The Mother Jones Podcast

Things have been a bit quiet around these parts lately, huh? After a few months bringing you some of our best feature investigations read aloud, in partnership with Audm, we're going through some behind-the-scenes newsroom changes that will impact how we best serve you, our listener. We're going to be taking some more time, off-air, to re-tool and recalibrate. Goodbyes are hard! But it's not really a goodbye. It a “goodbye for now”. And Mother Jones journalism isn't going anywhere. You can continue to listen to our incisive stories on Audm through their app and on our website. And, of course, there is a ton of beautiful multimedia journalism from our newsroom on Instagram, YouTube, and even on our new TikTok profile. We'll pop up again here in the future, no doubt, but for now, from everyone on the team with love and appreciation: See ya, and thanks. —James West, Mother Jones Deputy Editor

We bet you've heard one phrase more and more this year than ever before: Critical Race Theory. It's an obsession on Fox News, and it's the topic, along with anti-mask protests, raging at school board hearings across the country—a new frontier in a roiling culture war. But what is Critical Race Theory? And how did it come to be used to whip up a new hysteria on the right? States are now racing to ban the teaching of CRT, many successfully, even while many of its fiercest critics can barely explain what it is. For this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, some much-needed history. Journalist Anthony Conwright argues that this current anti-CRT movement is part of a long standing war in America against Black liberation dating back hundreds of years. This compelling essay originally appeared in the September/October edition of Mother Jones Magazine. It is read aloud here by our partners at Audm.

With everything going on these days—we'll spare you the list of existential crises we're currently living through—now seems like the perfect time to hear from two leaders who have a revolutionary vision of what this country could be. Last week, in a special livestream event, Mother Jones reporter and columnist Nathalie Baptiste spoke to two fascinating politicians that may be on the cusp of a national movement. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is the youngest-ever mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. India Walton won a historic upset primary against a four-term incumbent and is the Democratic nominee for the mayor of Buffalo, New York. They are from two different cities—over 1,000 miles apart—but both of these young Black leaders have put forward progressive agendas that have been called “radical.” And right now, words like “radical” or “socialist” or “progessive” seem to have shifting definitions. For some, those words are interchangeable. So we hear from Mayor Lumumba and Walton directly: how do they define themselves? What do they consider the biggest obstacle to a robust socialist party in the United States? And this wouldn't be a conversation during the years of the pandemic without finding out what, if any, guilty-pleasure TV shows are on their watch list. (Any Madam Secretary fans in the house?)

A week ago, thousands of people turned out for Women's March rallies across the country, galvanized by Texas' recent six-week abortion ban and the very real fear that Roe v. Wade could soon be overturned, as challenges to the Texas law and another law in Mississippi wend their way to the Supreme Court and its 6-3 conservative majority.  But while the battle over the Texas law rages, and people rightfully worry about a world in which abortion access is no longer protected, women in Mississippi are already living it. In 2019, reporter Becca Andrews went to Mississippi to explore where Roe doesn't reach, meeting a young woman on a 221-mile journey to get an abortion beyond state lines. The Mother Jones Podcast team thought revisiting Becca's piece provided compelling context for just how high the stakes are for people needing abortions in Texas right now, and more broadly, for the consequential decision in the hands of the Supreme Court. Listen to Becca's 2019 story, currently being expanded into a book, on this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, produced in partnership with Audm. Note: Some facts on the ground have evolved since this story was first published in 2019.

Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer has been following Ammon Bundy for years. He's the guy you'll remember who became a kind of folk hero on the far-right after he joined his father, rancher Cliven Bundy, in leading an armed standoff against the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada in 2014. Two years later, Ammon led the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which left one occupier dead. Bundy went to trial twice on criminal charges related to the standoffs but federal prosecutors failed to win a conviction. Now he's a big-time celebrity activist and running for governor of Idaho. Shortly before the pandemic started, he created what has been dubbed “Uber for militias”—a kind of network that can summon armed protesters for all sorts of far-right gatherings, including anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests during the pandemic. He's a messianic figure, and Mencimer wanted to understand what the appeal was. She found a complicated and very-American story about violence, religion, and public lands battles in the West. This in-depth profile was published in Mother Jones earlier this year, and reproduced in read-aloud form here by our partners at Audm.

As the Delta variant upended hope of returning to normal this summer, Mother Jones reporter Edwin Rios published a deeply reported story on Flint, Michigan, recounting how residents of this predominantly Black city have battled COVID-19 in spite of government distrust, neglect, and environmental catastrophe. But the pandemic isn't Flint's first crisis: In 2014, public officials implemented cost-cutting measures that led to dangerous concentrations of lead in the city's water supply. Up to 12,000 children were exposed to contaminated water. Then-President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency. And in 2021, nine people—including ex-Gov. Rick Snyder—were indicted on criminal charges in the matter. A few years later, when COVID-19 barreled across the globe and vaccinations became a political flashpoint, Flint already had an infrastructure of outreach and support in place. Their water crisis wound up being a crash course in how residents learned to band together in a catastrophe—and shows how one community used a dose of social medicine to close the gap between Black and white suffering during a pandemic.

Towards the end of 2020, Mother Jones's editorial director Ian Gordon wrote a deeply reported story about how then-President Donald Trump took a broken asylum system and turned it into a machine of unchecked cruelty. America's system for processing refugees and asylum seekers was effectively dead, he discovered, and the myth of national decency died with it. That the United States had long-standing commitments to asylum seekers under federal law and international agreements was of little consequence to Trump and his coterie of immigration hardliners. Even less compelling to them was the role asylum plays in the aspirational story of America that we have been telling the world for decades: that, in a country of immigrants, ensuring the safety of those fleeing repression and violence is our duty, and by welcoming them—by doing the right thing—the United States both fulfills its promise and distinguishes itself from all other nations. Since Mother Jones published that story in the November/December issue of our magazine, there's been an election and the problem is now Joe Biden's to fix. But the clean-up job just got so much harder. The government in Afghanistan has fallen after 20-plus years of US-led war, and its collapse and subsequent chaos has only underscored the United States' deep moral obligation to allow refugees to settle here. But when, or if, they are finally allowed to begin this journey, they will encounter a system that has been politicized to the point of collapse. Ian's story is especially relevant now, as the US meets one moral failing with another. So we're presenting it in full as part of our Summer investigation series, co-produced by our partners at Audm. Make sure you stay to the end for a recent update to Ian's reporting.

Every time you read the news lately, there she is: in conversations about bipartisanship, the infrastructure deal, the filibuster, even the fate of Joe Biden's presidency itself. But who is Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona? And what does she want to accomplish with her outsized influence on the passage of basically any law through the Senate, with its razor thin margins? For this week's installation of our Summer investigation series, Mother Jones senior reporter Tim Murphy takes a look at Sinema's political evolution. As a progressive in one of the nation's most conservative state legislatures, Sinema abandoned her early radicalism for a new theory of change. She learned to play nice, seeking incremental progress through careful messaging and across-the-aisle relationships, and reinventing herself as a post-partisan deal-maker. Now, for the first time in her career, she holds real power. With a giant infrastructure deal on the line, not to mention the future of her party and the Senate, the world is trying to understand what Kyrsten Sinema wants to do with it. This episode is produced by Audm.

Jake Tapper has drawn a line: no “Big Lie” proponents on-air. The CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent won't book Republican politicians touting the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. But when he's not in front of the camera, Tapper enjoys blurring the lines between fact and fiction by crafting novels about real-life figures like John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra. His latest book, The Devil May Dance, is a sequel to his bestseller, The Hellfire Club, which has been adapted into a TV series by HBO Max. During a live event hosted by Mother Jones' Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in early June, Tapper discusses the biggest threats to our democracy—and how his experience covering those threats as a journalist informed his work as a historical fiction writer. This recording has been edited for length.

Sergey Grishin is a well-connected, billionaire mogul. Last August, he made headlines when he sold his lavish estate to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Grishin's multiple US-based businesses include a social media company in California with more than 300 million Instagram followers, called 421 Media. But what those followers probably don't know is that they've been helping to enrich a man who has been accused in court documents of harassing and abusing women. In fact, women in multiple countries have been living in fear of Grishin, and have documented years of evidence. Now, they're going public. This episode is the latest installment of our read-aloud Summer investigation series. It was reported by MoJo's Samantha Michaels and produced by our partners at Audm.

Everywhere you turned in the aftermath of the 2020 election, someone was arguing a hard line on cultural issues as an explanation for the outcome. The point was made by different commentators of at least outwardly different political persuasions, with different code words and different bogeys—feminists, socialists, wokeness. However they might have varied, these arguments all circled the same thesis: The members of the working class—by which is always meant the white working class and very often, incoherently but significantly, the white middle class, too—have fled the Democratic Party because of its abandonment of the firm materiality of class politics for the soft superfluities of culture and identity. On this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we revisit our essay by MoJo enterprise editor, Tommy Craggs, who argues that political analysts are now in the fifth decade of making some version of this claim—despite its two contradictory premises. The first is that these cultural issues are so powerful as to dislodge certain workers from their “natural” class affinities: One glimpse of the specter of wokeness and they go running into the arms of the party of the bosses and plutocrats who hate them. The second is that these cultural issues are so flimsy and evanescent as to vanish at the mention of “meat-and-potatoes issues.” But which is it? Are cultural issues a set of powerful currents that buffet people around the political spectrum? Or are they a collection of irrelevancies and distractions with no real substance or meaning, lightly worn and easily dismissed? These questions never seem to get answered. This stasis is what Tommy describes as the politics of stalemate, something his essay wants you to shake off. You can read Tommy's original story here. This episode is part of our Summer series, produced in collaboration with Audm.

For five decades, Garry Trudeau has been writing what is one of the most important—and entertaining—comic strips in American history: Doonesbury. He started the strip in October, 1970 as a student at Yale. With its sharp-witted look at American politics and American life, it quickly became a phenomenon, eventually appearing in over 1,000 newspapers. He's lampooned every president of the last half-century and has introduced us to scores of original and engaging characters. After the first Gulf War in 1991, he became a fierce advocate for wounded vets. In 2014, he ceased the daily strip. But his Sunday cartoons keeps on coming. With Doonesbury, Trudeau has been an American Dostoyevsky, producing a never-ending novel now stretching over 50 years. Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize. On this bonus Summer episode, Mother Jones Washington D.C. bureau chief David Corn talks to Trudeau about how the pain and pride of veterans, his new commemorative collective of strips, and the art of drawing former President Donald Trump, “a right out-of-the-box cartoon character.”

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. In June 2019, Joe Biden invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer's recent volume, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America at its darkest hours. Meacham explained that the country's soul “is not all good or all bad” but rather an abiding conflict between “our better angels” and “our worst instincts.” Two months before Biden announced his third run for the presidency, the intellectual underpinnings of the campaign were already in place. His ensuing candidacy was an exercise in moving Meacham's thesis from the page to the stump: Biden cribbed Meacham's book title for his campaign framing, a “battle for the soul of the nation,” and Meacham occasionally weighed in on the narrative and thematic elements of Biden's major speeches. On today's episode, listen to an exploration of how Meacham has lingered on as a sort of historical and spiritual adviser to a White House beset by crisis, written by Mother Jones reporter Kata Voght. This is our first in a biweekly Summer series of read-aloud investigations, produced by our parters at Audm. You can Kara's piece from April, here.

After three years of weekly episodes—that's 181 shows, if you're counting—the Mother Jones Podcast team has decided to switch things up for the next couple of months, as we, like you, emerge from a year that has thrown up enormous challenges, journalistically, politically, and personally. It's time for Summer! We've always strived to bring you the very best of our newsroom, and that includes the deeply reported stories and characters that our journalists to life. So, starting soon, we're giving you more of the standout stories that aim to make sense of the world. We're talking about the heroic families struggling to make it across the border, the champions of democracy who are fighting the GOP's efforts to suppress voting rights, and the Washington, D.C. insiders who'd rather you not know much about them at all. Some of it will be fun, some of it will be serious, but we hope that all of it is clarifying: our best investigations, in an easy to access read-aloud form, produced by our storytelling partners at Audm. Think “audio book” for our long-form classics. It's all work that we're immensely proud of and excited to share with you in full. And the best part: you don't have to do a thing. We'll space them out, so instead of a weekly show, expect a biweekly update in your podcast feed. In the meantime, we're hard at work thinking of big ideas to make the show even better. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming as Summer moves into fall. Until then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the best of what our reporters have to offer.

The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol wasn't the start of something, nor was it the end. What happened on January 6 had been planned for weeks, and the ideology behind it, brewing for years. That day's chaos was the moment in which a dangerous mix of far-right factions came together in a way that won't be disentangled anytime soon. Even now, nearly five months later, there's still so much to process and still so many questions to answer (especially as Republicans work to forget the deadly attack ever happened). So at Mother Jones, we're continuing to unpack what led to that day and what has followed. In last week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we brought you the story of an unlikely insurrectionist: Dr. Simone Gold, a Stanford-educated lawyer and emergency room physician who ended up on an FBI most wanted poster. And this week, with the help of Mother Jones disinformation reporter Ali Breland, we explore the historical foundations of modern political fringe movements, like QAnon, and consider how they are the outgrowth of paranoid conspiracy-mongering politics that have taken root across the US over the last century. We hear from a former Oath Keeper about why he joined and later left the extremist militia. We meet one of the overlooked characters who poured gasoline onto the fire leading up to the insurrection, someone whose online popularity with Gen Z extremists reveals why it is not necessarily the generation that will save us. Plus, we talk to experts about what's ahead and how we may not know how widespread extremist groups actually are.

As we approach the five month anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, the Republican party has made one thing clear: They want to forget all about it—holding Trump and his big lie closer than ever. In the House, the party just kicked out a top leader, Rep. Liz Cheney, for calling out Trump's lies and authoritarianism. Over in the Senate, Republicans are likely to stymie efforts to formalize a January 6 commission to investigate the attack. The GOP might be desperate to move on, but the Department of Justice—and the nation—isn't. There are more than 400 cases working their way through the courts, in what has become the biggest counterintelligence operation since 9/11. Over the next two episodes, the Mother Jones Podcast team gives you a snapshot of where we stand, what history has taught us, and what's next in the hunt for the insurrectionists. On today's show: the story of someone who might not fit your picture of an insurrectionist—and how she was radicalized so quickly. Dr. Simone Gold is a Stanford-educated lawyer and board-certified emergency room physician who ended up on an FBI most wanted poster. Guest host Fernanda Echavarri is joined by Mother Jones senior reporter Stephanie Mencimer, who charts Gold's stereotype-busting rise from far-right media stardom to the steps of the Capitol on January 6. Her eventual arrest highlights not only the role of conservative media in fomenting an insurrection, but also illustrates what experts on extremism have long known: Education is no defense against radicalization.

The right-wing dark money group Heritage Action for America claims to be the mastermind behind the recent fire hose of state-level voter suppression laws, a new Mother Jones scoop reveals. Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman joins Jamilah King to walk through the explosive video he obtained of Jessica Anderson, the head of Heritage Action and a former Trump administration official, bragging about having drafted and funded voter suppression legislation in eight battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” Anderson says in the video. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” Over the next two years, Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, is planning to spend $24 million on efforts to pass and defend legislation that restricts voting. The video reveals the extent to which voter suppression laws are part of a coordinated campaign, funded by conservative special interest groups and dark money, to preserve GOP power by limiting voting. As of April 1, 361 voter suppression laws had been passed in this year alone. “The Heritage Foundation raised about $122 million in their most recent tax filing, and they don't have to disclose who most of those donors are,” says Ari. “The fact that you have dark money writing and organizing campaigns to pass voter suppression laws, that's really a double whammy when it comes to how our democracy is being undermined.”

A Mother Jones investigation has found that hundreds of visa workers are stuck in India with no way to get back to their families in the United States. India is the in the midst of a shocking COVID-19 crisis. Health officials are reporting approximately 400,000 new cases a day. Hospitals are experiencing shortages of beds, oxygen, and medical supplies. Deaths are projected to reach 1 million by August. Sinduja Rangarajan, Mother Jones' Data and Interactives Editor, has reported that hundreds of Indian-Americans are stuck in India, caught up in the United States's May 4 travel ban. Some are unable to get their legal visas stamped at US consulates in India because they are closed due to the pandemic. “A lot of people who went to help their families and their parents who are dying of COVID, or who went to grieve for their parents, are effectively stranded in India,” Sinduja says on the podcast. Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced on May 5 that they are supporting a World Trade Organization resolution to waive vaccine patents in an effort to make vaccines more accessible and speed up inoculation efforts around the world. Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, joined host Jamilah King on the podcast to talk about the impact this decision could have on bringing the pandemic to an end. “The idea that we're somehow hostage to these drug companies, that's really not true,” says Baker. “If we can get vaccine production up and running in some of these countries in three, four or five months, that will still be an enormous help.” Make sure to check out more of Sinduja's reporting on the unfolding crisis in India at motherjones.com.

Natalie Baszile knew she was onto something when she got the call from Oprah's people. A novelist and food justice activist, Baszile had been working for years on a semi-autobiographical novel about a Los Angeles-based Black woman who is unexpectedly faced with reviving an inherited family farm in Louisiana. The book became “Queen Sugar,” was published in 2014 and, with Oprah's backing, it debuted as a television series on OWN in 2016. It was executive produced by Oprah Winfrey herself and directed by Ava DuVernay. American audiences were getting an intimate glimpse into how reverse migration was reshaping Black life in America. Now, in a new anthology, Baszile is broadening her scope. In We Are Each Other's Harvest, Baszile offers up a carefully curated collection of essays and interviews that get to the heart of why Black people's connection to the land matters. Mother Jones food and agriculture correspondent Tom Philpott recently published an investigation called “Black Land Matters,” which explores how access to land has exacerbated the racial wealth gap in America. The story also takes a look at a younger generation of Black people who have begun to reclaim farming and the land on which their ancestors once toiled. In this discussion, host Jamilah King talks with Baszile about how this new generation of Black farmers is actually tapping into wisdom that's much older than they might have imagined. This is a follow-up conversation to last week's episode, which took a deep look at how Black farmers are beginning a movement to wrestle with history and reclaim their agricultural heritage. Check it out in our feed.

Agriculture was once a major source of wealth among the Black middle class in America. But over the course of a century, Black-owned farmland, and the corresponding wealth, has diminished almost to the point of near extinction; only 1.7 percent of farms were owned by Black farmers in 2017. The story of how that happened–from sharecropping, to anti-Black terrorism, to exclusionary USDA loans–is the focus of this episode on the Mother Jones Podcast. Tom Philpott, Mother Jones' food and agriculture correspondent, joins Jamilah King on the show to talk about the racist history of farming and a new movement to reclaim Black farmland.  You'll hear from Tahz Walker, who helps run Tierra Negra farm, which sits on land that was once part of a huge and notorious plantation in North Carolina called Stagville. Today, descendants of people who were enslaved at Stagville own shares in Tierra Negra and harvest food from that land. Leah Penniman is another farmer in the movement. She is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, and the co-founder and managing director of a Soul Fire Farm, a cooperative farm she established in upstate New York that doubles as a training ground for farmers of color.  The campaign to reclaim Black farmland has received some political backing. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act in 2020, a bill that would attempt to reverse the discriminatory practices of the USDA by buying up farmland on the open market and giving it to Black farmers. The bill has received backing from high-profile on the left, including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA), though it is unlikely to get the votes it would need to override the filibuster and pass. On the episode, you'll also hear from Dania Francis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a researcher with the Land Loss and Reparations Project. When asked how about economic tactics for redressing the lost land and the current wealth gap, Francis suggests: “A direct way to address a wealth gap is to provide Black families with wealth.”

Judas and the Black Messiah, a ground-breaking film about the life of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, has been hailed as one of the best films of the year. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture. It's a historic haul for a movie made by an all-Black team of producers. It's also a notable and somewhat unexpected achievement for Keith and Kenny Lucas, who, along with director Shaka King and co-writer Will Berson, wrote the semi-biopic's screenplay. The Hollywood honor for the 35-year-old identical twins known as the Lucas Brothers arrives after they built careers in comedy, including standup; appearances in 22 Jump Street and Arrested Development; and starring roles in the series Friends of the People and Lucas Bros. Moving Co. On today's bonus episode, Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland caught up with the brothers to chat about comedy, philosophy, and what it was like to make a movie about a revolutionary socialist who was committed to Black freedom. An edited transcript of the interview can be found on motherjones.com

Late Tuesday afternoon, the jury in the trial of Derek Chauvin delivered its verdict: guilty on all three counts in the killing of George Floyd. The 12 jurors—six of whom are white, four Black, and two multiracial—heard three weeks of testimony and deliberated for about 10 hours. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. The verdict comes just less than a year since Chauvin forcibly kneeled on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, ultimately suffocating and killing him. Floyd was 46 years old. The video was shared widely and sparked massive waves of protests last summer under the banner “Black Lives Matter”—first in Minneapolis and then across the United States, people took to the streets to demonstrate against police violence and demand racial justice. Chauvin was fired and arrested after killing Floyd. He had worked for the Minneapolis Police Department since 2001, during which time he received at least 17 complaints and had a record of fatal use-of-force. Nathalie, who closely followed the trial over the past few weeks, joined Mother Jones Podcast host Jamilah King just after the verdict came in.  "I was really surprised by how quickly the verdict came back," said Nathalie. "It feels like a huge moment." In her analysis of this important moment, Nathalie touched on the barely latent racism in the prosecutor's argument, the issues with a televised trial, and how this verdict fits into the long fight for racial justice in America.”A lot of people are eager to hold this guilty verdict up as this big symbol of change,” says Nathalie on the podcast. “But after so many viral police shootings, one guilty verdict doesn't satisfy that appetite for actual change.”

Money. You're probably thinking a lot about it these days. From a global pandemic that's tanked the global economy, to President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure bill, to workers once again trying (and failing) to unionize at Amazon, who gets what and how is the recurring theme of so many important social and political debates right now. Michael Mechanic is a long-time Senior Editor at Mother Jones. His compelling new book is called Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. From Capitol Hill to family office suites  to wine cellar bunkers, this is an eye-opening romp through the lives of the richest people in America–the so-called One Percenter and a.comprehensive look at the structures behind wealth inequality. Not to mention the psychological effects of wealth on the very people who have the most of it. "Higher wealth is associated with more entitlement and narcissism, less compassion," explains Mechanic on the podcast. "People who are wealthier tend to be less socially attuned to those around them." In this conversation with Jamilah King, Mechanic discusses the tax code, the ways that race and gender have played into the accumulation of generational wealth, the tension between the promise of the American dream and the stark reality of the present-day wealth gap. And that specifically American landscape does not have much allure for others. "When people visualize how bad the wealth gap is in America,” Mechanic notes, “they say, I don't want to live there."

Lady Bird Johnson always fit the mold of a certain old-fashioned, stereotypical presidential wife: self-effacing, devoted to her generally unfaithful domineering husband, not particularly chic, and, being a traditional first lady one who needed a public cause, and found hers it in planting lots of flowers near highways. They called it at the time, with just a hint of disparagement, "beautification." Nowhere in the hundreds of thousands of pages written by presidential historians on the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, has there been presented much evidence to the contrary. But in her new book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig has radically changed the narrative. “She doesn't just have a front seat at history,” says Sweig on the podcast. “She was shaping it.” Mother Jones's DC Editorial Operations Director Marianne Szegedy-Maszak sat down with Sweig to talk to her about Lady Bird Johnson, writing history, and how the dominance of a certain narrative about male power informed the way we have understood the Johnson presidency. Especially striking is how many of the same issues that are current today—income inequality, the fight for racial justice, police shootings, environmental despoliation, and environmental justice—were priorities for the Johnson administration. Nearly all of them eclipsed by the Vietnam War. This episode includes clips from In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson, a podcast hosted by Sweig and produced by ABC News/Best Case Studios.

Earlier this week, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky went off-script during a news conference to issue an emotional warning: a fourth coronavirus surge could be on its way. She described a “recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” saying that while there was  “so much to look forward to,” the country was entering a dangerous new phase. “I'm scared,” she said. Meanwhile, the country has seen week-on-week vaccination records tumble, and officials predict that half of Americans will be fully protected within the next two months. Nearly 150 million doses have been administered so far. So Americans find themselves confronting yet another front in the war on COVID-19, in which hope and fear are colliding. Can we vaccinate fast enough to combat the threat of dangerous new variants? What's the deal with the AstraZeneca vaccine drama? Why is the United States populations getting vaccinated at a much faster rate than the rest of the world? When—if ever—can we ditch the masks? We try to answer some of those questions on this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, with Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and the founding dean of the national school of tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. He's been leading a team at the Baylor College of Medicine that uses older vaccine technology to create a COVID-19 vaccine that would be cheaper to make and distribute.  “By the summer I think we could potentially vaccinate ourselves out of the epidemic,” Hotez tells Kiera Butler, our senior editor and public health reporter, during a taped livestream event last week. But that doesn't mean we are out of the woods yet. Though coronavirus cases have dropped 80 percent from the latest surge, case numbers are at the same level that they were last summer and variants are spreading quickly. “We're at a dangerous time right now.” This interview was originally recorded for a Mother Jones livestream event on March 24, 2021. The full video can be found on www.motherjones.com or on Mother Jones' Youtube and Facebook channels.

For many people who contract the coronavirus, shame is an underreported side-effect. Its symptoms are intense bewilderment about the cause of infection, reluctance to engage with healthcare systems, and discomfort disclosing the diagnosis to friends and family. The internal dynamic is likely reinforced by the public shaming that follows news stories about crowds of spring breakers not following social distancing rules. Or the Instagram account dedicated to calling out parties and gatherings. Or the tweets about how people who dine indoors are selfish morons. Shaming others “can function as a way to distance yourself from the fear, the terror, or any uncomfortable feeling you have by placing the badness on someone else,” says Dr. Deeba Ashraf, a psychoanalyst at the Menninger Clinic in Houston. “We can feel this illusion of safety, which is born out of shaming another group.” In this bonus episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, Associate Producer Molly Schwartz interviews Ashraf about the psychological effects of COVID shaming, the impacts on public health, and some tips for dealing with feelings of shame and stigma. This interview is part of Molly's big feature about COVID shaming and its historical parallels in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Read the full story at www.motherjones.com.

Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual and provocateur—and he has been pondering a timely issue: public lying. A longtime Harvard law professor and an expert on behavioral economics, Sunstein has written a slew of books, including volumes on cost-benefit analysis, conspiracy theories, animal rights, authoritarianism in the United States, decision-making, and Star Wars. He was recently named senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he will oversee the Biden administration's rollback of Donald Trump's policies. But right before he rejoined the federal government, he released his latest work: Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. The book is certainly a product of the Trump era, a stretch in which the “former guy” made 30,583 false or misleading claims while serving as president, according to the Washington Post. All his lying kind of worked. Donald Trump was elected despite—or because—of his serial falsehood-flinging. He nearly won reelection after his tsunami of truth-trashing. And after the election, Trump promoted the Big Lie that victory had been stolen from him, and his crusade triggered an insurrectionist raid on the Capitol that threatened the certification of the electoral vote count. After all that—and after Trump's misleading statements about the COVID-19 pandemic led to the preventable of deaths hundreds of thousands of Americans—Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and a hero for tens of millions of Americans. So what, if anything, can be done to thwart such lies? Especially in an age of expanding disinformation, wild-and-wooly social media, QAnon, deepfakes, and widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories? In his book, Sunstein discusses why lying can succeed and how tough it is—especially given First Amendment freedoms—to counter them. He notes that certain forms of lying can be punished: perjury, defamation, and false advertising. And he argues for extending the category of lies that ought to be officially punished, noting, “Governments should have the power to regulate certain lies and falsehoods, at least if they can be shown to be genuinely harmful by any objective measure.” Though that is much harder done than said. Our Washington DC Bureau Chief David Corn spoke with Sunstein about all this. And they addressed the big topic: given that a debate over lying and what to do about it is, in a way, a debate over reality, how can we as a democratic society function, if we don't agree on what is and isn't true?

Boiling water to drink and bathe. Collecting rainwater to flush toilets. Using bottled water distributed by the National Guard to take care of basic hygiene. For four weeks, tens of thousands of people in Jackson, Mississippi, did not have access to clean water. Freezing winter storms wreaked havoc on Jackson's old and crumbling water infrastructure. In mid-February the city experienced 80 water main breaks, leaving tens of thousands of residents were left without running water. But while the Texas blackouts dominated the news cycle, Jackson's water crises received far less attention, even as it extended into its fourth week. Jackson's residents, 80 percent of whom are Black and nearly 30 percent of whom live below the poverty line, were forced to boil water to drink, bathe, and use the bathroom. In the middle of a pandemic, residents of Jackson didn't have reliable access to clean water to wash their hands. This water crisis was years in the making. For the past 50 years the Republican-led state government has been cutting taxes and neglecting to invest in infrastructure repairs. Jackson's shrinking tax base has been exacerbated by white flight and the fact that, unlike other capital cities, Jackson does not receive payments in lieu of taxes for its state-owned properties. “It isn't a matter of if these systems will fail, it's a matter of when these systems will fail,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba tells Mother Jones reporter Nathalie Baptiste on this week's show. “We have a $2 billion infrastructure problem.” Last week, Jackson finally lifted its boil water notice. But Jackson's water crisis laid bare the budget, infrastructure, and equity issues that leave cities like Jackson vulnerable to future extreme weather events. “Climate change is significantly impacting the pressure on our infrastructure. We have hotter summers, colder winters, and more rain in the rainy season,” says Mayor Lumumba. “They're becoming our new normal.”

Anything for Selena is more than a podcast about the iconic 1990s superstar Selena Quintanilla. It's a nine-part series about belonging itself. Journalist Maria Garcia documents her own journey as she discovers what it means to love and mourn Selena, and what her legacy can teach us about pop culture and Latinx identity today. As a fearsomely talented singer and dancer, Selena dazzled on stage with bold red lips and large hoop earrings, wearing sparkly bustiers and tight, high-waisted pants. She mesmerized audiences in Texas and along the US-Mexico border first, then took Mexico by storm. She built a loyal fanbase across the United States and sold millions of albums worldwide. But the devotion she sparked wasn't a simple case of celebrity. Before she was tragically killed in 1995, she had become the queen of Tejano music and culture, adored by both United States and Mexico for being unapologetically herself, as she navigated both cultures with pride—something that left a huge impression on a young Garcia. Selena's mere existence sparked mainstream conversations about race, language, and identity. “The podcast is truly a lifelong culmination of my quest to understand why this woman has meant so much to me and has been a profound flashpoint,” Garcia says on this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast. “I had to go back to little Maria who was new to this country, trying to figure out where she belonged.” Today, more than 25 years later, we're still grappling with the loss and meaning of Selena, the cross-cultural phenomenon. Just last Sunday, Selena was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 Grammys; she only received one Grammy in 1994 before her death. For older fans, This recognition brought back memories of Selena at the peak of her career, and joy to a new wave of young Selena Stans, who weren't even born until after her death. Anything for Selena is a collaboration between WBUR in Boston and Futuro Studios. Each episode is available in English and in Spanish. This week's show features MoJo reporter Fernanda Echavarri in conversation with Garcia, and Futuro senior producer Antonia Cereijido.

Stacey Abrams has a name for the series of bills that just passed the Georgia state legislature: “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Abrams joins the Mother Jones Podcast to explain why your right to vote is once again under attack—perhaps more so now than it has been in generations. Donald Trump's big election fraud lie sparked a deluge of voter suppression efforts across the country. Over the past two months, GOP legislatures have pushed 253 new voting restrictions in 43 states. Under the guise of “election integrity,” these restrictions run the gamut: enacting voter ID laws, limiting early voting, repealing no-excuse early voting, and purging voter rolls. The Roberts Supreme Court has gutted the section of the Voting Rights Act that would protect against voter suppression in states with long histories of voter discrimination. HR 1, the so-called “For the People” bill, could put crucial voting rights protections back in place. It's the most ambitious democracy reform bill since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But right now, it remains unlikely that it will ever pass the Senate. Why? Because of the filibuster. Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman joins Jamilah King to talk through the contents of HR 1, the issues with the filibuster, and how Republicans are benefitting from minority rule to further curtail democracy. The 2020 election might be over, but voting rights are still very much at risk.

Roxane Gay is one of the most prolific and versatile writers of our generation. She's written a best-selling collection of essays (Bad Feminist), a blockbuster memoir (Hunger), Black Panther comics, and countless essays of cultural criticism. That's not to mention her New York Times advice column, her book of writing advice coming out in November called How to Be Heard, a YA novel, and a screenplay for Hunger. Oh, and don't forget her podcast. Or the TV show that she runs. How does she do it? How has she cultivated her voice over the years? How does she write things that make a difference? Gay has distilled these lessons into a new MasterClass series called Writing for Social Change, and she joined host Jamilah King for a conversation about the project in late February. You can read a lightly edited and condensed transcript at MotherJones.com.

A new coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson has been approved. A new coronavirus variant in New York City has been identified—and is spreading. New data shows structural and racial disparities in who is receiving the vaccine, and who is still waiting in line. As the one year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic in the US approaches, we're seeing a flurry of both hopeful and concerning developments. Kiera Butler and Edwin Rios, two Mother Jones reporters who have been on the pandemic beat for the past year, join host Jamilah King to provide much-needed context about what it all means. Butler, a senior editor and public health reporter, explains that while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has lower efficacy rates than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, it is still highly effective at preventing the worst outcomes of coronavirus infections. “It prevents hospitalization and death 100 percent of the time,” she says. While millions of vaccine dosages have been shipped out this week, and vaccination rates are on the rise, there are concerning reports of low vaccination rates among communities of color—the very the same communities disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic itself. Black, Latino and Native Americans have been dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of white Americans. Those disparities widen in younger age groups. But despite the fact that Black Americans account for 16 percent of COVID deaths, they have received just six percent of the first dose roll-out. “The pandemic exacerbates preexisting inequities,” Rios says. “It's not as if those barriers kind of the barriers to access go away when the vaccine rollout starts.” In this episode, we attempt to tackle solutions to vaccine hesitancy by putting trust at the heart of the rollout.

Overflowing ICE detention centers. Families separated at the border. A multi-billion-dollar border wall. Over the course of his four-year presidency, Donald Trump used executive power to wage war on the United States' immigration system–leaving millions of immigrants and asylum seekers in impossibly tough situations. Now, President Biden is making immigration reform a top priority. Mother Jones immigration reporters Fernanda Echavarri and Noah Lanard join Jamilah King on this week's show to walk through the actions that Biden has undertaken during his first month in office to try to reconstruct a broken system. Biden's slew of executive actions include: an end to the travel ban for majority-Muslim countries; halting construction of the border wall; ending new enrollments in the “Remain in Mexico” policy (officially named Migrant Protection Protocols) and starting a new system to slowly allow some asylum seekers on MPP to enter the US; an unsuccessful attempt to pause deportations for 100 days; and directing the Department of Homeland Security to form a task force to undo some of the damage caused by Trump's family separation policy. Plus, a huge new immigration reform bill has been introduced to Congress. Trump left Biden with a Gordian knot of immigration policy to untangle. Doing so will likely take years. Lives hang in the balance.

House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin delivered a speech during Trump's impeachment trial last week in which he made a direct appeal to reality: “Democracy needs a ground to stand upon,” he said. “And that ground is the truth." There's a lot of demand for reckoning in America right now. Cities around the country are debating and in some cases instituting some forms of reparations for Black residents. Last June, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to establish a “United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation,” which has gained 169 co-sponsors. In December, even anchor Chuck Todd asked his guests on “Meet the Press” about the political prospects for a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The calls for a rigorous public accounting of Trump-era misdeeds reached a crescendo in the aftermath of the violent attack on the Capitol in January: the impeachment proceedings against the former president became, all of a sudden, the de facto court for establishing the reality of the 2020 election results, even as Republican lawmakers voted to acquit. It raised the fundamental question: How do we establish the truth, amid a war on truth itself? On today's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, journalists Shaun Assael and Peter Keating share their deep reporting into the history of the "truth and reconciliation" movement, here and abroad, and what we can learn from its promises and pitfalls—presenting a realistic view of their effectiveness as building blocks for reality, rather than magic bullets. “There can be no reconciliation before justice,” Keating says. Keep an eye out for their written investigation, appearing later this week at motherjones.com.

Tears on the Senate floor. Shocking footage of the insurrection. A bumbling and widely panned performance by Donald Trump's legal team. The former president's second impeachment has now moved to trial, and House Democrats came prepared. A little over one month after a riotous mob laid siege to the very chamber in which the trial was now taking place, Democrats presented such a damning trail of evidence that that it caused one GOP senator, Bill Cassidy, to change his vote on the trial's constitutionality. Mother Jones national political reporter Pema Levy joins Jamilah King from DC to recap and explain what went down on Day One. Pema explains how the House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, will set out to prove Trump responsible for the deadly attack. Meanwhile, Republican Senators are expected to try to wiggle out of the toxic political shadow of their former president by sticking to an argument that the proceedings are unconstitutional, letting Trump get off scot-free. Trump's acquittal is all but a foregone conclusion, and the trial is expected to be an unusually swift one. But as Pema explains, what happens over the next week or so will still be incredibly consequential and perhaps even more damaging for Republicans than Trump's first impeachment. For up-to-the-minute coverage of every twist and turn, head to motherjones.com, and for special bonus coverage, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, wherever you listen.

Stopping climate change is back on the White House agenda. President Biden came into with the most ambitious climate change plans of any administration to date. He not only promised to reverse the Trump administration's regressive climate policies, including regulatory rollbacks and a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, but also to push the United States farther on climate change action than it has ever gone before. He named climate change action as a top priority, right alongside the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, and racial justice. Rebecca Leber, Mother Jones' environmental politics and policy reporter, joined Jamilah King on the podcast this week to talk about Biden's executive orders and what they mean. "That was the first time we had a president enter office saying climate was that high of an ambition," says Rebecca Leber. ""Any one of these items on their own would be huge. But the fact that we're seeing them all together is even bigger." In his first few days in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders to get the Untied States back into the Paris agreement, to pause the lease of fossil fuel on public lands, and to establish environmental justice in multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of State, Energy, and Treasury. He issued an executive order to set up a Civilian Climate Corps. He promised to get the United States on track to conserve 30 percent of lands and oceans by 2030. He directed federal agencies to eliminate subsidies to Big Oil and invest in clean energy solutions. His actions already seem to be prompting change in US industry. General Motors (GM) announced last week that it aims to move entirely into electric vehicle manufacturing by 2035.

Trump is gone. But assessing the wreckage wrought by his lies has only just begun. Emerging, battered, from a year advising the former president, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah Birx, the former coronavirus taskforce coordinator, both agree: Trump's embrace of disinformation and chaos made the pandemic worse. “I think if we had had the public health messages from the top right through down to the people down in the trenches be consistent, that things might have been different,” Fauci told CBS on Sunday. On Face the Nation, Birx described working around Trump, and competing with “parallel data streams coming into the White House.” In his first press conference as President Biden's top medical adviser, Fauci described the “liberating feeling” of letting “the science speak.” The damage done by anti-science messaging—along with self-delusion, denial, and happy talk—can't be underestimated, says Dr. Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, epidemiologist, and author of the new book, Viral BS. It amounts to a pandemic within a pandemic. “It's not just a pathogen that threatens our public health,” she tells MoJo's Kiera Butler, on this week's episode. “It's the misinformation and disinformation about the disease, about the vaccine, about the pandemic, that can undo everything you're trying to do in public health.” Effective communication is the “make or break”, she says. But it's been in short supply. “Public health agencies and other establishments have not taken the information aspects seriously for many years,” she says. And so the challenge is even tougher when it comes to encouraging Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine, especially in marginalized or underserved communities. “If you interviewed six of them, you would have six different reasons—historical, cultural, religious, all of that—for being vaccine-hesitant, so we have to meet people where they are.” Yasmin lays out her playbook for tailoring messages across a wide range of groups during this live-streamed Mother Jones event, recorded earlier this month. You can also replay the full video on our YouTube page.

Today, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. Two weeks after an armed mob stormed the Capitol, the new president painted a picture of hope and collective effort in his inaugural address. His message sharply contrasted with former president Donald Trump's dystopian “American carnage” speech from four years ago. “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,” Biden said in his address. “And unity is the path forward.” DC Bureau Chief David Corn and Senior Reporter Tim Murphy joined Jamilah King for live coverage and analysis of the event. David Corn was at the Capitol, where he witnessed a very different inauguration from ones he had attended in the past. There were no large crowds, but ubiquitous face masks, heavy security, members of Congress wearing body armor, even in the midst of the traditional pomp and circumstance. The US Marine Band played their trumpets and drums, the Capitol was bedecked in huge American flags, and the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Obamas were all in attendance. President Biden said he spoke with former president Jimmy Carter, who was unable to attend. The inauguration is usually a passing of the torch, but since Trump boycotted the inauguration in a final venal, norm- busting gesture, the event had the quality of the nation turning the page and ushering in a new era. "We were literally standing where blood had been spilled, where violence had occurred just two weeks ago," says Corn on the show. "Yet democracy prevailed, she persisted as Elizabeth Warren might say, and we were here carrying out this grand tradition which has gone on for over 200 years." Jamilah asked Tim Murphy about the historical context, including Trump's early escape from the city and non-attendance. “He's a deeply petty person,” says Murphy, but still there is some precedent.  “There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president has to attend the inauguration, and historically that hasn't always been the case. John Adams didn't attend Thomas Jefferson's inauguration. And that's the election that brought us the peaceful transfer of power that Trump brought to an end by inciting a riot on the Capitol.”

Today, President Donald Trump became the first president in US history to be impeached twice. A majority of the US House of Representatives—including 10 Republican members—voted to impeach Trump following last week's violent attack by right-wing extremists on the US Capitol. “Donald Trump will go down in history as the most impeached president, ever,” says Washington DC bureau chief David Corn, on this breaking news edition of the show. By the time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's gavel formalized the historic rebuke of Trump, 232 members had voted for the measure, 197 against. Corn suggests that in the final weeks of his presidency, Trump's incendiary rhetoric and persistent attacks on the election results will leave an everlasting stain on his legacy. “It was inevitable that the Trump presidency would end ugly.” The impeachment moves next to the Senate. It is unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will support it. But fractures have already appeared in the traditionally watertight Republican caucus, which has previously acted as a loyal force for Trump over the past four years. The future of the Republican party hangs in the balance.

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of extremist Trump supporters was shocking and scary—but not surprising. Incendiary rhetoric and racist dog whistles have been centerpieces of President Trump's politics since he first ran for office. Trump has encouraged his supporters to bully immigrants, journalists, and Democratic politicians. He tapped into a thick vein of right-wing extremism that has led to violence countless times in American history: from the Ku Klux Klan, to the Oklahoma City bombing, the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, Charlottesville, El Paso, and Kenosha, just to name a few. Right-wing extremism has time and again been the ideological driver of domestic terrorism. Mother Jones National Affairs Editor has been tracking President Trump's terror tactics for years. He joined Jamilah King on the podcast to explain how he saw the Capitol attack coming. “Anyone who was paying attention to the rhetoric Trump was using was able to see that bad things were coming,” Follman says. “It was logical that once he turned the full fury of his extremist rhetoric on the 2020 election that would lead to violence in the wake of the election, and that's exactly what we saw with the assault on Congress.” Why weren't the Capitol police prepared? Is there evidence of right-wing extremism among American law enforcement and military personnel? Does de-platforming actually work? Will there be violence between now and the inauguration? Follman explains how the attack on Congress was a coordinated, logical, and predictable outgrowth of Trumpism and an American brand of extremism—and the end of the president's plausible deniability.

On Wednesday, a mob of Trump supporters surged towards the US Capitol as the Senate was debating certification of Joe Biden's election win. “No one gets out alive, not today!” a man brandishing a Trump flag shouted, according to MoJo reporter Matt Cohen, who was there when the barricades fell and the insurgency began. The rioters then scaled the walls, smashed windows, and ran through the Capitol building, ransacking and looting as they went, forcing unprepared police officers to issue tear gas and lockdown orders. Five people were killed. The Capitol rotunda was littered with broken glass and damaged furniture. Having covered many protests over the years, Cohen says this one was different: “This really felt like the first time that if I had been wearing my press badge, especially when things go hairy, I would have been a target.” Cohen joins Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast to share his firsthand account with our listeners.

NOTE: This episode was recorded just before violence erupted on Capitol Hill when pro-Trump extremists, inflamed by the president, rampaged inside Congress. Goodbye, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Hello, razor-thin Democratic control of the US Senate, and the chance for President-Elect Joe Biden to actually get stuff done. After a pair of neck-and-neck runoff contests in Georgia on Tuesday, Rev. Raphael Warnock will be the first Black senator in that state's history and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate in the South—beating the incumbent appointee, Republican Senator Kelly Leoffler. And 33-year-old Jon Ossoff clinched his race against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue. It has been decades since the state sent any Democrat to the Senate, and the clean sweep will mean that, come January 20, Democrats will control the Senate with a tie-breaker vote from newly elected Vice President Kamala Harris. That's obviously huge news for President Biden's agenda: It will be the first time Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency since President Obama's first term. Joining host Jamilah King to discuss the political legacy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and what Democrats can do first with this new found power, is MoJo senior reporter, Ari Berman, who says Congress's first act should be obvious: expand voting rights across the country. But first, he gives something of an obituary for soon-to-be-former Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

Wow. What a start to the year. For those of you hoping high-stakes political drama might be confined to the 2020 presidential election, think again. In the year's opening week alone, we've heard a raging president, caught on tape, bullying state officials to fake the election result; witnessed a band of would-be coup-plotters launch an unheard-of attack on democracy; and watched a runoff election in Georgia that will decide the fate of the US Senate—and Biden's agenda. To explain the meaning of these dizzying, concurrent developments, host Jamilah King is joined by Washington DC Bureau Chief, David Corn, who provides much-needed historical background to the civil war brewing inside the Republican Party, and more. "The guy who goes on about election fraud has been caught red-handed, trying to induce election fraud!" Corn explains during the show. "What Trump is doing is he's trying to create a loyalty test.” What does this Trump loyalty test mean for the future of the Republican party? Are there parallels between the Whig party's implosion in the 1800s and the rift within today's GOP? Could Trump face criminal charges for trying to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State to find him more votes? "What we see here is the coddling of a coup," Corn concludes. "I mean: that's what they're trying to do."

A disease, global in reach but intimate in its cruelty. A nation plunged into economic ruin. A president raging and incompetent. Society's unforgiving disparities revealed like never before. What a year to be putting out a weekly news podcast. On this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, our last for 2020, the entire production team joins host Jamilah King to reflect on the year and replay what we thought were the most meaningful moments from our coverage. It seemed the best way—both personal and journalistic—to chart these extraordinary events. We start as the coronavirus catches fire. In March, producer Molly Schwartz followed reporter Noah Lanard to document how restaurants in Flushing, Queens, faced imminent collapse. As our producer James West recovered from his own bout of COVID, he turned to Peter Staley, a prominent AIDS activist who worked (and sparred) with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the early days of that epidemic. Staley's scathing indictment of Trump's inaction is haunting still. "The deaths are all on his head," he said. "The blood is all on his hands. The people dying now are Trump deaths." Soon, the unequal impact of coping with quarantine became painfully apparent. Learning from home was hard enough, but Molly found that remote education in a place known as the "valley of the telescopes"—in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where WiFi is outlawed to preserve the integrity of a massive radio telescope—was a complete disaster. But other historic fissures were soon to crack open anew. The death of George Floyd in May at the hands of the Minneapolis police was broadcast to the world and "pushed nearly anyone with a political conscience into physical action," Jamilah wrote soon after, in a painful but galvanizing personal essay we turned into radio. Anger indeed was a 2020 touchstone. Trump's chief enabler Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, began ramming through a new conservative justice. "His entire vision for the Trump presidency has been to pack the courts," reporter Ari Berman explained during a podcast about this unfolding democratic emergency. Jamilah recalls this breathtaking hypocrisy: "It was a moment that kind of signaled that 'we're done'," she says. "We're done, being run over and being dictated to." And that was the sentiment that turned out, finally, to hold. Election Day 2020 was a picture of democracy in action. In the swing state of Arizona, long a laboratory for anti-immigrant laws, reporter Fernanda Echavarri documented a new group of activists determined to turf Trump from office, a coalition that became emblematic of Joe Biden's ultimate victory in November. "It really was this full circle," Fernanda says of the effort to flip Arizona. "Young, old, rich, poor, people came together and said, 'We're not going to have this here in Arizona anymore. And not only that, we're not going to have this country be run by somebody like this anymore.'” And come January 20, 2021, it won't be. "It was great for me to be reminded that change takes time," Jamilah says, neatly summarizing this tumultuous, tragic, unnerving, historic year.

Joe Biden's biographer joins the Mother Jones Podcast to tell us about the man behind the public figure. Over his decades in public life, we've heard about the tragedies our president elect has experienced: the trauma of the car accident that killed his first wife and small daughter, his own health challenges, his unsuccessful runs for president, and the death of his golden son Beau while his other son Hunter struggled with drug addiction.  But what are the deeper stories beneath this well-known narrative? What makes him tick? What is  he like off-camera? And perhaps most important of all, what kind of president is he likely to be? That's what Evan Osnos set out to explore in his new biography Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. We know that Biden faced enormous personal tragedies and devoted himself to public service for most of his adult life. Yet for many, the private person remains something of an enigma. In his biography, Osnos portrays a canny political operator known for his bipartisanship who has always maintained a certain political looseness, partly because his stutter made him averse to teleprompters. Jamilah King talks with Osnos about Biden's relationship with Mitch McConnell, his political evolution, and how his diverse cabinet picks square with his legislative record on racial justice. In just a few more weeks, Joe Biden will achieve the position he has been striving for since he was a kid. Here's a chance to understand what that means for him–and for the country.

On this week's Mother Jones Podcast, we take you along for the ride as Democrats barnstorm Georgia in the last few weeks before the pivotal runoff elections. Our reporter Becca Andrews is pulling up to drive-in church services and political rallies at the heart of the Reverend Raphael Warnock's race against incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. It's something of an old narrative meeting a new age: Republicans are unleashing dated stereotypes and prejudices about the Black church to smear Warnock, but his faith and his deep ties to the civil rights movement are rallying points for his supporters—and they'll be crucial in Democrats' pursuit of Senate control. The party will need to rely, at least in part, on the deep legacy of the Black church in political activism and in expanding voting rights, while a younger generation of organizers brings new-school methods to an old-school race.

You might be breathing a deep sigh of relief that the 2020 elections are finally over. But spare a thought for our friends in Georgia. Voters there are still being bombarded with political ads, national attention, and oodles of fresh campaign cash because they are about to decide, in two contests on January 5, who controls the US Senate. Runoff elections like these in Georgia are typically disasters for Democrats, explains our voting rights reporter Ari Berman. But organizing against voter suppression and high turnout in November are giving Democrats hope that these Senate races could be different this time around. Democrats have believed for some time that a rapidly diversifying electorate would allow them to be competitive in Georgia, but repeated voter suppression efforts had kept that electorate from fully forming. Now, two years of activism have created the conditions for Joe Biden to carry the state by just under 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate in 28 years to win Georgia, amid record turnout. That electorate is now giving Democrats hope that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff can win runoff elections that would have seemed almost unwinnable in past years. While Republicans are melting down over Trump's false allegations of voter fraud, Democrats and Black organizers are now focused on electing a majority in the US Senate that can pass Biden's legislative agenda. They might just make history.

Young people turned out in record numbers for the 2020 presidential election, and they overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden. Now, the hashtag #CancelStudentDebt has been trending on Twitter, as intense pressure mounts on the President-elect to finally tackle the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis holding millions of Americans, especially young Americans, hostage to often crippling monthly payments for years to come. “This feels like the closest we've ever been,” one education advocate recently told Time, referring to the chance for real policy changes. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who has established herself as the loudest voice on the matter, large-scale debt forgiveness would provide “the single most effective economic stimulus that is available through executive action.” But how likely is that? Can this finally be fixed? On this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we're revisiting our big investigation by journalist Ryann Liebenthal into America's broken student debt machine. We first brought you this story in August 2018, detailing the flailing government program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a system that, when Biden was a candidate, he pledged to streamline and reform. “It should be done immediately,” he said, referring to the passage of new legislation. But that depends on who controls the Senate come January, and Biden's professed urgency must inevitably be tempered with a tough political reality. To bring us up to speed on what's changed since the campaign and what Biden's picks for his economic team can tell us about his ambitions, we also chatted to our very own transition tracker, Washington, DC, political reporter Kara Vogt. “The demands for canceling student debt have not ceased since president-elect Joe Biden won in November,” Voght says. “It's not just the grassroots, not just progressive who are calling for this.” Revisit our original written investigation here.

How are your Thanksgiving plans different this year? You may have heeded the urgent advice to put travel plans on ice, but you're still trying your best to feel the holiday spirit, somehow? As the latest coronavirus surge continues unabated, and as various kinds of restrictions swing into effect across the country, the Mother Jones Podcast team is bringing you two chats with top infectious-disease experts on how to stop the spread and keep you and your family safe during a holiday season unlike any other. Science communication expert Jessica Malaty Rivera, a microbiologist, has a few tips for you, and a couple for the incoming president, too. Rivera spoke to our senior editor Kiera Butler about Thanksgiving strategies—"a negative COVID-19 test is not an immunity passport," she warns—as well as her work to document up-to-the-minute coronavirus data and trends at the COVID Tracking Project. "Nobody here is saying we should cancel Thanksgiving," Rivera says. "What we're saying is it needs to look very different from years past." Some top-line tips: Stay at home, and if you are hosting a gatherings, keep it small, outdoors, and masked. Read more from Mother Jones' interview with Rivera, and how the Biden administration must beat viral misinformation influencers at their own game to combat the coronavirus, here. Also on the show, host Jamilah King spoke to Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, pediatrician, and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, about the state of vaccine development right now, including which segments of the population are expected to get it first, and when. He gives his Thanksgiving tips, too: "We are in a public health crisis," he says. "Don't do reckless, irresponsible things. Let's just hang on a few more months and everyone can get vaccinated and live."

The United States is confronting its worst surge in coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic. Governors are rushing new lockdowns into place as hospitals nationwide burst at the seams. The death toll is, yet again, setting daily records. Maybe by the time you listen to this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, the US will have passed another dire milestone (of so many): a quarter of a million coronavirus deaths. Inside our newsroom, reporters and editors are determined to put science—and the voices of scientists—at the heart of our ongoing coronavirus coverage. That's why, earlier in the outbreak, we launched a series called "Pandemic Proofing America", an evolving oral history collection featuring incisive interviews with the nation's top scientists and public health experts. The central question we posed was this: With a scandalously enfeebled government hampering the country's response, what are the most important steps we can take to make sure we're better prepared next time around? Their responses were wide-ranging, often damning in their criticism of the current administration's failures, and sometimes hopeful that we might find common purpose in listening to science. For this episode of the podcast, the brains behind this series, Mother Jones's Atlanta-based Senior Editor Kiera Butler, has assembled a selection of these big thinkers to weigh in on how to survive America's coming dark winter, and how the country can begin to imagine a pandemic-free future by combating disinformation and collaborating across disciplines, and beyond our borders. You'll hear from top experts like Timothy Caulfield, from the University of Alberta's School of Public Health; Laurel Bristow, from Emory University's Vaccine Center; Ashish Jha, at Harvard's Global Health Institute; and Andy Slavitt, President Obama's top healthcare advisor. For the entire showcase of nearly 20 interviews to date, click here.

After a drawn-out vote count, Joe Biden has clinched the presidency. Now he needs to save the planet. As Biden's supporters celebrate, many are hoping beyond hope for a quick reversal of President Trump's most harmful policies come January 20, 2021. And perhaps no part of Trump's agenda posed a bigger existential threat than his denial of climate change. From crippling the EPA and rolling back environmental regulations, to pulling out of the landmark Paris Agreement, Trump did everything he could to roll back the progress of President Obama's ambitious second-term climate agenda. This year, carbon dioxide levels reached the highest recorded levels in human history. On today's show, Jamilah King is joined by Mother Jones' climate and environment reporter Rebecca Leber to discuss what we can expect from an incoming Biden administration that has claimed climate action as central to its governing mandate. How much of Trump's damage can Biden reverse? What could a Republican-controlled Senate mean for the Green New Deal? How will Kamala Harris' barrier-breaking role in the White House influence Biden's commitment to environmental justice? Biden made big promises for climate action on the campaign trail. His first 100 Days as president are expected to unleash a flurry of executive orders on climate change. Now the questions are when, and how, he'll deliver. If the number of times Biden said “science” in his victory speech is any indication, this administration will reverse Trump's denialism. But will it be enough to stop runaway global warming? On today's show: Biden's last-chance climate fixes.