Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2022 från Mother Jones

When Albert Diaz, then 41, took his seat in the Social Security Administration’s hearing room in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in October 2011, he had to lower himself onto his left buttock to avoid stabbing pain in his right leg. His dominant arm, the right one, was locked in a brace to keep it from curling in toward his body. He shook uncontrollably, a side effect of an electrical stimulation device implanted in his spinal cord to manage relentless pain. Three years earlier, Diaz had fallen backward three stories down an elevator shaft while working as a maintenance director in a luxury apartment building. Since the accident, his family of nine had relied on his wife’s teaching salary. His application for federal disability benefits was denied, and after waiting a year for…

On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. “He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,” she recalls, “and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.” His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of…

Noah Lanard Surveillance Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2004 with the goal of helping the federal government comb through its massive databases to identify national security threats. The Lord of the Rings superfan named the company after Elvish “seeing stones” used by the antihero Saruman to control Middle Earth. Thiel is also funding the defense firm Anduril (another LOTR reference), which deals in autonomous submarines, aerial drones, and border surveillance. Culture After Thiel started funding projects like last year’s “anti-woke” film festival in downtown Manhattan, right-wing influencers starting referring to the billionaire’s largesse as “Thielbucks.” He’s also using his nonprofit Imitatio to popularize the ideas of French cultural theorist René Girard, whose notion that human desire comes from imitating the desires of others has proved a hit among tech investors looking to fund the next…

During his time in the White House, no target provoked as much anger from Donald Trump as the American press. In 2017, he declared, “The press, honestly, is out of control.” In 2019, he called it “truly the enemy of the people.” His reelection campaign sued the Washington Post and the New York Times. Some 500 of Trump’s tweets attacked individual journalists by name, and at one point he accused the Times of “treason.” When Trump and Vladimir Putin—under whose rule some critical journalists have been assassinated—sat down for a press conference at a Group of 20 summit, Trump pointed to the reporters waiting in front of them and joked, “Get rid of them.” A century earlier, an American administration did get rid of opposition journalism with a ruthlessness Trump…

ON THE COVER The potential visual metaphors for Republicans’ long descent into madness and conspiracy-mongering are endless. For David Corn’s look at this phenomenon, Justin Metz nails the combination of bizarre and grotesque.   How we covered abortion and far-right extremism this issue: Reporter Becca Andrews profiled the staff of a Kansas abortion clinic (and the protesters outside) for her book No Choice, excerpted here (“In the Eye of the Storm”). Photographer Zoe Freilich was already working on a project about abortion when we tapped her to snap pictures of the Kansas clinic staff and protesters on the sidewalk (“In the Eye of the Storm”).   Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor, picks apart Justice Alito’s misuse of racial justice rhetoric one flagrant misconception at a time (“The Race…

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein In a 2021 interview with the Stanford Review, Blake Masters was asked for a historical figure he admired. He chose two. The first was George Washington, possibly the best-known military general, slave owner, and president in American history. “I don’t think people realize how much of a boss this guy was,” Masters explained. The second was Lee Kuan Yew. LKY, as he’s often called, was Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and oversaw what some call its economic miracle. He turned the former British colony into a go-go free market paradise. As it grew, Singapore instituted a far-ranging welfare state. The government built extensive public housing; it heavily subsidized health care and education. Today, municipal order is apparent: The streets in Singapore are relentlessly clean, almost everyone has internet access,…

In late February, just after Russia invaded Ukraine, my Twitter feed began filling up with videos showing Black exchange students being refused passage on trains fleeing the escalating conflict, while white students had no problem boarding. But not everyone was buying it. In a now-deleted tweet, Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma shared a Washington Post article reporting on the spread of disinformation, and added, “as videos go viral, a reminder about verifying sources before sharing—and a reminder that Russia disinfo ops have specifically targeted Black people in the past with fake accounts and media.” “The videos and the ppl are real,” Q. Anthony Omene, creator of RZNWA Media, who had been amplifying the voices of those speaking out about anti-Black racism in Ukraine, shot back in response. Omene and others…

Amid the tumult surrounding the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June 24 ruling that ended Roe v. Wade, one curious detail went largely overlooked. Nestled among Justice Samuel Alito’s arguments laying waste to nearly 50 years of abortion precedent was an unassuming footnote documenting a narrative advanced in amicus briefs submitted to the high court. These “friend of the court” briefs, Alito explained, “present arguments about the motives” of people and groups favoring “liberal access to abortion,” namely “that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.” Portraying abortion as a tool of racial genocide is not a bridge too far, Alito insisted: “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,”…

In May, during an Aspen Institute Conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the audience, “I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment… This country needs a strong Republican Party. And we do. Not a cult. But a strong Republican Party.” Her comments echoed a sentiment that Joe Biden had expressed during the 2020 campaign: If Donald Trump were out of the White House, the GOP would return to normal and be amenable to forging deals and legislative compromises. Both Pelosi and Biden have bolstered the notion that the current GOP, with its cultlike embrace of Trump and his Big Lie, and its acceptance of the fringiest players,…

In the spring of 2012, Blake Masters, who was in his final year at Stanford Law, sat in on a computer science class taught by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. During a lecture titled “Founder as Victim, Founder as God,” Thiel argued a kinglike leader was essential to innovation. “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy,” he explained. “We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.” Afterward, Masters tweeted that the lecture was the best 90 minutes he’d ever spent in a classroom and linked to the exhaustive notes he’d been taking on Thiel’s course. For months, everyone from tech bros to New York Times columnist David Brooks headed to Masters’ Tumblr to read them.…