Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2025 i Mother Jones

On the Cover This issue’s dive into “Peeping Don”—and his growing surveillance state—is brought to (unsettling) life by Berlin-based illustrator and animatorTIMO LENZEN. Contributors How has Trump’s return to power changed your beat? 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 (800) 438-6656. To advertise or for other questions, call (415) 321-1700.…

REP. ANDY OGLES has achieved a difficult feat: In a GOP House caucus known for sycophancy, the second-term Tennessee Republican has become President Donald Trump’s most cloying lackey. Since January, Ogles has introduced a bill to “Make Greenland Great Again,” moved to amend the Constitution so Trump (but not Barack Obama) can run for a third term, and filed articles of impeachment against two federal judges who have ruled against the president. On social media, he defends Trump loudly, if poorly. The congressman told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his contentious White House visit to head his “little a$$ back to Europe!!!” From the perspective of Ogles’ dignity, the most charitable explanation for his behavior is that he is legislating with a gun to his head. During the 2022 run…

ONE EVENING IN MARCH 2017, Hoan Ton-That, an Australian coder building a powerful facial recognition system, emailed his American business partners with a plan to deploy their fledgling technology. “Border patrol pitch,” the subject line read. He hoped to persuade the federal government to integrate their product with border surveillance cameras so that their newly formed company, later named Clearview AI, could use “face detection” on immigrants entering the United States. An immigrant to the United States himself, Ton-That grew up in Melbourne and Canberra and claimed to be descended from Vietnamese royalty. At 19, he dropped out of college and, in 2007, moved to San Francisco to pursue a tech career. He later fell in with Silicon Valley neoreactionaries who embraced a far-right, technocratic vision of society. Now Ton-That and…

Sungida Rashid had no intention of taking an uber to the birth of her first child. She’d never been one to take the easy route, and besides, she wanted to get things moving—and walking seemed the best way to do it. So on an overcast Sunday in October 2023, Sungida and her husband, Nabil Haque, set out from their Boston apartment to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the local hospital where Sungida, nine months pregnant, was scheduled to be induced. Sungida and Nabil had met 12 years earlier while working at a consulting firm in their native Bangladesh. Over lunches, they began strategizing about PhD applications, eventually spending years in a long-distance relationship as they fell in love and pursued their doctoral degrees in the United States. Then there was a…

NEARLY 30 YEARS ago, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina. It was the most expensive natural disaster in state history—causing an estimated $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars and killing 37 people across the region. Raleigh took a direct hit, with the storm toppling thousands of trees and dumping nearly 9 inches of rain. In Rochester Heights, a historically Black neighborhood southeast of downtown, most homes were flooded. This, as it turns out, wasn’t a freak accident. The neighborhood, built beginning in 1957, was among the first suburban enclaves marketed to Black families, who were excluded from other areas of then-segregated Raleigh. It was full of attractive, one-story brick homes with wide, grassy lawns. But because the low-lying neighborhood flanked a swamp that received untreated sewage…

ON A SUNNY afternoon in early February, two dozen Democratic representatives, clutching smartphones and talking points, converged on the Treasury Department’s public entrance in downtown Washington, DC. For weeks, a strike force from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, loosely vetted and barely old enough to vote, had swarmed federal buildings with a mandate to dismantle the government’s core institutions and bend what was left to their whims. They had threatened career employees, shut down lifesaving programs, and demanded—and received—access to some of the government’s most sensitive systems. Democrats, many caught off guard by the totality of the takeover, had watched with a mix of apprehension and disbelief. The day before, a group of lawmakers attempting to visit the now-shuttered offices of the United States Agency for International Development had…

IN THE EARLY morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and her hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media. The operation seemed designed for maximum coverage, despite actual goals achieved. (While Trump officials claim operations round up felons, many of the migrants arrested by ICE so far have no criminal record.) Still, Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a “spectacle” of…

IN THE FALL OF 1984, when I was a high school senior in Washington, DC, protests at the South African embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador. That meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were demonstrations at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest. Area kids like me got in on protesting the embassy, too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Special AKA in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted that he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was roiling to a boil. Then in 1985,…

THE COVID-19 pandemic’s stimulus checks and tax credits helped mainstream the idea that government could help unwealthy people through hard times by simply giving them cash—without conditions like work requirements or stringent income limits. Since then, the push for guaranteed income for the poorest Americans, for whom wage stagnation, inequality, and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs continues as a plodding catastrophe, has bloomed into a nationwide movement. Dozens of direct cash transfer pilots have sprung up, from rural Oregon to Chicago and South Texas, spearheaded by nonprofits, city governments, and even states. There’s no shortage of evidence that no-strings-attached cash helps. Research has shown that, with extra money, participants buy necessities, increase savings, or even start businesses. They have an easier time holding onto housing and fleeing domestic violence. Advocates…

IT STARTED WITH a wrong turn. In early December 2023, through a scrim of swirling flurries, Mackenson Remy steered his minivan past an open gate in the security fence surrounding a gray concrete factory along Highway 85, on the northeastern edge of Greeley, Colorado. Remy was still relatively new to the state, and he’d never been to Greeley before. He didn’t really know anything about the plant either, only the three letters he’d been told to look for—JBS—and what he’d heard: that they had jobs. Lots of jobs. Remy is originally from Haiti. He’s in his 30s with braided hair and a thin beard. He has a wary way about him but also a restless hustle. About 10 years ago, he moved from Port-au-Prince to Boston, and for a while…