Mother Jones March/April 2022

ON THE COVER Trump supporters have continued to weaponize the Big Lie that drew some to assault the Capitol by passing laws restricting voting rights and nabbing positions overseeing elections. CONTRIBUTORS What media—book, podcast, song—helped you work on this issue? Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920–33. Looking deeply at assumptions can reveal as much as the front pages.—Noah Y. Kim (“Housing Crisis”) Publications like the National Catholic Reporter and the website Where Peter Is. They’ve tracked the divides in their church with horror.—Kathryn Joyce (“Holy War”) The song “Wet Dream” by Wet Leg, seemingly made for the soundtrack of a coming-of-age A24 film (or designing a magazine) —Grace Molteni (“The Pushback”) BY THE NUMBERS To see our masthead, visit motherjones.com/about. For questions about your subscription or to make a tax-deductible donation to support our journalism, call…

For decades now, many of our leading newsrooms have covered American politics like it’s sports. There are two opposing teams; there are players on the field; there are people with money jockeying for power and acclaim behind the scenes. There are winners and losers. And there is a set of rules that everyone understands to determine which is which. That way of looking at politics has always had blind spots. But the biggest one didn’t become fully apparent until recently: What if, even as we follow the play-by-play, someone is setting the arena on fire? That’s where we are with democracy in America. We can see the flames licking at the corners. We can smell the smoke. And we have a choice: We can keep watching the action on the field and…

Diane Weiss and Kristen Svihlik live 1,700 miles and a generation apart. Weiss, 60, is twice divorced with a grown daughter, and resides by herself in a one-bedroom apartment in Mesa, Arizona. Svihlik is 38 and lives in a fixer-upper in Akron, Ohio, with her husband, their 6-year-old son, and a newborn daughter. The two women have never met, but they uttered precisely the same words to me on the exact same day: “I’m going to have to work until I die.” It’s not an uncommon sentiment in America today, where a relative few have enough money socked away to see them comfortably through the so-called golden years. The Federal Reserve’s latest survey of consumer finances shows that among the poorest 50 percent of families, less than a third participated in…

At raucous school board meetings across the country, disgruntled parents have grabbed the mic to represent the political desires of the Republican Party. Once-innocuous local gatherings have become anti–critical race theory caucuses administered by white people. In July 2021, the Missouri state legislature’s joint education committee held an invite-only hearing on how educators in public K–12 schools teach about racism. “I felt today it was important to hear from people who have tried to go through the official cycle of authority within their districts and have basically been turned away,” said Cindy O’Laughlin, a Republican senator and the committee’s chair. For O’Laughlin, “people” has a precise meaning, as no Black person spoke and the only people allowed to give testimony were opponents of critical race theory. Of course, giving primacy to…

Arianna Anderson had just gone into labor with her fifth child in March 2021 when a bathroom pipe burst. She scrambled to pack for the hospital and, with her husband working out of state, shuttle her young children off to a sitter. Water rushed from a cabinet, pooling on the floor. “Can you imagine? My water was breaking, and there was water coming from underneath the sink,” Anderson recalls. By that point, her four-bedroom, 100-year-old rental house on the 33rd block of Colfax Avenue in north Minneapolis’ McKinley neighborhood had become the starring villain of her life. Its issues were myriad, its pestilence almost cinematic. During colder months, it lost heat. In the summer, its mold thrived as Anderson’s 7-year-old son fought bloody noses and asthma attacks. In the autumn of…

A week before the ninth anniversary of her son’s murder, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) discovered that Republicans had radically redrawn her district to oust her from Congress. A political novice, McBath had become a leading gun control advocate after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot by a white man in 2012 in an altercation over the volume of rap music Davis was playing. She went on to stage one of the biggest electoral upsets in Georgia’s recent history when, in 2018, she became the first Black person to represent the state’s 6th District, Newt Gingrich’s home turf for 20 years. Her victory exemplified Democratic inroads in formerly red states like Georgia, and the new power being exercised by communities of color in the rapidly diversifying South. But those gains are…