Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i Mother Jones

Jeanne Herman, commissioner, Washoe County, Nevada In Nevada, county commissioners approve election results, and Herman voted against certifying the 2020 outcome in the state’s second-largest county. She has pushed to curtail the use of voting machines and wanted National Guard troops posted at election facilities. If she wins reelection this year, she might have company on the commission. Mike Clark—a Republican who won’t say whether he thinks Joe Biden was “duly elected”—knocked off another incumbent in the primary. Brian Zahra, Supreme Court justice, Michigan Federal judges smacked down Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, but some state-level jurists proved more pliable. Michigan’s high court narrowly voted to throw out a lawsuit seeking to undo Biden’s victory. Zahra—one of three dissenting Republicans—didn’t say how he might have ruled. But in a…

The states that have enacted the harshest abortion restrictions, banning it outright or after six weeks, are, it turns out, the worst equipped to deal with the consequences of forcing people into parenthood. These 15 states—controlled by Republicans, apart from a few Democratic governors—tend to rank among the nation’s worst in maternal mortality, child wellness, and food security. They offer less access to affordable health care, too, which makes it harder for women, for example, to obtain birth control prescriptions. “It’s like they want us to have them,” explains 38-year-old Melissa Kearse, a Georgia single mother of five, “but they are not giving us any aid to raise these kids.” Congress, for now, is unlikely to solve the problem. Making abortion legal nationwide would require 60 Senate votes to override…

It is the first full day of the inaugural Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors National Summit, and 500 such warriors are listening raptly as Florida governor Ron DeSantis delivers the keynote address. They fill tables in the grand ballroom of the Tampa Marriott, waving “Mamas for DeSantis” signs, and wearing T-shirts bearing the slogans “We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT” and “Stop woke indoctrination.” They jump to their feet and cheer when DeSantis, who is obviously considering a presidential run in 2024, brags about having stood up to Disney’s “leftism” and again when he refers to President Joe Biden as “Brandon blundering around every time you go get gas.” The moms have been primed by a morning program that has been nothing short of a pep rally. First came…

  It was a cold, blustery weekend in February when Neesha Davé opened the door to her Austin, Texas, home and found a process server standing on her front step. She felt sympathy for the woman waiting in the morning wind and rain, even after she awkwardly handed Davé a 30-page document they both knew was bad news. For months, Davé had prepared for the possibility that this day might come. She read through the document, then scanned each page with her phone, and sent it to her lawyers. The document was a request to depose Davé because, as the deputy director of Lilith Fund, she helps pregnant people in Texas obtain abortions. Beginning on September 1, 2021, abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy were banned in Texas under…

1. The Bachelor In 2020, after years of complaints from viewers and 24 straight seasons without a Black bachelor, the show promised to address “the lack of representation of people of color.” Matt James was appointed the first Black bachelor, but his season became mired in controversy when host Chris Harrison defended a white contestant for having attended an antebellum-themed party a few years before. 2. The Bachelorette In 2017, 14 years after the show premiered, Rachel Lindsay was cast as the first Black bachelorette. But after four years with the franchise, in which she was portrayed as what she calls the “angry Black female,” reckoned with a racist contestant, and interviewed the host as he defended a white contestant’s racial insensitivity, Lindsay said she was done with the Bachelor…

In her last years, homebound during the bleak reign of Covid and suffering various maladies, Barbara Ehrenreich did what she always did: She organized an activist collective. This one was a bi-weekly Zoom study group of assorted comrades—former writing partners like myself, other sisters from feminism, labor organizers, and loving ex-husbands. Ever defiant, Barbara kept pushing us to wake the hell up and see how race, gender, and class domination benefited only the rich, and how we could support Amazon strikers and women needing abortions. I first met Barbara in 1971 when we were both hired as part of a new SUNY school with a “mission of social justice.” We helped to found a women’s studies curriculum, and began writing the first of three books on how centuries of male…

 Early one Saturday morning in August, some 60 newly arrived migrants—mostly men, and a few families with children and breastfeeding infants—crowd into an activity room at a Washington, DC, church. Their scant belongings, keepsakes from home and tokens from strangers encountered on the journey north, are preserved in transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. They got here at dawn, after a 1,700-mile, 30-plus-hour road trip aboard two of the more than 150 migrant buses Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has dispatched to the nation’s capital in an act of audacious political theater. One woman asks me in Spanish where she might find a shower, saying she really needs to clean up. Another wonders whether she could get some new shoes because her cheap rubber sandals are falling apart. Others seek diapers…

One 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 games that season, the team had yet to record a win. Newcastle, once one of the best sides in England, had endured years of mediocrity under the ownership of a miserly local sporting-goods magnate. Magpies supporters resorted to stockpiling cans of beer for the day their fortunes changed. That day had come at last. The key acquisition who would turn Newcastle around wasn’t a new midfielder or a manager; he was a murderer. The club…

During a Moms for Liberty summit session called Gender Ideology in Our Schools, a presenter introduced a term I’d never heard before: “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” She cited the work of a former Brown University physician and researcher named Lisa Littman, who, in a 2018 study published in the journal PLOS One, had argued that the increase in the number of children who are openly questioning their gender identity isn’t just a result of broader acceptance of trans and nonbinary people. Rather, Littman posited, gender dysphoria is spreading among children through peer networks, almost like an infectious disease. Littman’s ideas went viral: Joe Rogan devoted an episode to these concepts, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling blogged about it, and Tucker Carlson called transgender identity among children an “epidemic.” Social scientists, however,…

  The numbers are now frighteningly familiar: Last year more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses, bringing the total death toll to more than 1 million since the invention of OxyContin in 1996. By 2030 another million people are projected to die. Americans are more likely to die of an accidental drug overdose—especially when it involves fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin and surreptitiously laced into other drugs—than in a car accident. But cars would kill 15,000 more people a year were it not for seatbelts. Seatbelts, helmet laws, and air bags are harm reduction strategies. They reduce the negative consequences of risky behavior. For decades, drug policy experts have recommended that we embrace the seatbelts of drug use: overdose-reversing medicine like naloxone, kits…

If you were cooking up a pitch for a tech company, you could do worse than “Our mission is to democratize X.” Many have used it in the past. Glossier, a cosmetics company, explains it is “giving voice through beauty” in order to “democratize an industry that has forever been top-down.” Robinhood, an app that gamified trading, says its “mission is to democratize finance for all.” CoachHub, a corporate coaching company, asserts: “Our Mission: Democratize coaching.” It goes on like this on About pages. Airtable wants to “democratize software creation”; Bolt is going to “democratize commerce”; PayPal is working to “democratize financial services.” Elizabeth Holmes, infamously, set out to “democratize healthcare,” according to media fanfare. Democratize has two usual definitions: One is to bring democracy or democratic principles to a…

Just hours after federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to seize highly classified national security documents, Paul Gosar urged a fight to the finish. “The FBI raid on Trump’s home tells us one thing,” the far-right Arizona congressman tweeted. “Failure is not an option. We must destroy the FBI.” Three days later, an Ohio man named Ricky Shiffer donned tactical gear, armed himself with an AR-15, and went to the FBI field office in Cincinnati. After failing to breach the facility, he fled and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Shiffer was a frequent user of Trump’s Truth Social site, where the ex-president has kept up steady attacks on political opponents and the Justice Department and FBI. Shiffer had posted about imminent violence, telling fellow Trump supporters…

In August 1944, just two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (a.k.a. the GI Bill of Rights), Harry McAlpin, Washington correspondent for the National Negro Publishers Association, warned that the new law, though race-neutral on its face, would exclude Black veterans. The GI Bill included funding for housing, college, and job training, along with business loans and unemployment insurance, which fueled social mobility for millions of veterans and their descendants. It also included “innumerable loopholes for states to ‘rob’ returning Negro veterans of the rights and privileges they have earned by risking their lives and limbs for the preservation (?) of democracy,” McAlpin wrote. This discrimination was by design. Southern Democrats including House Veterans Committee Chairman John Rankin—who a quarter century earlier had penned an…

Ahead of the Florida primaries in August, Gov. Ron DeSantis went on an “Education Agenda Tour” across the state to endorse candidates for school board races. His efforts paid off. Out of a pool of 30 school board hopefuls who had been handpicked by the governor for aligning with his “parent-centered,” so-called anti-woke, platform, 19 of them won their elections and six others advanced to runoffs. DeSantis’ unprecedented involvement in these down ballot races reinforced how culture wars on education have become central to the GOP strategy; the days of traditionally nonpartisan school board elections are over. “If I could have a conservative majority on every school board in the country, we would be in such good shape,” DeSantis, who in addition to running for reelection is clearly positioning himself…

If you're one of the estimated 10 million people in the United States taking oral contraception, you probably needed a prescription to get it. But that could soon change: In July, a Paris-based company, HRA Pharma, announced it asked the US Food and Drug Administration for permission to sell its progestin-only birth control pill over the counter. For the first time since its approval in 1960, the Pill may be available with no requirement to consult a health care professional—a significant hurdle for those most in need of the medication. The US wouldn’t be the first country to #FreeThePill; in fact, oral contraceptives are available without a prescription in more than 100 countries. That’s because the Pill is nearly 100 percent effective when taken regularly, and safe for most people.…

America's solar industry is slated for a big boost from the Democrats’ recently passed climate bill, yet solar still only accounts for about 3 percent of electricity flowing into America’s grid—less than one-seventh the share from coal. If we want to phase out fossil fuels and accommodate an electric vehicle revolution, the sun’s contribution has to rise dramatically—and fast. But where to put those panels? The best places for solar installations, according to a 2019 study from the University of Utah and Oregon State, tend to be the areas where we already grow our food. That’s because, just like sun-loving tomato plants that fare poorly when the mercury creeps north of 85 °F, photovoltaic (PV) panels lose their efficiency at higher temperatures. But that doesn’t mean we have to starve…