Mother Jones January/February 2026

On the Cover Illustrator Justin Metz uses exaggerated photo manipulations to capture political truths—including the role of Chief Justice John Roberts in America’s antidemocratic slide. Contributors What are you leaving behind in 2025? “Scrolling at bedtime. Instead, I’m reading fiction—putting worries about this world to rest by escaping into another one.” —Madison Pauly, writer, “The Making of Riley Gaines” “Stationarity! It’s the idea that past data reliably predicts future events. I just don’t think the past has good advice to give anymore.” —Adam Rogers, writer, “Department of Getting Shit Done” “Self-doubt and cynicism. I’m choosing to believe a better world is possible despite it all, and who knows, maybe I have a role in it.” —Brenda Bazán, photographer, “The Well Watchers” By the Numbers Takes and Takeaways “I…

“WE ALREADY LIVE in a fascist state.” I’ve been hearing that so often these last few months, from friends, pundits, Mother Jones readers. And who can blame them? People have been disappeared to torture prisons overseas and ICE is terrorizing day care centers. The federal workforce is being gutted, the economy is on a razor’s edge, America’s global credibility is in tatters, and kids are going hungry while billionaires cash in. A conspiracy theorist is in charge of our health agencies. Universities, law firms, and nonprofits live in fear of the Eye of Sauron fixing on them. Midterm elections? Will we even have them? To feel grim in the face of all this is to be realistic. But to throw in the towel and declare game over—that’s something else.…

IMAGINE: YOU ARE at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening? Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be…

WHEN I FIRST encountered 21-year-old Dilan Pinzón back in April 2025, he was sitting on the sidelines of a soccer field in Oakland, California, clad in cleats and a blue jersey, pondering his team’s fate. It was the third game of the season for Soccer Without Borders Academy, which hadn’t won a single match played the previous season, their first. Beyond the normal challenges of fielding a winning roster, Pinzón and most of his student teammates are recently arrived immigrants. Some, like him, are in the United States without family support, and have financial responsibilities—jobs on top of schoolwork—that make coordinating a full practice impossible. Traveling to workouts feels risky, too, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents randomly targeting people based on language and skin color. “We are not a…

IN EARLY September, Dr. Joseph Ladapo took the podium at a Tampa news conference to make an unprecedented announcement: As Florida’s surgeon general, he planned to eliminate “all vaccine mandates” in the state. “Who am I, as a man standing here,” he asked, hand over heart, “to tell you what you should put in your body?…Your body is a gift from God!” The audience roared in approval. Since Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him in 2021, Ladapo, despite a sterling résumé—MD and PhD from Harvard, positions at NYU and UCLA medical schools—has developed a reputation as a rogue public health official. Former colleagues who remember him as a capable and highly collaborative scientist have been perplexed as he has rolled back Covid protections, questioned vaccine safety, and challenged the CDC.…

AT a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old. Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people. Gaines joined the political fray just…