Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Mother Jones

On the Cover This issue examines Christian nationalists’ exclusionary vision for American society—beginning with an evocative cover by one of MoJo’s favorite illustrators, London-based NOMA BAR, an award-winning master of negative space and subtle illusion.    Contributors How do you think you’ll (try to) relax after the election?     By the Numbers   To see our masthead, visit motherjones.com/about. For questions about your subscription or to make a tax-deductible donation to support our journalism, call (800) 438-6656. To advertise or for other questions, call (415) 321-1700.…

A FEW MONTHS ago, a man crawling along a rooftop in Pennsylvania tried to murder Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Hours later, press releases started to circulate, from analysts, think tanks, politicians, and pundits, all offering to cut through the swell of confusion and misinformation. One of the people who washed up in my inbox was Ben Swann, whom a New York–based PR team presented as a journalist, and a source “to separate the conspiracy theories from the facts behind Trump’s assassination attempt.” This was curious for several reasons, the main being that Swann is himself an energetic conspiracy theorist, who first attracted notice in 2017 by touting Pizzagate, a lurid conspiracy about child trafficking, while working for Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Swann was ultimately fired, but quickly launched a…

ON JULY 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful. Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” To many viewers at home, this seemed like…

IN JUNE, Ohio held a special election to fill an open congressional seat in a district that voted 72 percent for Donald Trump in 2020. On Election Day, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor drove the length of the sprawling 200-mile district, which Republicans drew two years ago to dilute the influence of Democratic voters and boost their own power. Crisscrossing 11 counties and four media markets, she started at the fairgrounds in rural Marietta, on the West Virginia border; followed the Ohio River through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains; stopped in Steubenville, near Pennsylvania; and ended at a polling site in urban Youngstown. Although Democrats performed much better than expected, the outcome of the race was never in doubt. GOP state Sen. Michael Rulli, a grocery store…

SHYAMALA Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars,” scoffed the woman who this past summer, almost two decades after we spoke, would launch a million coconut memes. “You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for good grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided. “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.” I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother back in 2007, when her daughter, San Francisco’s popular district attorney, was running for reelection. In a city of political superstars—Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala stood out for…

IN 2014, at an elegant gala inside the Supreme Court’s gilded Great Hall, a tuxedoed Justice Clarence Thomas turned to me and voiced his approval for my work. I glanced over to where Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife, Jane, were entertaining two of my associates, trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a private, nongovernmental entity for which Roberts served as honorary chair. At that moment, I knew the secretive operation I had run, aimed at emboldening Thomas and his conservative colleagues to render the strongest possible decisions in favor of our right-wing Christian agenda, had succeeded. My organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, had created an initiative we called “Operation Higher Court” that trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries,” befriending Thomas and his wife, Ginni; Samuel…

IMAGINE OBAMACARE is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law,…

ONE OF THE most oft-quoted sentences ever penned by a philosopher is George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 2024, this aphorism is practically a campaign slogan. Donald Trump, seeking to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after being voted out of the job, has waged war on remembrance. In fact, he’s depending on tens of millions of voters forgetting the recent past. This election is an experiment in how powerful a memory hole can be. In March, Trump posted this all-caps question: “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” A realistic answer for most would be, hell yeah. Four years prior, the Covid pandemic was raging, the economy was…

IN THE WANING days of the Trump presidency, russell vought, the outgoing director of the office of management and budget, had a request. After years in Washington, DC, soaking in the minutiae of policy, Vought had come to both know and loathe the bureaucracy. A rare voice in an administration committed to “draining the swamp” who had actual Beltway experience, he found in the Trump era he could put his expertise to use. A few weeks before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of at-will employees—so-called Schedule F positions—which would be exempt from the rules designed to protect civil servants from partisan hatchetmen. Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of OMB roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a…

IMMACULATE MAY appear to be all about evil nuns. In the movie’s grisly opening, four nuns break a runaway sister’s leg. Another holy mob tries to skewer the protagonist, Sister Cecilia, like a shish kebab just after she takes her final vows—and before she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Halfway through the film, Cecilia catches two sisters slicing off a mouthy novitiate’s tongue. Candles burn, incense wafts, and their habits conceal evil intentions. But the real villain is the parish priest. A former geneticist who’s found his calling trying to engineer the next messiah, he inseminates Cecilia with DNA pulled from—wait for it—one of the nails used to crucify Jesus Christ. Producer and lead actor Sydney Sweeney said she and the rest of the crew behind Immaculate “never really looked at a…