Mother Jones
Seven years after Donald Trump descended a golden escalator, heralding a political era marked by racist bile, hate, and relentless lies, some journalists and media outlets apparently are still struggling with how to cover the former president. That’s not entirely surprising, given the fresh admonishments urging the media to simply do better should Trump run […]
Mother JonesBefore you Twitter pundits start writing Elon Musk’s obituary, I think we need to have a little talk. I mean, sure, it’s true that about a year ago, Elon—we normally use last names at Mother Jones, but only for adults—became the first human being ever to exceed $300 billion in net worth. It’s also true […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. These are rough times for the world’s wildlife and its habitat. The latest Living Planet Index shows that over the last couple of decades the number of North American vertebrate species and their populations are in decline. And according to State of […]
Mother JonesOf all the far-right extremists on the ballot Tuesday, perhaps none had the bona fides of Ammon Bundy. In 2014, he took part in an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at his father Cliven’s Nevada ranch after agents tried to impound Cliven’s cows for his failure to pay 20 years worth of […]
Mother JonesIllinois workers are on the verge of a historic win: a labor rights amendment to the state constitution that—among other things—would make the state the first to ban so-called “right-to-work laws” throughout its territory. The amendment, on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, has to meet a high bar: either 60 percent approval (not counting blanks) […]
Mother JonesMark Finchem, a Trump-backed “poster child” of election denialism, has lost his bid to become Arizona’s top election official. Even by the current standards of the Republican Party, Finchem is extreme. After spending the first part of his career as a public safety officer in Michigan, he relocated to Arizona and adopted the look of […]
Mother JonesDuring his days as a Stanford libertarian, Blake Masters was nothing if not principled. The 36-year-old Peter Thiel protégé turned Arizona Republican Senate candidate considered voting morally indefensible, taxation theft, and nationalism a scourge. He called for open borders and full drug legalization. He was an anarcho-capitalist. But as I reported this summer, this was not the […]
Mother JonesElon Musk’s most recent Twitter experiment has reportedly shut down less than a week after introducing major changes to its verification process. But despite the short life of Twitter Blue, plenty of fun was had. Let’s rewind. Last week, the tech billionaire introduced Twitter Blue, a new program that would allow people to buy a […]
Mother JonesLeading up to the election, Republicans relentlessly blasted voters with campaign ads about crime, offering them brutal images of shootings and assaults and suggesting that if progressives got their way, murderers would run rampant on the streets and sex offenders would approach their children at barbershops. Journalists, too, fanned the flames, quoting voters across the […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the past few decades, the European Union has transformed its energy system. In 2005 about 10 percent of all energy consumed in the EU came from renewable sources. Last year that share hit 22 percent—it’s one of the main reasons the bloc’s […]
Mother JonesA Mississippi police chief has been caught on tape bragging that he crashed a nonviolent protest and thought about assaulting its Black organizer, who had criticized him on social media. “I thought about fucking him up right then,” Chief Kenneth Collins said of activist Marquell Bridges, in a conversation recorded earlier this year. The audio, […]
Mother JonesThe first video ever posted on YouTube was of co-founder Jawed Karim making a dick joke. Jennifer Lopez’s famous green Versace dress was essentially the reason for the creation of Google Images. A picture from Playboy was used for decades to test image processing tasks on computers. Sex has essentially created the digital, online world […]
Mother JonesSenator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was born during the Great Depression. He was born before Hitler rose to power; he attended college in 1955 (when tuition cost $159); his predecessor upon his first election to US Congress was born in 1899. Grassley won his first election in 1959 and served in the Iowa House of […]
Mother JonesThe Democrats had a plan: Fund the right-wing radicals. For the 2022 midterms, according to numbers compiled by the Washington Post, Democrats spent $19 million in support of far-right Republican primary candidates who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election. Fringe-right candidates, they assumed, would be less palatable to voters in specific districts […]
Mother JonesOn Election Day, the much-hyped red wave didn’t crest quite as high as some polls predicted it would, with Democrats scoring key victories in several states. Yet it was far from a total wash for Republicans—and in a few places, they made historic advances. In Florida, for instance, incumbent Governor (and likely presidential candidate) Ron […]
Mother JonesJust a few days before the November midterms, Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Texas) exuded confidence. “If you believe the Dems will hold the House and Senate on Election Tuesday,” tweeted the 34th District incumbent, who won a special election in the summer, “then I got some oceanfront property in Arizona.” Hispanic conservatives, she announced with conviction, “are […]
Mother JonesThe Supreme Court on Wednesday heard an under-covered but very important case about the the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a law that helps to keep Native children who are put up for adoption close to their families and tribes after decades of forced separation and trauma in Native communities. During oral arguments, the majority […]
Mother JonesWith four of the country’s most extreme Trump-backed election deniers on the ballot in Arizona Tuesday, Democrats headed to the polls worried that the future of democracy in their state was on the line. At campaign stops and, later, at Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s election night watch party, voters told me that the issue of […]
Mother JonesIn a close race State Attorney General Keith Ellison, a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has narrowly won re-election as the top legal officer in Minnesota, defeating Republican challenger Jim Schultz. Ellison was the first Black person elected to statewide office in the state’s history and the first Muslim elected […]
Mother JonesIt was a mixed night for the fight against climate change on Tuesday. Voters in two of the country’s largest states, California and New York, considered climate-related ballot measures that would have freed up billions in funding to protect the environment and electrify the economy. New York resoundingly passed its measure. California did not. First […]
Mother JonesDemocracy was on the ballot in key swing states on Tuesday—and in two states the results are still too close to call. Three election-denying Republicans seeking to run their states elections in 2024 lost to Democrats: Kristina Karamo in Michigan, Audrey Trujillo in New Mexico, and Kim Crockett in Minnesota. But in Arizona and Nevada, […]
Mother JonesIn state after state on Election Day, voters sent a resounding message: “Abortion rights matter to us.” They didn’t only matter in California and Vermont, where voters chose to guarantee abortion rights in their state constitutions. They mattered in deep-red Kentucky, where voters shot down a “no right to abortion” amendment that would have blocked the […]
Mother JonesGov. Glenn Youngkin, in a rare show of contrition in an increasingly shameless Republican Party, has decided to apologize. The Virginia governor sent a handwritten letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after cracking a joke about the brutal assault against her husband. According to her spokesperson, the top Democrat accepted Youngkin’s apology. In a statement […]
Mother JonesThe full impact of Tuesday’s midterm elections won’t be clear for days, if not weeks. But the results in the East and Midwest were nowhere near as bad for Democrats as they could have been, in part because of a familiar dynamic: Donald Trump is a really bad judge of competence and character. During this year’s Republican […]
Mother JonesGeorgia’s election results are in, and the winner of the race that could determine control of the US Senate is…nobody. Not yet, anyway. The polls are closed. Only four other Senate races have not yet been called. But multiple media outlets are projecting that neither incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor GOP nominee Herschel Walker […]
Mother JonesBefore Tuesday’s election, the prognosis for democracy seemed bleak to outright apocalyptic. Republican election deniers were running up and down the ballot in key battleground states, threatening the future of free and fair elections. Armed vigilantes were guarding ballot drop boxes in places like Arizona, leading to fears of voter intimidation. Thousands of “Stop the […]
Mother JonesA political force propelled by irrationality and a dangerous lie, led by a man who tried to overturn a national election, who incited violence to block the peaceful transfer of power, and who has promoted the lunatic QAnon conspiracy theory and engaged in antisemitism, is poised to take control of the House of Representatives. Though Republicans […]
Mother JonesRon Johnson has done it again. Despite a low approval rating, a litany of baseless assertions about Covid-19, and allegedly aiding in the failed coup attempt of January 6, the wealthy senator has won a third consecutive term to represent Wisconsin. He defeated Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, a 35-year-old would-be rising star in the […]
Mother JonesNew York City approved three ballot measures to codify racial justice in the city charter. As I reported earlier this week, the Racial Justice Commission and proposed ballot measures were a response to the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020 over police brutality and to a pandemic that disproportionately impacted Black and brown New […]
Mother JonesAn idea: Let’s not have politicians do Borscht Belt cadenced jokes about an attempt to kidnap House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an incident that nearly left her husband dead last week after an intruder broke into the couple’s home and brutally assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer fracturing his skull. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ): “[Speaker Nancy Pelosi] is […]