Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i Mother Jones

ON SUSAN’S birthday five years ago, Kai, her 10-year-old, slid a note under her bedroom door that she still can recite from memory: “Hey Mom, I wanted to ask, when you talk about me in the future, if you could use he/him or they/them pronouns because she/her pronouns make me really uncomfortable.” Then, “Happy Birthday.” Susan remembers exhaling. She had been deeply worried about Kai, who had been severely depressed and struggling with his classmates and schoolwork. She hurried to his room and hugged him, thinking: Maybe this is what has been wrong. Maybe this is why he’s been so sad. It was a relief to have an answer, because, Susan realized, “this is something that we can tackle.” Today, Kai is part of the small number of transgender…

THIS PAST WINTER, as Education Secretary Linda McMahon said her department’s “final mission” would be to shift education programs “back to the states,” the agency was stripped to the bone, dismantled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The attack didn’t come out of nowhere: For years, the right’s megarich have bankrolled efforts to weaken public education by supporting voucher initiatives to pull funding from local schools—and their unionized teachers. The DOGE cuts have supercharged the effort, creating unprecedented opportunities for private interests to profit while hastening the destruction of public education and remaking how society shapes young minds. “Generally,” Musk has said, “you want education to be as close to a video game as possible.” Now, as his proteges lay havoc to the federal government and push for critical…

LAURA BETH RESNICK was delivering snapdragons and anemones to clients near the White House when she got the news: In his first wave of executive orders, President Donald Trump had frozen all projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, one of his predecessor’s signature achievements. Resnick was awaiting reimbursement for solar panels she’d purchased for her flower farm via the Rural Energy for America Program, which had received a $1 billion IRA injection to help farmers invest in renewable energy projects. Her frozen grant left her $36,000 in the hole. “This sudden knowledge that we are on the hook for this money we don’t have—it’s so overwhelming,” she told me in March. Trump’s chaotic first months back in office—his flurry of orders, tariffs, and cuts by the so-called Department…

IT’S TOUGH sometimes, when you’re a modestly sized, nonprofit newsroom, to look at the big dogs in journalism—the New York Times or CNN, with their thousands of journalists, or storied magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic—and not feel hopelessly outgunned. They can swarm dozens of journalists on a single story, or pay some $12,000 to duplicate a certain New York mayor’s luxe travel experience. They have fleets of publicists to make sure every success is amplified. Our staff has been known to couchsurf to get a story, air-gap computers with the help of epoxy glue, or enlist a relative to play the guitar for music on our sister radio show, Reveal. Nevertheless, or maybe because of this, we’ve often punched above our weight when the time comes to…

  IN 2018, Monica Ruiz and her neighbors found letters from their landlord taped to their doors. They were notifications of rent hikes—in some cases, increases of over 200 percent. Ruiz had lived at Hillside Villa, a large apartment complex overlooking Los Angeles’ gentrifying Chinatown, for more than 20 years. She had raised five children there. Her youngest daughter attended the nearby elementary school, where she had taken Mandarin classes since kindergarten. She didn’t want to give them up or leave her friends. “I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move,’” Ruiz recalled. Ruiz didn’t know if she could find another affordable home anywhere in Los Angeles. And she didn’t want to. She had long tended a community garden…

LAST FALL, retired Judge Karen Radius leaned on her cane as she walked me toward the girls’ housing unit at Hawaii’s only youth prison, remembering the moment three years ago when she’d learned no more girls were living there. For Radius, a disarmingly matter-of-fact 76-year-old who’d spent much of her career trying to keep teens out of detention, the empty housing unit came as the best kind of news. “These aren’t fucking evil kids who commit bad crimes,” she said as we passed a couple of incarcerated boys studying in classrooms. The absence of girls at the prison was the rare positive criminal justice story to get national attention. Politicians and activists mused whether Hawaii—a pioneer for women’s and girls’ rights as the first state to legalize abortion and ratify…

IN MARCH, the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sent concerned letters to 20 of the nation’s top law firms. The problem? Big Law diversity and equity programs were likely illegal, said the administration, because DEI discriminated against male and white candidates. At first, such an attack could seem silly—the policy memo equivalent of a trolling tweet. But something more insidious was afoot. I used to work at WilmerHale, one of the law firms that received a letter. I was stunned by the rationale. The ostensible legal basis for the administration’s assertion is that these policies violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits an employer from making decisions on the basis of characteristics such as race, sex, and national origin—traits that are often referred…

THE SO-CALLED Department of Government Efficiency was many things in the first months of the second Trump administration. It was a chain saw, a wood chipper, and “a way of life, like Buddhism,” according to Elon Musk, its fearless leader according to everyone but the president’s lawyers. It was a funnel of disinfo, a conflict of interest, a bureaucratic mystery, and a tired meme. But above all, it was the realization of a dream. For all the talk of changing demographics and new coalitions, the most important development in US politics last fall involved money and power: The billionaires who believe their technology will save civilization found common cause with authoritarians who hoped that same technology could help them control it. They realized that, in the end, the things they…

EIGHT YEARS AGO, if you wanted to line the first family’s pockets, your choices—while ethically unprecedented—were limited. There was only so much you could spend on hotel rooms or Mar-a-Lago fundraisers. Fortunately for foreign governments, megacorporations, and anyone else with an agenda, the Trumps have diversified. “It’s a whole different scale than it was in 2017,” says Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who says President Donald Trump and his underlings “seem to believe that the American people don’t care. They’re not making much of an effort to hide any of this stuff.” The options for paying tribute to the president, his kin, and the MAGA movement are now legion. There are even exciting new opportunities to protect your business by reaching a “settlement”…

TO THE UNTRAINED eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate. The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at…