Home//Mother Jones/January - February 2017/In This Issue
Mother Jones|January - February 2017HOW TRUMP PLAYED THE MEDIATHERE AREN’T A LOT of people or things that have not yet been blamed for the election of Donald Trump. fbi Director James Comey. Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton, Jon Stewart, Sean Hannity. Twitter, Facebook, cnn, the Donald Trump. There’s a good case to be made for almost every culprit you can imagine, and a think piece or tweetstorm to lay it out.This is not going to be one of those pieces.As my colleague Kevin Drum has written, for the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in.” But in the flood of emails we got from readers after the election, one question came up over and over again—the role of the media.And that happens to be an issue we’ve been obsessed with at MoJo. We…8 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Bully PulpitWHEN I WAS about 10, a classmate in my small-town school in Latvia liked to tell me in between classes that he hated Jews. I was the only Jewish kid in school, and one day as I walked home I heard steps behind me. My eyes caught his, and we stood there for a moment. I still remember his face—hazel eyes, closely cropped blond hair—and his navy uniform jacket over a white shirt. Suddenly, I heard a crunch as his fist landed on my left cheekbone, and I fell backward on a sidewalk damp with melting snow. I still remember the hollow ringing in my left ear. I looked around to scream for help, but the streets were empty.I’ve never felt more terrified and alone.“There is nothing we can do…9 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Here’s How to Save ObamacareDONALD TRUMP CAMPAIGNED on a promise to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law. In fact, he vowed to ask Congress to deliver a full repeal “on day one.” Can he do that? Well, no one can stop him from asking. But can Congress make it happen? Even a Republican Congress? The answer turns out to be sort of complicated. The legislative basics I’m about to spell out apply to everything Trump wants to do, so if you’re following along at home, here’s what to watch for over the next few months.Let’s take the easiest option first. The only thing stopping Congress from a simple and total repeal of Obamacare is the fact that Democrats can filibuster any repeal bill in the Senate. Republicans need 60 votes to override a…10 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017THE BIRTH OF A NOTION2007: Right-wing firebrand Andrew Breitbart creates Breitbart News as an antidote to “liberal bias” in media. “My entire business model is to go on offense,” he tells Slate. “They don’t like our aggressiveness. They want to portray me as crazy, unhinged, unbalanced. OK, good, fine. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”2008: White nationalist Richard Spencer coins the term “alt-right,” initially to describe anti-establishment right-wingers skeptical of Bush-era Republicans. In 2010, Spencer launches AlternativeRight.com, a hub for “racialist” ideas and promoting America as a white ethno-state.2011: 4chan, an online forum created to discuss anime, launches the message board “/pol/” (short for “politically incorrect”), which soonbecomes a cesspool of racist memes such as the “Happy Merchant,” a cartoon depicting a scheming Jew.2012: Andrew Breitbart dies of heart failure. Stephen Bannon takes over…3 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017A FISH OUT OF WATERBY MID-OCTOBER, harvest is in full swing in central Iowa. Giant green combines crawl through rows of withered corn until well after dusk as Webster City’s farmers hurry to gather their crops before the first freeze sets in. The stiff, pale bodies of dead hogs pile up in dumpsters along gravel roads, waiting to be butchered. Geese sail south in wavering Vs, and the maple trees on the banks of Brewer Creek flare crimson.A few miles outside of town, in a squat white barn that used to house hundreds of sows, a different sort of harvest has kicked into gear. Grace Nelson, 22 and tan with ombré hair, stands alert, clipboard in hand, watching her co-workers hustle to transfer fish from tanks to a flatbed truck bound for Colorado.Their neighbors…12 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017IN COUNTRYTHE NOVELIST Viet Thanh Nguyen can’t remember a time when he wasn’t a refugee. When he was four, in 1975, his family joined the masses of South Vietnamese fleeing the Viet Cong. His first reliable memories began when his family arrived at a Pennsylvania resettlement camp and was temporarily split up. Nguyen’s American saga, including his lonely childhood quest to understand the horrors his relatives endured, has defined his path as a writer. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, the darkly comic confessions of a North Vietnamese spy who flees to America, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His nonfiction follow-up, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award. Nguyen’s latest, out in February, is The Refugees, a collection of…6 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Don’t Mourn. Fight.DECADES FROM NOW, when the election of 2016 is distilled to its essence, what will that be? Many hoped the central lesson would be a shattered glass ceiling and a cementing of the Obama legacy. An expansion of rights and tolerance.Instead, a small electoral majority chose a candidate who openly embraced bigotry, who slurred war heroes and mocked the disabled, who bragged of sexual assault, who said he’d roll back the protections of a free press, who was cheered on by white supremacists, who said he’d upend our alliances and the world’s long-overdue climate deal, and who is ignorant and cavalier about the basics of safeguarding a nuclear arsenal.There is no way to sugarcoat it. The election of Donald Trump is a brutal affront to women, people of color, Jews…7 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Swamp Creature2016 WAS SUPPOSED to be the Dark Money Election, the year when a flood of anonymous campaign cash would dominate news cycles, the internet, and the airwaves, and pick our next president. In January 2015, the Koch brothers declared that their shadowy network of donors and political outfits would spend close to $1 billion. One analyst even predicted that the price tag for the entire election would come to $10 billion, the highest in US history.Then, according to conventional wisdom, a superrich outsider blew all those predictions away. “In the end, Donald Trump defeated big money,” was how one postmortem put it. It’s true that Trump’s victory has changed what we thought we knew about politics. But does it change what we know about money in politics? Let’s look at…5 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Return to the Dark SideWHEN LIZ CHENEY returned to her ancestral home state of Wyoming in 2012, she expected to be greeted as a liberator. She moved into a house in Jackson Hole, not far from her parents, Dick and Lynne; she bought a horse for her 13-year-old daughter; and she began laying the foundation for a Senate run.But in the rush to jump-start her political career, Cheney neglected to inform the man she was angling to replace—Mike Enzi, her father’s fly-fishing buddy and the state’s senior senator. Enzi had been planning to retire after 2014, and had Cheney asked for his blessing, he might have stepped aside. When she surprised him by jumping into the race, he decided his retirement could wait.Things descended from there. A local newspaper revealed that Cheney had obtained…8 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017CRUDE AWAKENINGOME TLALOC WALKED through the North Dakota hills with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie, scouting for police in the prairie dark. Earlier that evening, I’d met the 30-year-old on Highway 1806, where he’d been sitting behind a makeshift barricade. Now he was doing reconnaissance. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department and the National Guard, stationed ahead of us on the road, were planning to raid the camp where Tlaloc and hundreds of other protesters had been living for the past week. The barricade was meant to stop the cops, or at least to slow them down. As he walked, Tlaloc listened to his radio for the code words that would signal when he and his comrades were to spring into action: “Eagle’s Claw.”The Standing Rock Sioux reservation sits in the Dakota…9 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017MIXED MEDIAIN DECEMBER 2015, Spanish photographer and filmmaker Pep Bonet, who has documented the aftermath of war in Sierra Leone and the global ravages of hiv/aids, set out for Botswana, in pursuit of a more positive Africa story. A largely white genre, heavymetal music has been gaining popularity in countries like South Africa and Kenya, Bonet says, but Botswana is the “pioneer.” At the heart of the scene is Overthrust , fronted by a singing, bass-playing cop named Tshomarelo Mosaka.“They don’t mind about color or race,” Bonet says. “They believe heavy metal unites people.” Lacking access to store-bought fashions, local “hellbangers” create their own—embellishing leatherware with rivets, chains, and animal bones. “They look very similar, many of them, to the Ace of Spades album cover,” notes Bonet, who is also known…1 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017ECONUNDRUMS THE CLOSET IN THE CLOUDLAST YEAR, A FRIEND of mine hosted a clothing swap. There were about 10 women and just a few rules: Bring clothes you want to get rid of. Take the items from your friends’ closets that you like, and the rest goes to the local thrift shop. The setup was an easy way to recycle the ridiculous number of garments in our millennial closets—we ditched items we hadn’t worn in months or even years and came away with some fresh, if worn-in, items, like the pair of American Apparel high-waisted cutoff jean shorts I left wearing.I’m not as wardrobe-obsessed as the average American, who bought 64 articles of clothing and spent more than $1,100 on clothes and shoes in 2013. The average woman had just nine outfits in 1930. Today,…4 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Peter’s ChoiceTHIS PAST OCTOBER, I taught a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly well. Six were African American women. Then there was a middle-aged white single mother, a white kid who looked like any other corn-fed Oklahoma boy and identified himself as “queer,” and the one straight white male. I’ll call him Peter.Peter is 21 and comes from a town of about 3,000 souls. It’s 85 percent white, according to the 2010 census, and 1.2 percent African American—which would make for about 34 black folks. “Most people live around the poverty line,” Peter told the class, and hunting is as much a sport as…11 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017Code SwitchDID YOU EVER wonder why Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan took such root among the Republ ican base? Did it symbolize a return to an age when wages were higher and jobs more secure? Or was it coded racial language designed to signal a rollback to a time when people of color (and women) knew their place? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, both theories have their champions.But a closer look at conservative rhetoric in recent years reveals that “Make America Great Again” was not Trump’s invention. It evolved from a phrase that became central to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: “American exceptionalism.” People often equate the expression with the notion that God made America “a city upon a hill,” in…3 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017MAKE AMERICA HATE AGAINJEFF BLEHAR HAD no idea he was about to become a conduit for a virulent political awakening. It was July 2015, and the conservative writer and outspoken critic of freshly minted presidential candidate Donald Trump was being pummeled on Twitter with a profane-sounding political dis: “cuckservative.” The term, which had recently begun appearing on fringe internet forums, was meant to denigrate mainstream Republicans as impotent traitors, in part by evoking a genre of porn that features white men watching their wives have sex with black men.“I want to congratulate [the] guy who keeps calling me a ‘cuckservative’—you win, dude,” Blehar tweeted sarcastically. “You’re right, and I’m deleting my account out of shame.”Conservative pundit and Trump critic Erick Erickson soon weighed in, tweeting that he had read about cuckservatism in the…28 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017What to ExpectWHEN CLAIRE L. found out she was pregnant, she was ecstatic but a little nervous. Every one of her female relatives on her mother’s side—her grandma, her mom, her aunts, her sister—had needed a cesarean section. Slender hips and big babies were a family trademark.At about 20 weeks, Claire, then 30 and living in Santa Cruz, California, told her obstetrician about her family history. Much to her surprise, the doctor waved away her concerns. The takeaway was that practically anyone can deliver vaginally. Her relatives’ experiences were probably the result of knife-happy, old-fashioned doctors. So Claire went home and did her best not to worry too much about it.Like many first-time moms, Claire went overdue. A week past her date, an ultrasound indicated that the baby was getting big. She…23 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017SOUND EFFECTSIF YOU’RE A tree frog or an ovenbird in mating season and you happen to live in the 83 percent of the continental United States that lies within 3,500 feet of a road, bummer for you. Not only are you more likely to collide with an suv, but you’re going to have a harder time finding a mate. Research suggests that human-generated noises also mess with nesting behavior, predator-prey dynamics, and sleep patterns. In other words, wildlife gets stressed out by noise.So do we, it turns out—and the world is getting louder. Scientists define “noise” as unwanted sound, and the level of background din from human activities has been doubling roughly every three decades, beating population growth. Road traffic in the United States has tripled over the last 30 years.…7 min
Mother Jones|January - February 2017FOOD FOR THOUGHT LOST IN THE SUPERMARKETDEBORAH GILFILLAN lives between Brooklyn’s first Trader Joe’s and its flagship Whole Foods. She’s also walking distance from Union Market, a local grocery chain where flank steak sells for $15.99 per pound. But these stores are too expensive and don’t have the right ingredients for the 62-year-old contract administrator, a native Brooklynite who lives in a brownstone she bought for a song back in the 1960s. Nowadays, she usually walks or takes the bus almost a mile to shop.In the past, if a city dweller had to journey a mile to a grocery store, it probably meant she lived in a “food desert.” The term was coined by social scientists in the 1990s to describe places bereft of ingredients needed to make a healthy meal.In recent years, the US government…4 min
