Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Mother Jones

On the Cover For MoJo editor Mark Follman’s cover story on how the mother of mass shooter Elliot Rodger is working to prevent similar tragedies, we called on artist and designer MIKE MCQUADE, whose award-winning illustrations have graced the covers of countless books, products, and magazines. Contributors For the last two years, reporters and editors at the Center for Public Integrity have been compiling and analyzing nearly 2 million Reconstruction-era documents to create “40 Acres and a Lie,” a far-reaching multimedia investigation into how thousands of formerly enslaved Americans were granted seized Confederate land—only to have it taken away. This broken promise caused specific, multigenerational injuries, but it is also emblematic of our nation’s abandonment of justice and reparations for the systematic restoration of white supremacy. ALEXIA FERNÁNDEZ CAMPBELL, PRATHEEK REBALA, and APRIL SIMPSON…

LAST SEPTEMBER, when the Biden administration canceled several oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it cited in its decision the expertise of the Native “original stewards” of the land. The move was the fruit of government-wide guidance issued in late 2022 encouraging the incorporation of what Biden policymakers broadly referred to as “Indigenous Knowledge”—a wide array of observations, oral and written records, innovations, beliefs, and practices of various Native communities—into science-based federal decision-making. The rollout cited ways Indigenous knowledge had already informed federally funded research, including studies on controlled burns, crop yields, and historic fish populations. The mention soon proved to be another piece of fodder for culture warriors on the right who decry the process as liberal orthodoxy run amok. As the Washington Free Beacon…

KAREN DOVE BARR parked her cart next to a “Golfers Only” sign. Up ahead, men in khaki shorts and polo shirts leaned on golf clubs around the 12th hole. Houses with large wooden decks dotted one side of the fairway. On the other side, miles of shallow salt marshes extended to the horizon. As Dove Barr walked along a footpath, her tennis shoes crunched ancient oyster shells—an echo of a past when Indigenous and later enslaved people once lived and fished here. “That’s where Mr. Waring would launch his boat,” she said, pointing to a shaded patch of Georgia shoreline. William Waring was a wealthy Savannah physician whose family once owned this land and enslaved dozens of people on it. The Waring estate—about 1,300 acres and roughly the size of…

CHEUNG ON TRUMP’S PRIMARY RIVALS Ron DeSantis is “sullen and sad, because his numbers are as tiny as him.” “In another desperate sign that his campaign is off the rails, DeSanctus had the bright idea to travel to Los Angeles to do Bill Maher’s show where he was filleted like he was the main course at Sugarfish.” “Nikki Haley is so stupid she doesn’t know how to read polls/numbers. She must be a shitty accountant.” Haley is “a warmonger…Her bloodthirst is only rivalled by her dependency for Democrats to interfere in the Republican primary.” ON BIDEN AND HIS CAMPAIGN “Aside from trying to explain away losing his memory, shuffling his feet like a short-circuited Roomba and falling on his ass over and over again, they’ll have to take responsibility for…

ON A WARM January evening, mayoral candidate Wanda Arzuaga López makes her way through Juncos, Puerto Rico, visiting a neighborhood of 1940s-style casitas and breadfruit trees sitting behind chain-link fences. Joined by her campaign director and four turquoise-shirted volunteers, Arzuaga López, an evangelical lay chaplain, goes door to door, warmly exclaiming, “¡Dios la bendiga! ¡Buenas tardes!” offering God’s blessings to residents. The neighborhood, nestled within the lush greenery of Puerto Rico’s southeast, is plagued by acrid fumes from a nearby waste-disposal facility. Residents, most of them over 60, peer through their windows before coming outside. Questions like “Who are you?” quickly turn into another kind of dump, as people seize the opportunity to unload about Arzuaga López’s opponent, the government in San Juan, and the abandonment they felt after a…

ALVIN TAYLOR still remembers the sight each day as he’d return from school, of more houses in his neighborhood being burned to the ground. He was about 8 years old when the fires came for his home. Fenita Kirkwood recalls listening, as a 9-year-old girl, to her father arguing with men who had come to their doorstep to insist they had to leave. “That big yellow bulldozer pulled up in front of our house on a Friday,” remembers Lawrence Williams, who ran inside to fetch his mother. “I came in later and she was in the kitchen crying, asking God, ‘What are we going to do?’” They were all children at the time, living in Section 14, a small plot of tribal land near downtown Palm Springs, California, in the…

LAST YEAR, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children—and making it look easy. Take Nara Smith, a model and mother of three who’s married to Mormon actor and model Lucky Blue Smith. Nara, who’s biracial and opaque about her politics and religion, doesn’t claim to be a trad wife, but the signs are there. Through mellow voice-overs, she walks us through cooking barbecue chicken…

THE 2015 Aston Martin Vulcan can go from zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds and maxes out at 208 mph. Only 24 of the two-door, two-seater carbon-fiber British speedsters were ever made, each with a $2.3 million price tag. They also aren’t street legal in the United States. Since the car doesn’t comply with the Clean Air Act’s emissions standards, importing one requires an EPA exemption. Aston Martin was granted just nine between March 2015 and February 2017, on the condition they be used “solely for competition.” But on a sunny day in November 2015, Bernie Moreno took a shiny new cherry-red Vulcan—part of his “personal collection,” a local reporter noted—for a spin outside Cleveland. At least three police cars escorted Moreno down usually busy suburban streets. At the time,…

POMPEY JACKSON was born in the heart of Georgia’s rice empire—the human property of one of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful families. He and his sisters were among hundreds enslaved on a sprawling marshland estate called Grove Hill, where life was brutal. People died every month, mostly young children. Those who reached adulthood often suffered spinal injuries, lung disease, and foot rot from sloshing through flooded rice fields. Jackson survived smallpox. He was a teenager in late 1864 when Union General William T. Sherman and his soldiers advanced through the Ogeechee River low country on their way to capture Savannah. Sherman freed thousands during his march through the South, later writing that “freedmen, in droves, old and young, followed [our troops] to reach a place of safety.” On January…

THE CONVERSION therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared Michelle Cretella, a board member of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. “We must do something.” Cretella was delivering a keynote speech at the first in-person conference in four years of the Alliance, which describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian…

IN LATE FEBRUARY, after Donald Trump had nearly vanquished the entirety of the Republican primary field, his spokesman, Steven Cheung, took aim at the one opponent still standing. “Birdbrain, are you a liar or just plain stupid?” he posted on X. “Birdbrain” was Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s own ambassador to the United Nations, whose effrontery in not exiting the race made her a favored punching bag. But there were, and are, many other Cheung targets. “Chris Christie looks like a weak bitch,” he proclaimed after the former New Jersey governor expressed regret for endorsing Trump in 2016. On March 9, Cheung posted on X a picture of Joe Biden standing at a podium. His caption, all uppercase: “HELP! MY DIAPER IS FULL!” Cheung’s last…