Mother Jones

Palantir’s Co-Founder Thinks We Should Be Less Judgmental About That Deadly Iran School Strike Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America’s AI-assisted warfare at a Reuters-hosted event late last week—and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he ackno…

Union: CDC Lost a Third of Its Workforce In One Year A new report by the American Federation of Government Workers has documented a staggering level of staff attrition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the first year of the Trump 2.0 administration. The nation’s premier public health agency lost a third of its workforce from March 2025 through April 2026, the union […]

Al Gore on the Global Climate Crisis: “We’re Going to Win This” This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two decades after the release of his groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has admitted he was surprised by the ferocious, ongoing backlash from the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. B…

“They Really Did Screw Bernie”: Here’s What 2016 Can Teach Democrats Today First, a confession: Before I read long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine’s new book, How the Democrats Screwed Bernie, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of yet another post-mortem on the 2016 election (which was admittedly also the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote). Not even halfway through h…

The Art Trump Doesn’t Want and the Artists Left Behind Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled. The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public ar…

SCOTUS Smacks Down MAGA Map of Missouri The long and strange saga of Missouri’s redistricting battle is over. On Friday evening, the Supreme Court released a final opinion—with no noted dissents—that disallows Missouri Republicans’ ultra-gerrymandered congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections. In 2025, at President Donald Trump’s urging, Missouri’s GOP-led legislature redrew its con…

Tim Tebow “Pausing” Christian Seminar Promotion After Our Investigation Yesterday, we published our investigation, in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out, about legendary quarterback Tim Tebow’s involvement with Life Surge, a Christian financial seminar company. We detailed complaints from customers who said salespeople used Christianity to persuade them to buy pricey courses, and that they ha…

You’re Paying For Donald Trump’s New Ad Since Wednesday, the federal government has been airing a taxpayer-funded political advertisement on channels like Fox News promoting the virtues of President Donald Trump, as Republicans ramp up advertising in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections. The ad, soundtracked with the chorus of the singer JMSN’s “Love Me,” is structured like a TikTok hype r…

El Niño’s Estimated Death Toll From Extreme Heat Alone: 451,000 by February This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists. The toll is on top of the early deaths resulti…

Supreme Court Allows Trump to Use Flawed Database to Vet Voter Citizenship The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to use a controversial government program in its aggressive search for alleged voter fraud, increasing the likelihood that eligible voters will be wrongly labeled as noncitizens due to faulty data and removed from the rolls. The court’s conservative m…