — probably three candidates at the most — will go through to a final vote of Labour’s members. The result is difficult to predict, as many of the most left-wing members who joined under Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s have exited the party. In October’s deputy leadership vote, Bridget Phillipson — who was widely painted as being aligned to Starmer — lost by only a small margin. The winner will be Labour leader, and therefore prime minister. If Keir Starmer wins, he will stay in No. 10, secure until the next time a critic is strong enough politically to come for him. If a rival wins, Starmer will visit King Charles III to tender his resignation as PM.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado estimated that Venezuela could hold new democratic elections in less than a year, she told POLITICO, but has not yet spoken with President Donald Trump about starting that process. “We believe that a real transferring process with manual voting … throughout the process could be done in nine to 10 months. But, well, that depends when you start,” Machado said Tuesday in an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns for “The Conversation.” Her projection comes as leaders in both parties in Congress urge the president to accelerate the process of relinquishing U.S. control of Venezuela following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January. But Trump has suggested the U.S. could continue to oversee Venezuela for years, with an eye toward closely controlling the development of infrastructure to extract oil from the country’s vast reservoirs. Trump told The New York Times last month that “only time will tell” how long the U.S. will assert oversight over Venezuela. Machado, who met with Trump at the White House after Maduro’s capture, said the two did not discuss her estimated time frame for new elections during their meeting. But she explained her optimism for the relatively short window to stand up democratic elections in the country, compared with similar nation-building efforts by America in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration, which took years to fully establish. “In our case, look, we have a democratic culture, strong democratic culture. We have an organized society. We have a legitimate leadership with huge popular support and our armed forces are also supportive of a transition to democracy,” she said. Machado also pointed to recent elections in Venezuela, which she said occurred “under very tough circumstances,” as evidence that Venezuelan people will readily embrace U.S.-backed democratic elections. Venezuela held presidential elections in 2024, which Maduro’s regime said he won, and parliamentary elections in 2025. Independent monitors criticized the elections as being neither free nor fair. “If we were able to do that under such extreme conditions, imagine now, when we have the support of the United States government, when people feel that we are not alone,” she said. Listen to the whole interview on the latest episode of “The Conversation.”

BRUSSELS ― The EU’s conservatives are convening for the second time in a week as they increase internal coordination after a tough first year of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term at the head of the European Commission. After last weekend’s meeting of European People’s Party leaders in Croatia, this week sees EPP members of the European Parliament gather in Slovenia, where they will discuss policy with the bloc’s commissioners in charge of defense and regional development. The party has powerful national chiefs, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but is up against surging opposition figures across the political spectrum. “Populists on the left and right oppose everything without proposing anything,” said European People’s Party Vice Chair Romana Tomc in a statement. The party “will discuss who we will work with to deliver real change in Europe.” Von der Leyen has seen off four no-confidence votes since the start of her second term on Dec. 1, 2024 while the EPP has been boosted since May by the return of a German chancellor from its ranks. But the group’s traditional Brussels allies from the center left and liberal center have distanced themselves from some EPP policies, especially those supported by the far right such as the rollback of EU green rules, including cuts to corporate sustainability and deforestation legislation. The Ljubljana meeting is another example of how Manfred Weber, chair of the EPP and head of its European Parliament faction, is trying to tighten decision-making and bring more central control over policy in the Commission, the Parliament and the Council of the EU, which represents national governments, according to two EPP officials. Weber wants to use the different iterations of EPP gatherings to increase the number of touch points for center-right leaders and senior EU officials to meet and coordinate policies ahead of big moments on the calendar, they said. Next week’s EU diplomacy is particularly intense, with a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, a summit of EU leaders in the Belgian countryside on Thursday, and the Munich Security Conference, which brings together some of the world’s most powerful decisionmakers, from Friday to Sunday. COMING TOGETHER The EPP is well represented in Brussels, with von der Leyen and Parliament President Roberta Metsola its two leading figures. In addition to regular pre-summit gatherings, where EPP leaders meet on the morning of European Councils, Weber has inaugurated annual meetings of national chiefs, of which last weekend’s gathering in Zagreb was the most recent. “The more coordination we can have between various groups of people, the better,” said an EU official granted anonymity to speak freely, like others in this story. “Because then you have the relationships and the format to stop the wheels coming off completely.” At informal dinners held on the Tuesday ahead of the Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg, the EPP’s commissioners, among them von der Leyen, as well as economy chief Valdis Dombrovskis and tech boss Henna Virkkunen, sit down with Weber and his Parliament vice presidents. These dinners “were set at the beginning of the term and structured in a way that allowed [the party] to have greater influence on the work of the Commission,” said an EPP official. “The goal — I won’t hide it — is to know in advance the direction the Commission is heading and to have an impact already at the preparatory stage, even before proposals are formally presented,” they added. IRONCLAD SECURITY The summit of MEPs in the Slovene capital, which kicked off Wednesday and runs until Friday, is aimed at what the organizers call “strategic planning.” Party members also pointed to the increasingly important role of policy position papers that the EPP now regularly publishes. | Marko Perkov/AFP via Getty Images In Zagreb last weekend, leaders agreed to work on making the EU’s mutual-defense clause operational, and tasked two national leaders, as yet unidentified, with spelling out how to make it an ironclad security guarantee. It’s never been used because NATO has a similar provision, but leaders are worried U.S. President Donald Trump will make that obsolete. Such moves highlight how the EPP is trying to influence wider EU policy and get ahead of security or economic decisions taken by the Commission or by leaders, where opinions from parties opposed to the center right have to be taken into account. Party members also pointed to the increasingly important role of policy position papers that the EPP now regularly publishes, which give direction to the party’s senior officials and leaders. The push to water down planks of the Green Deal, as well as an ongoing deregulation drive, both originated in policy papers drafted by the EPP following coordination meetings, two party officials said. In its 2024 manifesto the party called for the creation of a defense commissioner role, which von der Leyen made a reality when she took office. The party also called for deregulation and watering down the EU Green Deal, which became a central part of von der Leyen’s policy agenda during her second mandate. Gerardo Fortuna contributed reporting.

Mujtaba Rahman is the head of Eurasia Group’s Europe practice. He posts at @Mij_Europe. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has only four months to save his premiership. After the U.K. parliament’s return from Christmas recess, Starmer marked his first 18 months in Downing Street with a speech touting his Labour party’s efforts to ease the cost-of-living crisis. But behind the scenes, anxiety is growing that voters won’t feel any meaningful relief before the decisive regional and local elections on May 7, which could seal the prime minister’s political fate. And the outlook is bleak: After placing third in the Welsh Parliament elections behind Plaid Cymru and far-right leader Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, failing to unseat the Scottish National Party in Scotland, and bleeding support to both the Greens and Reform UK in English council contests, Labour risks humiliation across the U.K. And national polling only underscores the danger, with Reform UK now averaging close to 30 percent, and Labour languishing in the teens alongside the Greens and the Conservatives. Still, Starmer’s advisers privately argue that “less bad than expected” results might be enough to save him. But many Labour MPs expect a leadership challenge regardless, as it would require only 81 out of 404 MPs to initiate one — and Starmer is hardly popular with the wider party. Then there’s the unfolding scandal over Labour stalwart and former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was appointed by Starmer before being removed from his position in September once the extent of his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became clear. Under mounting pressure, Starmer has been strong in his criticism and push for transparency — but that may not be enough, as Mandelson’s now under investigation for misconduct while in public office. A challenge may not come immediately, or even right after polling day in May. But the sense that Starmer’s authority is waning is unmistakable. For one, the prime minister is already preparing his defense. A King’s speech designed to reset the agenda ,outlining proposals on special education needs and digital ID, is now penciled in for mid-May. A cabinet reshuffle may follow, and some in Labour believe Starmer might even sacrifice his chancellor if he thinks it would placate restive backbenchers. He’s also expected to recall former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to the cabinet, hoping her return could blunt any leadership ambitions. Labour’s traditions may offer Starmer only limited protection.While the party prides itself on avoiding the “regicide” that’s plagued the rival Conservatives, this instinct will weaken if electoral defeat looms. Labour MPs may dread a destabilizing leadership contest, but many have already concluded Starmer won’t lead them into the next general election. And privately, some ministers believe it’s no longer a question of if the prime minister falls, but when. Their concerns are understandable: Energized by new leadership, the Greens are siphoning some progressive voters, while Reform UK is eroding Labour’s traditional working-class base. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have stabilized enough under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership to reduce the likelihood of another revolt — a development that leaves Starmer more exposed. So, if a contest is triggered, he’s unlikely to survive it. Party members — roughly 250,000-strong — tend to favor the soft left. And that dynamic would advantage Rayner, should she stand. Last week’s events in Greater Manchester only further crystallized this perception of Starmer’s weakness. His decision to block Mayor Andy Burnham from contesting a parliamentary by-election was a lose-lose proposition: Either deny Burnham a Westminster platform and risk a party backlash, or enable a future leadership challenger. And Starmer chose the former, provoking fury while reinforcing the perception that he’s defensive and frail. Then came news of Mandelson. Starmer was elected on the promise of ending the chaos of government sleaze, and this saga will only foment questions about his judgement when appointing Mandelson ambassador. And the prime minister may well end up having to sacrifice his beloved advisor Morgan McSweeney, who lobbied for Mandelson to be picked for the plum Washington post. Labour MPs may dread a destabilizing leadership contest, but many have already concluded Starmer won’t lead them into the next general election. | Lukas Coch/EPA Meanwhile, foreign policy — the one area where Starmer’s performance has proven more assured — is offering Number 10 no relief either. U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has distracted him from and sometimes undermined his domestic agenda, particularly in the case of tariffs. And the latest crisis over Greenland was no exception. Managing relations with the U.S. under Trump has forced Starmer into awkward contortions, attempting to respond to provocations while trying to preserve his strategy of staying close to both Washington and Brussels, where his government is trying to reset relations. As it stands, the debate inside Labour over whether to pivot toward the EU is intensifying, and there’s now growing support within the party for a customs union with the bloc. But Starmer’s preference for incremental sector-by-sector alignment risks satisfying no one, viewed in Brussels as cherry-picking and at home as timid. Even loyalists concede a damaging story has taken hold: A prime minister unable to impose a vision or discipline, haunted by his early decisions, buffeted by U-turns and trapped by his own party. Starmer wanted to avoid a Tory-style drama. Instead, he’s now heading one of Labour’s own — slower, quieter but no less brutal. And four months isn’t long to change the narrative, especially when so many in his own party have already turned the page.

MADRID — Spain’s conservatives hope a trio of impending regional elections will collapse the government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the EU’s only remaining heavyweight national leader from the center left. First up this Sunday is the northeastern region of Aragón, dubbed the “Spanish Ohio” thanks to its track record as a barometer of the national mood. The center-right People’s Party (PP) appears to be heading for victory, but a surging far right is likely to make the biggest gains. Aragón will be followed by two more elections in PP-held regions — Castilla y León in March and Andalusia in June. For the conservatives, the goal is to seize on the corruption scandals in the Socialist party, which have severely weakened Sánchez, to confirm the PP’s regional dominance and dial up pressure on the government in Madrid. Speaking to supporters on the campaign trail in the town of Calatayud, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, called on Aragón’s voters “to be the spokespeople of all Spaniards on Sunday at the ballot box.” “Friends, vote to stop the lies, to stop the corruption, to stop the arrogance and to stop the discredit into which national politics has fallen,” he said. Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at Barcelona’s Autonomous University, said the key across these regional elections was to build momentum at the national level. “The [PP’s] intention is to convert all these elections into a national story,” he said. “If the PP wins and the Socialists suffer a bad defeat, that will be used to say that Sánchez must step down because his party is in freefall.” PILING ON THE PRESSURE Sánchez’s coalition is already on the ropes following a storm of scandals. Probes into a kickback scheme implicating two former senior Socialists, as well as sexual harassment allegations concerning other figures in the party, have been hogging headlines in recent months. An ongoing investigation into the business dealings of Sánchez’s wife and the upcoming trial of his brother on charges of influence peddling have given the opposition further ammunition. Meanwhile, two January train crashes that killed a combined 47 people and triggered rail chaos in some parts of Spain have added to the government’s woes. A ballot held in the western region of Extremadura in December handed the PP electoral momentum: The party made modest gains while the Socialists lost 10 of their 28 seats. The Aragón election is a snap ballot called by regional president Jorge Azcón amid a parliamentary impasse that followed a decision by the far-right Vox to withdraw support for the conservatives. “Friends, vote to stop the lies, to stop the corruption, to stop the arrogance and to stop the discredit into which national politics has fallen,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo said. | ZIPI/EPA Polls suggest Aragón is heading for a similar result to Extremadura, with the PP clearly ahead and possibly making slight gains. The Socialists, meanwhile, are left hoping to avoid their worst-ever result in the region. Polls have the PP on track to win about 28 seats in the 67-seat assembly, with Vox taking 12 to 14 and the Socialists 17 or 18. In every general election since the country’s return to democracy in 1977, the winning party in Aragón has been the national overall victor, earning it the “Spanish Ohio” nickname — although analysts say its capital Zaragoza and the province that surrounds it currently provide a more reliable measure of the national vote. With a surface area slightly greater than that of Switzerland, the region borders Catalonia to the east and France to the north, encompassing vast rural areas. But it has also developed a reputation as a technological hub, and Zaragoza is Spain’s fifth-largest city. WARNINGS ABOUT VOX The Socialists have also given the election a national dimension by deploying the former minister of education, training and sport, Pilar Alegría, as their candidate. The warning from the Socialists is that Vox — which triggered the regional election in a clash with the PP over the acceptance of unaccompanied migrant children — could still ultimately agree to form a majority with the PP after extracting concessions. The Aragón election is a snap ballot called by regional president Jorge Azcón amid a parliamentary impasse that followed a decision by the far-right Vox to withdraw support for the conservatives. | Chema Moya/EPA Prime Minister Sánchez has campaigned alongside Alegría, urging voters to mobilize against the prospect of a consolidated PP-Vox majority, which he casts as part of an international radical right-wing tide. “The question we have to ask ourselves here in Aragón is: What you don’t want for the rest of the world, do you want that for Europe, for Spain and for Aragón?” the prime minister said at a campaign rally in the city of Teruel. He condemned the “misogyny and hate” of Vox, which he warned could form part of a coalition with the PP if they secured a majority. Tomás Guitarte, the leading candidate for Aragón Exists, which seeks to represent voters in rural areas, said such debates have distracted from more pressing concerns. “Sixty percent of the population of Aragón lives in two percent of its territory, while the rest are suffering serious problems related to depopulation,” he told POLITICO.  “They should be talking about this but instead the national leaders come here and turn the campaign into a national debate, focused on what concerns them in Madrid more than the real concerns of Aragón,” he said. Guitarte also pointed to housing as a serious concern for voters. Describing itself as cutting across party lines, Aragón Existe presents itself as a potential coalition partner for the PP, which is unlikely to secure an outright majority. However, Vox is likely to be the PP’s only viable partner and the one set to make the most substantial gains. The national conservative party has been courting the region’s farming sector with attacks on EU agricultural policy while condemning the central government’s willingness to welcome migrants. Polls show Vox could come close to doubling its seven seats, echoing its strong performance in national polls. The Socialists have also given the election a national dimension by deploying the former minister of education, training and sport, Pilar Alegría, as their candidate. | Mariscal/EPA Bartomeus said the PP was struggling to fend off the electoral threat posed by Vox, which divides the right. “The more Vox’s support increases, the worse the PP will perform,” he said. “The PP doesn’t go up substantially because part of its voter base is going to Vox.” Political analysts don’t generally believe the Aragón result alone could force Sánchez to bring forward the general election, scheduled for 2027. But the cumulative effect of defeats there, in Castilla y León and, above all, in the former Socialist stronghold of Andalusia could make it very hard for Sánchez to hang on.