Stress Test, from Mother Jones

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The Afghan Refugee Crisis Has Only Just Begun Aug 18, 2021

Show notes

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.

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The Metamorphosis of Kyrsten Sinema Aug 04, 2021

Show notes

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.

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CNN’s Jake Tapper Says the Media Must Confront Republicans’ Big Lie Jul 28, 2021

Show notes

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.

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Escape From the Billionaire Meme Mogul Jul 21, 2021

Show notes

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.

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Everything You're Getting Wrong About the Culture Wars Jul 07, 2021

Show notes

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.

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Garry Trudeau on Lampooning Trump and Other Lessons from 5 Decades of Doonesbury Jul 02, 2021

Show notes

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.”

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Can America’s Problems Be Fixed By a President Who Loves Jon Meacham? Jun 23, 2021

Show notes

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 Kara Voght. This is our first in a biweekly Summer series of read-aloud investigations, produced by our partners at Audm. You can read Kara’s piece from April on MotherJones.com.

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A Special Summer Announcement from the Podcast Team Jun 09, 2021

Show notes

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.

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The Insurrection Was a Giant Recruitment Exercise for Extremists Jun 02, 2021

Show notes

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.

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Doctor, Lawyer, Insurrectionist: The Radicalization of Simone Gold May 26, 2021

Show notes

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 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.

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