Mother Jones
In the final days before the midterm election, Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, filmed an unusual series ads. They weren’t about high gas prices in the state, or public schools, or crime. They weren’t even about the Arizona governor’s race at all. Speaking directly to the camera, Lake addressed Republican voters […]
Mother JonesIt was no secret during the Trump presidency that if you wanted to curry favor you should stay at Donald Trump’s swanky and controversial hotel when you were in Washington, D.C. In fact, at least 31 foreign governments booked rooms at the hotel during his time in office—and as the majority owner of the hotel […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For weeks, some Republicans have been preparing to wield control of Congress as a cudgel against President Joe Biden’s climate and clean energy agenda. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), in line to become chair of the powerful Energy and […]
Mother JonesThe only thing that’s certain in Colorado’s third congressional district is that it wasn’t supposed to be this close. Most analysts assumed that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) would cruise to victory in her solidly red district, which became even more Republican after redistricting. In 2020, Boebert defeated her Democratic opponent by six percentage points. This year, FiveThirtyEight […]
Mother JonesAs he delivered his landslide reelection victory speech Tuesday evening, Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated one of his favorite battle cries: “Florida is where woke goes to die.” DeSantis has made himself to be the loudest parents’ rights champion, signing legislation to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and discussions of gender identity and […]
Mother JonesOne afternoon last October, thousands of fans began gathering outside St. James’ Park, the 130-year-old home of the English soccer club Newcastle United, to celebrate a new beginning. Some sported the club’s traditional black-and-white striped jerseys. Others toted cases of booze. There was no match that day, but that only improved the mood. In seven […]
Mother JonesWhen Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto finally won her reelection battle Saturday evening, it became clear that Democrats would retain control of the US Senate. Cortez Masto’s victory gave her party 50 seats in the upper chamber, meaning that even if incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) were to lose to Herschel Walker (R) in next month’s […]
Mother JonesAre you an election-denying secretary of state candidate? In a key battleground state? Then you might be having a difficult election year. Election deniers running to oversee state elections did particularly poorly in the 2022 midterms—even in comparison to the underwhelming performance of the Republican Party more generally. Almost the entire America First Coalition, for […]
Mother JonesElon Musk seems to have settled on a bold new strategy for responding to a letter from a US senator probing his handling of Twitter: shitposting. On Friday, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted out a letter he had sent to Musk, partially in response to a Washington Post story in which the writer used Twitter’s […]
Mother JonesLast month, I published an investigation showing that Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant was deceiving voters by wildly misrepresenting his business history. After the story came out, Marchant told fellow election denier Steve Bannon, “Mother Jones did some sort of colonoscopy on me and they came up with everything.” He contested nothing. “Everything,” […]
Mother JonesFor months leading up to Election Day, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada was widely perceived as one of the most—if not the most—vulnerable Democratic incumbents and her seat as one of the best pick-up opportunities for Republicans to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. The contested and costly race between Cortez Masto […]
Mother JonesWhat’s been likely for days is now official: Democrats will hold the US Senate. Media outlets on Saturday night projected that Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto had narrowly won her race, giving Democrats at least 50 Senate seats—enough to control the chamber. The party has many people to thank. Their own candidates for staying on […]
Mother JonesFiveThirtyEight’s final election forecast projected that Washington Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent would win by more than 12 points. Instead, in the biggest upset of the midterms, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has carried the Republican-leaning district in southwestern Washington. Gluesenkamp Perez is the kind of relatable candidate Democrats have often struggled to nominate in recent […]
Mother JonesFor nearly nine months, the people of Kherson, Ukraine, had been living under Russian occupation, with countless families forced to live without basic means including food, running water, and electricity. But after Russian troops suddenly announced a retreat from the city on Friday, scenes of joy have brought a reprieve from the brutality of the war. […]
Mother JonesTiffany Trump is so often forgotten among Donald Trump’s adult children. But for one brief Saturday, the former president’s 27-year-old daughter will be the focus of media and family attention as the Trumps gather in Mar-a-Lago for Tiffany’s wedding to her fiancé, a Lebanese billionaire heir named Michael Boulos. Or at least that’s what one might […]
Mother JonesSeven 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 […]