Mother Jones
Rebecca Cooke has spent many nights this year waiting tables during her race for Congress in a Wisconsin swing district. She is a 36-year-old service industry worker and nonprofit leader with a chance to secure an upset in a tight House race. It’s not the typical profile for a future member of Congress. She has […]
Mother JonesThe below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. For almost a decade, our world has been shaped and distorted by the […]
Mother JonesDemocracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy? Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. […]
Mother JonesElon Musk’s $150 million pro-Trump super-PAC is one of the biggest campaign-finance stories in years—maybe ever. It’s the first time a presidential campaign has completely outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to an outside group. And so far, it has been more X than SpaceX. Musk has overhauled his staff at least once, been sued […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The final days of this election season are wearying for the people who do research and advocacy on the transition away from fossil fuels. For this group, the Biden administration has been a champion, developing landmark legislation and building a […]
Mother JonesYes, you read that headline right. At a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Donald Trump said he would be OK with someone trying to assassinate him by firing through a group of journalists. “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” Trump said, when […]
Mother JonesOn Sunday morning, Donald Trump made something crystal clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “going to have a big role in the administration” if he wins. And some of RFK Jr.’s wildest ideas—including banning certain vaccines and removing fluoride from drinking water—could be on the table. Trump made the comments to NBC News reporter Dasha […]
Mother JonesWith two days until Election Day, the New York Times is confronting a potential crisis: The army of tech workers who keep its digital platforms running is threatening to go on strike. Nearly 700 members of the newspaper’s Tech Guild—which represents the workers who power the famous election needle, mobile push alerts, Wordle, the audio […]
Mother JonesWhat changes if more people showed up to vote? One answer emerges by comparing Minnesota and Tennessee—two states with vastly different voter turnout rates. Minnesota leads the nation, with nearly 80 percent of eligible voters participating in the 2020 election. With that, Minnesotans have elected leaders who have advanced a popular agenda: universal school meals, […]
Mother JonesIn overturning Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court gave state-level judges enormous new power to decide the reproductive fates of tens of millions of people of childbearing age. With the national right to abortion wiped out, states were forced to decide if abortions were legal for their residents as pre-Roe “zombie” laws, trigger bans, […]
Mother JonesIt started, according to court filings, with a tweet. On August 18, Maria Bartiromo, the Fox News Host, alerted her 1.4 million followers on X to a development that might not, at first glance, seem like news: She was hearing troubling reports of lines at the DMV. The information had come to Bartiromo fourth-hand. The […]
Mother JonesAs Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had. It was no surprise. Instead, call […]
Mother JonesIt was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal. In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable […]
Mother JonesThis story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. This past April, days before a Louisiana Public Service Commission (PSC) meeting at a remote lakefront resort, the state’s largest power company dropped a bombshell. Entergy asked the five commissioners to vote—four months ahead of a schedule—on an […]
Mother JonesAt a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state. “How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the […]
Mother JonesDonald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him. “To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning. During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump […]
Mother JonesDonald Trump has an enemies list. The Sierra Club has an allies list—some 259,000 Pennsylvanians who could decide the election. They have demonstrated concern for the climate crisis, the clean energy transition, and the environment—but they are young, or newly registered, or do not regularly vote. “These voters can be critical,” says Sarah Burton, the […]
Mother JonesWith the election on everyone’s mind, it’s a good moment to revisit a consequential election from the past. No, we’re not talking about 2016. Let’s go way further back—to what’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history. In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and […]
Mother JonesThe idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week. Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for […]
Mother JonesAfter all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or […]
Mother JonesI never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end […]
Mother JonesIn early April, Trex Proffitt opened his mail-in primary ballot and saw that no Democrats were running for state senate in Pennsylvania’s 13th district. It made sense: The district, which covers the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs, has been represented by Republicans for over a century. The incumbent, Scott Martin, is vocally anti-abortion […]
Mother JonesBack in June, during the CNN debate, former president Donald Trump said something very important: He promised to accept the results of the 2024 race in November if it is a “fair and legal and good election.” How does Trump define those terms? In 2020, he felt the election was not legitimate because he did not […]
Mother JonesThis story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. It was 2:30 in the morning on November 6, 2014, when flames engulfed the New Orleans home of political consultant Mario Zervigon. Someone had lit his cars on fire, and the flames spread to his house. Zervigon and […]
Mother JonesI never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end […]
Mother JonesThere’s one line in the sprawling, 900-hundred page document known as Project 2025 that sketches out a plan to eliminate hundreds of millions dollars of federal money meant to help protect some of the most disadvantaged people in the country from pollution and the effects of global warming. Project 2025, crafted by the conservative-think tank the […]
Mother JonesOn a multispectral satellite image of the West Bank, Ramón Bieri, an analyst at SITU Research, shows me how to watch the vineyards. A box in the bottom right-hand corner displays the year, beginning in 1984. As the map moves forward in time, orange and yellow spots, inside the blue outlines, shift to deep green […]
Mother JonesA video purporting to show recently arrived Haitian immigrants illegally voting in Georgia for Kamala Harris was produced by a Russian government-backed disinformation unit, according to US authorities. Three agencies—the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—said in a joint news release Friday that the video, […]
Mother JonesIf Kamala Harris is elected, we’re in for a climate catastrophe. As she swears the oath of office, we’ll find ourselves facing a magnitude of climate chaos and ecological unraveling never before experienced by humanity. We can say that with confidence, because we’re in that crisis now, already. We just don’t talk about it all […]
Mother JonesThe contrast between the intentions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on reproductive rights could not be clearer—no matter how much Trump tries to suggest otherwise. Trump appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade and has famously flip-flopped on his stances on abortion. Back in […]