The Mother Jones Podcast

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.