The Mother Jones Podcast

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, ma...

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 Chok...

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 wor...

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 t...

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 t...

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 s...

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 ...

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...

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 docu...

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 wor...

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...

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 polit...

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 an...

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 ...

As we approach the five-month anniversary of the January 6 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 in...

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 ...

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,...

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...

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 ...