Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i Mother Jones

"You ever been here?" Yterenickia Bell asks me as we wait for the door to the Cascade Skating Rink to be unlocked. “It’s historic,” she says, ushering me out of the December rain and into the fluorescent-lit roller-skating spot in west Atlanta’s Adamsville neighborhood. “People have been gathering here for years.” The rink is awaiting the night crowd. Video games sit silent in a corner. The snack bar is dark except for a flashing neon sign. But it’s not empty: a handful of people in orange shirts and masks are chatting at the other end of the rink before braving the rain to get out the vote for Senate candidate Raphael Warnock. Bell is the GOTV director for Care in Action, an advocacy group whose members are mostly nannies, housecleaners,…

In 2018, Democrats swept every statewide race in Wisconsin, ending nearly a decade of Republican rule. “The voters spoke,” Democrat Tony Evers said after defeating incumbent Gov. Scott Walker. “A change is coming, Wisconsin!” Not so fast. A month later, the GOP-controlled legislature convened an unprecedented lame-duck session to strip the incoming governor of key administrative and appointment powers and shorten the early voting period to dampen future Democratic turnout. Though their opponents had won more votes, Republicans believed only they were entitled to exercise power. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said of the state’s two largest and most Democratic cities, home to 850,000 people, “we would have a clear majority.” In fact, they still did. Even though Democrats…

Joyce Jones’ Facebook page is almost an archetype of what the social network is supposed to look like: Pictures of her kids, her kids’ friends, her sports teams, her kids’ friends’ sports teams. Videos of her husband’s sermons at New Mount Moriah Baptist Church. Memes celebrating achievement and solidarity, holiday greetings, public health messages. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg extols when he talks about how his company is all about “bringing people together.” So when Jones decided to run for mayor in her Alabama town, it seemed obvious that she’d try to bring people together on Facebook. Her bid to be Montevallo’s first Black mayor, challenging a 12-year City Council incumbent, drew an enthusiastic, diverse crew of volunteers. They put up a campaign page, One Montevallo, and started posting cheery endorsements…

Every evening last summer, after I’d shut down my work laptop, my 3-year-old daughter and I would approach our Google Home smart speaker and yell, “Hey Google, can you play ‘Aankh Marey’ from the movie Simmba?” We’d hold our breaths and wait for a response. The digital assistant would then repeat the name of the Bollywood song we’d requested in its default standard American accent. We’d rejoice and dance when the assistant played the right number, which happened about half the time. My daughter was going to a Bollywood dance class and we’d finally found a use for the device that my husband had won at a tech conference. Often, however, it would mishear our requests and play something else. My daughter and I would look at each other and…

Mother Jones national affairs editor MARK FOLLMAN has been investigating the rise of far-right extremists for years. He’d been warning about Trump’s incitement of violence weeks before the siege of Congress. Afterward, security experts told him that replacing Trump was only the start to combating the newest wave of extremism. (“American Carnage”). He is at work on a book about preventing mass shootings. Since she began covering voting rights four years ago, reporter PEMA LEVY has been obsessing over Section 2 of the 14th Amendment (“Or Other Crime”). She realized three little words in the Constitution had stymied efforts to restore ballot access to former offenders. In case after case, courts had twisted the amendment, originally meant to expand the franchise, to prevent more Black people from voting. BOYCE UPHOLT…

In the time between his election loss and Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump rushed through dozens of federal appointments. Most rewarded loyalists with cushy, largely ceremonial positions on boards and commissions. But many were “burrowed in,” a process wherein a lame-duck president converts political appointees into civil servants who the next president will have a hard time getting rid of. Both political parties have used this trick, but Trump took the practice to new extremes. “Burrowing in general is a problem,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “I think that the likelihood is that there’s quite a bit more problems than we’ve seen in the past.” Here are a few of the holdovers and their new gigs: KELLYANNE CONWAY US Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors…

On the morning of January 6, hours before a right-wing mob attacked Congress, leaving five people dead and halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in the nation’s history, Josh Hawley arrived at the Capitol early. A group of demonstrators who had answered the president’s call to “stop the steal” cheered when they spotted the 41-year-old first-term Republican senator from Missouri, tall and thin with a youthful swoop of hair. Hawley glanced in their direction with a look of determination and raised his fist in solidarity. The image, captured by a well-placed photographer, would become one of the day’s enduring visuals. It depicted the confident strut of a guy who still thinks everything is going according to plan. A week earlier, Hawley had been the first…

In 1866, an Army officer named Robert Avery was stationed in North Carolina when he began hearing disturbing reports: Former rebels were rounding up as many Black men as they could find, dispensing summary justice, and whipping them in public view. Avery, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau there, alerted his superiors in Washington. The press got hold of his dispatch and began to chronicle the situation. Harper’s Weekly told of 500 people in Raleigh gathering to watch “the public whipping of colored men.” The whippings were about more than bloodlust. They served a political purpose. Under North Carolina law, a crime punished by public whipping would cost the offender the right to vote. The white rebels plotted to “seize negroes, procure convictions for petty offenses punishable at the whipping…

For six weeks in early 2006, engineers drilled nearly 3,000 holes into the 499-foot-tall cooling tower at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant outside of Rainier, Oregon, and filled them with 2,800 pounds of dynamite. Early on May 21, a 2.5-second explosion echoed through the surrounding hills. Cheers erupted from the dozens of anti-nuclear activists who had come to watch the demolition from across the Columbia River. The effort to topple Oregon’s nuclear industry had been years in the making. The Trojan plant, which came online in 1975, featured the largest reactor ever built. Twice in the 1970s, picketers blocked workers from entering the plant. Four years after it opened, the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island facility in Pennsylvania spooked the nation, and Oregon, like many states, put a…