Mother Jones January/February 2023

ON THE COVER Our coverage of November’s colorful, surreal midterms called for equally colorful and surreal art. The perfect artist was London-based ANDREW RAE, whose cover brings to life Washington’s weirdest weirdos and wingiest wingnuts. CONTRIBUTORS MoJo is named after a hellraising labor leader. Who would you name your magazine for? Pantalones, to honor Luisa Capetillo: feminist labor organizer, anarchist, and the first Puerto Rican woman to publicly wear pants.—Emily Hofstaedter, “Hidden Figures” Albert Parsons, the former Confederate soldier-turned-antislavery-anarchist, for his inspired personal arcs of social change.—Gabbriel Schivone, “Black and Blue” Grace Paley, who wrote her genre-defying short stories on scraps of paper before attending antiwar rallies.—Emma Copley Eisenberg, “Friend Zoned” BY THE NUMBERS Competitive water polo, financing a new stadium, nepotism—there are lots of ways to get into Harvard. To see our masthead, visit motherjones.com/about. For questions about…

“THIS AGAIN??” I thought when I read the Washington Post’s editorial, a couple of weeks before Election Day. The topic was “pink slime” news, a.k.a. political campaign literature made to look like a newspaper. A good issue for journalists to address. But a few paragraphs in came a lazy and familiar trope: “People know more or less what they’re getting when they tune in to Fox News or open up a copy of Mother Jones. These institutions’ primary purpose is to make money by putting out news…” I may or may not have flung something at the wall, an impulse that seizes me every time some media pundit feels compelled to drag independent investigative reporting down to the level of propaganda to make their “both sides do it” arguments. To its credit,…

FANS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY had good cause to celebrate in November, when many election deniers and extremists were sent packing, and predictions of violence and chaos at the polls did not come to pass. Democrats were the beneficiaries, holding the Senate and making significant gains in governorships and state legislatures. But a political force propelled by racism, conspiracy theories, and lies, led by a man who tried to overturn a national election, who incited violence to block the peaceful transfer of power, won control of the House of Representatives. In an election in which far-right kooks generally fared poorly and no red wave emerged, the Republican Party, aided by racial gerrymandering and fueled by antidemocratic election denialism and extremism, still amassed a slim majority of seats in the lower chamber. And…

ON NOVEMBER 14, shortly before the networks called the Arizona governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs, Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old conservative activist, asked a guest on his YouTube livestream what Republicans had missed. Since moving to the state in 2018, Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, have become one of Arizona’s biggest political power brokers, using the state party apparatus to elevate candidates who showed fealty to former President Donald Trump and purge those who did not. Turning Point had been a launch pad for Hobbs’ opponent, the former local newscaster Kari Lake, and Kirk had for days been predicting an easy victory for the rising conservative star. “The vibe on the ground was totally different than this, wasn’t it?” he said, head on his hand, looking mystified. His guest, Republican…

ON JANUARY 11, 2021, five days after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, CNN published an article titled “Experts Warn That Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Will Outlast His Presidency.” It quoted Timothy Snyder, a historian who wrote the 2017 bestseller On Tyranny. “The idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie,” Snyder said. “It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it. And it’s a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action.” In the two years since, the phrase “Big Lie” has become central to the story of how Trump incited violence at the Capitol. Opening…

IT WAS SIX WEEKS before the November election, and in his snug campaign office in suburban Milwaukee, located in a shopping plaza between a dentist and an acupuncturist, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers scanned the brightly colored maps that hung on the walls. They depicted the tortuously shaped legislative districts drawn in a state regarded as one of the most gerrymandered in the nation. “Who in their right minds could’ve made them up?” Evers asked. The answer: Republicans in the state legislature. Evers saw firsthand the impact of GOP control of the redistricting process when he ran for governor in 2018. That year, Democrats swept all four statewide races and won 53 percent of votes cast for the state Assembly, but the party retained just 36 percent of seats in the chamber.…