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2025-12-20 04:31:28

Sometime this week in an undisclosed location, two powerful figures sat down for tense negotiations, hoping to end a cold war that had, in recent days, turned very hot. The talks were not a success, with one participant dubbing some of what the other side presented as “fake and gay.” Tensions, it’s fair to say, continued unabated.

In this case, the combatants were Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk and far-right one-woman chaos machine Candace Owens. They met to discuss Owen’s relentless trafficking of conspiracy theories about the murder of Kirk’s husband, TPUSA founder and leader Charlie. Owens, a former TPUSA communications director and close friend of the slain leader, has continued her descent into gutter antisemitism by suggesting that his assassination was orchestrated by the Israeli state, as well as suggesting that Egyptian military planes and France also may have been involved, before eventually tweeting that it’s “likely” that “the same people who killed JFK killed Charlie.” Turning Point staff have also merited her suspicion, and she tweeted last week, “I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.”  

As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote, all this conspiratorial churn has put Owens in the midst of an all-out war with virtually everyone else in right-wing media. Right-wing podcaster and diehard beanie-wearer Tim Pool, who is not known for consistently breaking ranks with right-wing extremists, spoke loudly for the group when he dubbed her a “fucking evil scumbag” and a “degenerate cunt.” After Erika Kirk’s four-hour meeting with Owens to try to tamp down her wild accusations, Kirk emerged describing it as being “very productive.” As CNN reported, she even brought in a lawyer to explain to Owens how the investigation of her husband’s death worked. Suspicious as ever, Owens emerged, dismissing a police affidavit outlining evidence in the Kirk shooting “fake and gay.” 

Their war will likely continue, but it’s just one of dozens of feuds, internecine wars, and petty beefs rivening MAGA from top-to-bottom. As far-right British political activist Raheem Kaseem told Axios, the result of it all is a “cacophony of grifters.” The broad Trump coalition is ending its first year back in power more divided than ever. From the White House to the conspiracy media-verse, at what should be their moment of greatest strength, MAGA simply cannot stop both constant covert sniping and the occasional outright brawl.

Aside from the ongoing Candace Owens situation—a phrase that will surely become part of the national conversation in the years ahead —TPUSA also saw some robust infighting at their big AmericaFest gathering, where Politico reports that headline speakers Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro threw bitchy little digs at one another from onstage and off. “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, you ought to own it,” Shapiro said, a continuation of a particularly bleak piece of infighting on the right about how much antisemitism in the movement is too much.

Outside the malodorous confines of AmericaFest, the public squabbles and unseemly jockeying for position go all the way to the top. Chaos erupted this week after Vanity Fair published an explosive article featuring quotes from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who has, for reasons even she can’t seem to explain, been speaking to reporter Chris Whipple for eleven sit-down interviews. In those chats , which she fit in while managing various crises created by her boss, she called Vice President JD Vance “a conspiracy theorist,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the handling of the Epstein files controversy, and said Trump himself has “an alcoholic’s personality,” an analysis the president, who famously doesn’t drink, told the New York Post he agreed with. 

Wiles has responded by calling the article “a hit piece”—without exactly disputing any of its contents—and the White House has made a show of supporting her in public, even as the Washington Post reports they were taken by surprise by the splashy story. According to some reporting, Wiles may have thought she was speaking to Whipple for a book. Meanwhile, top administration officials cannot clearly explain why they posed for a photo to accompany the article, nor what they thought Vanity Fair was going to publish.

The president’s most relentless loyalty enforcer, Laura Loomer has ended her extremely a busy year of ferreting out perceived dissenters and getting people fired whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause by tattling on them to the president and tweeting angrily about their ostensible betrayals. In Washington, the term “Loomered” has come to mean not just fired, but thoroughly exiled from both the government and the movement. (“Another LOOMERED SCALP!” she exulted on Twitter/X last week, celebrating the fact that the White House has withdrawn their selection for deputy NSA director.)

Loomering is the most targeted of MAGA infighting, as opposed to the more chaotic, impulsive set of feuds and implosions that are more commonly on display. In the ultimate conflict between giants that you’ve probably already forgotten about, Donald Trump and Elon Musk declared their friendship to be null and void earlier this year, and the current status of their bromance remains uncertain. Although Musk recently reappeared at a formal White House dinner to celebrate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (No one in the U.S. government is feuding with bin Salman, despite his reported approval of the brutal execution of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2021; some things apparently aren’t serious enough to merit a squabble.)

Meanwhile, one of Donald Trump’s strongest foot-soldiers, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she’ll be stepping down in January, after Trump dubbed her a “traitor” and a “lunatic.” Her unforgiveable transgression was that she objected to the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. “Loyalty should be a two-way street,” Greene declared in her resignation announcement. And elsewhere in the Trump administration, the FBI’s deputy director Dan Bongino is also stepping down, having made it clear that he hopes to return to a far more comfortable job as a right-wing talking head attacking the Deep State instead of working for it. Bongino spent much of his tenure feuding with Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files, when he wasn’t complaining about how hard it is to be required to go to an office. 

Bongino and his boss, Kash Patel also found time to feud with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who accused them of trying to ferret out and punish a whistleblower at the FBI. Massie—who has been unusually independent for a GOP member of Congress (which is not saying much, and should not be interpreted as praise, but still)—has said that the whistleblower has been trying to make a disclosure regarding the bureau’s ongoing investigation into pipe bombs that were placed at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters on January 5, 2021. A suspect in the case was arrested on December 4; Massie has made it clear that he believes the FBI arrested the wrong person, tweeting that his FBI source has no confidence that the suspect is “capable or motivated” of having committed the crime. Massie is one of several House Republicans who have baselessly suggested the pipe bombings were an inside job. As evidence, Massie shared a now-retracted story by The Blaze accusing a Capitol Police officer of being the bomber. 

Outside the Trump administration and in the wilds of right-wing influencers, Charlie Kirk’s death has been the catalyst for a brushfire of altercations, far beyond the confines of the one between his widow and Owens. His absence has opened up a power vacuum that other far-right figures have been unsubtly jockeying to fill. Longtime Kirk nemesis Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and vile weirdo, is attempting to expand his own influence, sitting down for a friendly interview in October with Tucker Carlson that immediately incited a broad and ongoing MAGA civil war. After the Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts defended the interview, the staff and board of the organization revolted; two more board members quit this week. As evidenced in the Shapiro-Carlson smackdown at AmericaFest, the hard feelings over Fuentes’ presence in the movement have not abated.

Needless to say, that’s not all.

In September, Owen Shroyer, one of the top hosts on the conspiracy network Infowars, left the company due to disagreements with founder Alex Jones. Shroyer, who previously served two months in prison on misdemeanor trespassing charges after being on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, said he argued with Jones about whether Shroyer was “too anti-Trump” and “too negative.” But despite the acrimony, Shroyer said he will always respect the Infowars founder.

Jones did not agree, and has been posting wounded tweets for months, accusing Shroyer of just “mailing it in” when he’s not calling him an “evil agent.” Similarly, multiple staff members working for MAGA gossip blogger Jessice Reed Kraus, a.k.a. Houseinhabit, quit earlier this year and have been trading social media barbs with her ever since. (The drama that has frankly been both too boring and convoluted even for me to consider covering, but according to one former staffer named Emilie Hagen, it allegedly involves disagreements over how Kraus covered and befriended disgraced former New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi, who was involved inher own extremely serious public feud recently.)  

The names, allegations, fights, and feuds pile up; alliances shift, re-form, and then immediately collapse. And yet, somehow, MAGA staggers on, laying waste to the American political structure and doing horrifying real-world harm: children have died of cholera in South Sudan after devastating USAID cuts. Whooping cough and measles cases have surged in the United States amidst RFK Jr.’s continued campaign to install his friends and ideological fellow-travelers in positions of power at HHS. The siege on immigrants and Americans of color continues, with ICE and DHS presiding over a viciously, gleefully cruel set of mass deportations and various forms of broad-scale discrimination and psychological torture, with an able asisst from the Supreme Court. MAGA’s constant infighting is as hilarious as it is pointless —and yet, unlike their friendships, the true and lasting damage this exhausting group of people have wrought shows no signs of ending. 

2025-12-20 03:25:20

President Donald Trump has suspended a diversity green-card lottery program after authorities said that the suspected gunman in the Brown University and MIT shootings used the program to gain entrance to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the move Thursday on social media. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said on X. “I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.” 

According to police, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown University graduate student, is the man behind two shootings in New England that killed Brown students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and MIT physics professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro. After a multi-day search for a suspect, authorities found him dead in a Salem, New Hampshire, storage unit. Valente was born in Portugal and was a legal permanent resident of the United States. He first arrived in the country in August 2000 as a graduate student at Brown under an F-1 visa for international students, before later returning in May 2017 under the “Diversity Visa.”

The program’s suspension has long been a goal for the president. In 2017, Trump attempted to push Congress to halt the same visa program after another recipient, Sayfullo Saipov of Uzbekistan, killed eight people and injured 18 others in Lower Manhattan in a terrorist attack. 

Established over two decades ago in 1990, the lottery program offers 50,000 visas per year to people from countries with relatively low rates of immigration to the US. According to the State Department, for the 2026 lottery, 20,822,624 “qualified entries” were received during the 37-day application period this fall. Visa candidates must have at least a high school education or two years of work experience in a field that requires training. Those who make it to the application process are required to undergo a vetting process and an interview before getting a visa. 

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has used an act of violence by one immigrant to enact collective punishment for immigrants at large, documented or not. As Isabela Dias wrote last week, shortly after Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, was identified as the suspect in the shooting that killed one West Virginia National Guard member and injured another in late November, “the Trump administration moved fast, stopping the issuance of visas and asylum for nationals of Afghanistan.”

“Then,” Dias continued, “it went a step further: indefinitely halting all asylum decisions, regardless of nationality, ‘pending a comprehensive review.’ The Trump administration also paused the processing of immigration benefits for people from 19 countries targeted by the June travel ban.”

Trump justified that ban, which targeted citizens from 12 mainly African and Middle Eastern countries from traveling to the US, in part by referencing Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian national, the suspect in an antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado that happened days earlier.

Egypt, however, was not one of the countries included in Trump’s ban.

While it’s not unusual for government leaders to push for legislative changes following violent acts, the continued response to restrict entire immigration systems points to a larger political project to decimate legal ways to be in this country, while painting immigrants as “drug lords,” or “from mental institutions” or “rapists” or people “poisoning the blood of our country.”

2025-12-19 22:21:49

In a residential neighborhood in Kenner, Louisiana, two vehicles full of Border Patrol agents speed down the street. Their goal is to work quickly, before the protesters show up and start blowing whistles and honking horns to alert potential targets to hide inside. Border Patrol might spend hours waiting to detain an immigrant, only to be thwarted by a united neighborhood effort. Here in Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans, it looks like the feds might succeed. But as the agents round a corner, a Mercedes-Benz SUV comes out of nowhere, wedging itself between their vehicles, laying on the horn, whistles shrieking.

It’s a scene that has played out across Chicago, Charlotte, and now New Orleans, where the Trump administration launched what it calls “Operation Catahoula Crunch.” When Customs and Border Protection and Commander Gregory Bovino move into town, so does Whistlemania. Activists create and distribute thousands of 3D-printed whistles, and their piercing cries are used to signal that immigration agents are nearby. Caravans of protesters follow agents around, raising the alarm as they drive through the streets.

Hours after the chase in Kenner, Bovino and his team held a photo op for press. As they walked out of a store and back to their vehicles, video journalist Ford Fischer asked Bovino if the whistles and horns had impeded the raids.

“No, it actually helps us,” Bovino claimed. “Oftentimes that helps. We incorporate that into our strategy.”

When asked for clarification, Bovino explained, “Sometimes it alerts them. We’re able to look at a reaction from the horn, and gather info and intel from that.” He quickly walked away.

CBP didn’t answers my follow-up questions about the raid I saw that day. But based on my experience observing Border Patrol and ICE across the country, I found it hard to believe they actually wanted protesters to warn neighbors about their presence. And that certainly wasn’t what I witnessed in Louisiana.

Alongside the masked federal agents and the 3D-printed whistles, a group of journalists—mostly photographers and videographers—rolls into town. The team of press is small enough that we nearly all know each other by face, if not by name. In Louisiana, even members of the Border Patrol affixed to Bovino remembered some of us from Broadview or Charlotte, leading to masked, seemingly interchangeable agents greeting journalists with an unsettling one-sided familiarity. 

In each city, activists have an uphill battle learning what to do as they try to follow the federal agents around. But after months in Chicago, the journalists have a proficiency that comes with accepting you’ll spend 12 hours a day in the car and, if you’re lucky, get five minutes of footage.

That is how I found myself standing in front of a gas station, watching an SUV with out-of-state plates hide in a carwash, ready to tell a half dozen other members of the press the second the vehicle was on the move. Earlier, a photographer and I had driven by two vehicles full of federal agents and quickly U-turned to follow them. In an attempt to shake us, they blew past “do not enter” signs, drove double the speed limit, and split up. When we found them one neighborhood over, we held up our press badges, hoping they wouldn’t try to lose us again. Once they parked, we did too. We were definitely in the right spot: The neighborhood was crawling with feds.

When the SUV peeled out of the carwash, the other unmarked Border Patrol vehicles throughout the neighborhood followed it—and so did our press colleagues. We started to join them, but then it dawned on us that the feds would likely come back—clearly, there was someone in the area that they were looking for. So we returned to the spot where we had first run back into the feds after they tried to lose us. Sure enough, the SUVs and trucks quickly returned. 

This time, a vehicle with four agents inside pulled up directly next to us. The unmasked driver rolled down his window, confirmed we were media, and motioned for us to follow him, before driving off. 

“He’s fucking with us?” the photographer asked as we tailed them.

“I don’t think so.” 

“They never put their windows down,” he mused.

They never put their masks down, either. In months of following Border Patrol around, I had never before seen masked agents reveal their bare faces. 

I was still in disbelief when we backed into a spot next to the agents and rolled our windows down. Just three months ago, I was being shot at with pepper balls by Border Patrol as I tried to film arrests of protesters outside of the Broadview ICE facility; now, I appeared to have their blessing to film a possible raid? Surreal.  

The guys in the vehicle leaned toward the open window to chat with us. They mentioned the people in this neighborhood seemed particularly observant, making things harder for the feds. Curious how we were able to keep track of them, they asked if someone had given us information about their location. I said no, we just try to think like them.

One of the agents told us that sometimes the press, or perhaps protesters posing as press, will follow them around and tell them to kill themselves. The photographer assured them we were just there to document what happened. 

In some ways, the agents seemed as interested in us as we were in them. They wanted to know how we came to be on the Border Patrol beat, and how we were paid. They complained about being followed and the threat of doxing, and they talked about the murder of detainees by a shooter outside a Dallas ICE facility in September. Suddenly, they stopped talking and pulled their masks up. 

“Stay loose,” they told us as they started to drive. “This may get a little sideways.”

Off we went, staying as close as we could. Suddenly, a Mercedes SUV pulled out between the team we were following and the unmarked vehicle in front of them, laying on the horn. In the distance, we could hear whistles. Already unsure of exactly what was supposed to go down, we were disoriented by the whistles and honking. Was the Mercedes with the feds? Surely not, but they were so close! Did the whistles mean the raid had already started, with at least two vehicles of feds still on the way? 

The rear unmarked vehicle overtook the Mercedes and blocked it in an intersection, allowing the front vehicle to make a turn and drive off. Eventually, the Mercedes reversed, almost into us, and drove off. Still hearing whistles, but not seeing any immigration officers outside of their vehicles, we followed the feds back to their staging area and parked nearby. As they drove past us, the agents indicated we should stay put. After a few minutes conferring with each other out of their vehicles, they got back into their caravan. 

Pausing by us, one driver swiped his fingers across his neck, shaking his head. “We’re done for the day.”

After the caravan of feds left, we went back to the neighborhood and circled near the intersection where the Mercedes had been boxed out. A young man who was clearly on neighborhood watch still stood in one of the yards, staring suspiciously at our SUV. But the agents were gone, and apparently no one had been detained.

The community had won its battle against the Border Patrol—at least for today. 

2025-12-19 22:00:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

The Hatch Restore alarm clock, which retails for $169, can light up your bedroom in every hue, soothe you to sleep with audio meditation sessions, and keep you in a REM cycle with a full catalogue of white noise options. To utilize these features, though, you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.

Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you. 

This rant isn’t really about streaming platforms. While I do wish there were fewer of them, their relatively low monthly fees give you access to ever-growing libraries of content that you can easily stop paying for when your beloved comedy series ends. Nor do I have it out for wine clubs, laundry services, gym memberships, or the like—businesses that offer discount pricing for frequent customers. 

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars.

Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They’re often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We’re effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it’s only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Companies would argue these models benefit consumers, not just their bottom lines. For example, HP’s Instant Ink program suggests you will never again find your device out of ink when you need it most. The printer apparently knows when it’s running low, spurring automatic deliveries of ink to your home for $7.99 per month if you select the company-recommended plan. But if you cancel the subscription, the printer will literally hold hostage the half-full cartridges already sitting in your printer. The ransom to use it? Re-enroll.

(As a workaround to the subscription madness, you can buy individual ink cartridges at Staples or Amazon, but as of nine years ago, only HP-branded ones will work. The company has added firmware to its technology that deliberately blocks cheaper, off-brand cartridges from working at all.)

I have subscription fatigue for those Oura fitness rings, too. Technology has come a long way in the wearables category, from the basic pedometers of the 2000s to the newer health devices that can prompt you to seek lifesaving care. It makes sense that the latter would cost more than the former, but I’d much prefer to pay a higher price upfront and not encounter arbitrary paywalls blocking core hardware functions.

The subscriptions that car manufacturers increasingly sell may be the most irksome of the bunch. General Motors has announced its new vehicles won’t support Apple CarPlay, a popular technology that enables drivers to connect iPhone maps, music, and other apps to their car’s built-in display. By blocking drivers from using something that works and is free, GM will be able to charge the people who buy its $37,000 Silverados for GM data plans that currently start at $10 per month. Remote start used to be a free perk or one-time-fee upgrade on new car purchases, but Toyota started charging $8 per month for it around 2021. Programming vehicles to open garage doors has been an accessible technology for more than 20 years, but Tesla now charges drivers $45 per year for it. In 2022, BMW even tried to make its customers pay $18 per month to use heated seats already built into its cars, but its customer base got so heated (sorry), that the car manufacturer backtracked on its decision.

If I haven’t convinced you we’re now living in subscription hell, just know that there’s even a subscription service that enables you to track and cancel your piling subscriptions—for just $6 to $12 per month.

2025-12-19 20:30:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

“Diet Pepsi,” the lead single from Addison Rae’s debut album, Addison, dropped last August, and I haven’t stopped thinking of it since. The viral TikTok dance originally turned me on to the song, which is fitting considering Rae’s former life as a TikTok princess. But two new covers that dropped this year kept me coming back for more. 

I, admittedly, am a sucker for a good cover. Ten years later, I’m still showing Childish Gambino’s cover of Tamia’s “So Into You” to anyone who will pay attention. Dolly’s “I Will Always Love You” invokes entirely different feelings for me than Whitney’s. Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon” is about a middle-aged man in a dive bar, thinking of how he let a good woman get away. It’s all stale cigarettes, cracked booths under a buzzing beer sign, and regret—whereas Kacey Musgraves’ cover sounds like a celebratory song for a girl who just broke up with a loser boyfriend. She spins under a disco ball with her friends, pink lights flashing across her face, smiling wide—free. It makes me think of this scene from Sex and the City. What makes a cover so special is how it transforms a song into a wholly different one. It’s a fun way to pay tribute to a singer or band or to put a spin on a song from a completely different genre. 

Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” is heady, lustful, and full of youthful urgency. She whispers, “Untouched, X-O,” breathlessly. There’s a nostalgic sensuality to it, pushing listeners to reminisce about their own experiences with young love (or lust) and losses of innocence. The song is danceable, bouncy pop music as it’s meant to be. “Diet Pepsi” was the perfect preamble to Rae’s debut album, released this June, which Pitchfork compared to those of pop icons like Madonna and Britney Spears. As a friend of mine put it recently after we listened to the entire album on a road trip, “Pop is so back.” 

So I was pleasantly surprised when 2025 delivered two fresh covers of the song. In June, one of my favorite people making music right now, Blondshell, released a cover for SiriusXM. I immediately tuned in. Blondshell does something a little different with the song. She turns Rae’s pop track into a raw, vibey indie one. In her “Diet Pepsi,” the lyrics are laid bare, and the music is moodier. Where Rae’s is warm, intimate, and snappy, Blondshell’s is cooler, distanced, and muted. Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” is perfect for a summer playlist blasting through car speakers with the windows down. But I’d play Blondshell’s version through my noise-cancelling headphones on one of my broody walks through Brooklyn in October. 

Then, in August at the 2025 Las Culturistas Awards show, Ben Platt performed a theatrical “Diet Pepsi” that took the song to an entirely new place. In typical fashion, Platt brought a dramatic, campy flair to the pop song. The crowd laughed, but truly, my jaw dropped. I thought, “Wait. Is ‘Diet Pepsi’ actually an insanely emotional song?” As much as he sings the song, Platt performs it. His voice rises as the music swells into a grand display from his orchestral accompanists. “I like it from the fountain,” Platt ad libs. It is funny, but Platt takes the assignment seriously and makes “Diet Pepsi” his own. He makes eye contact with the camera, carefully articulates each word, and throws his hands up. To me, Platt’s rendition reads like a scene straight out of Glee, where Platt is a guest star just passing through McKinley High to teach the New Directions a thing or two about stage presence. Maybe he has a brief fling with a glee clubber before skipping town. It’s a very 2012-coded performance and I, for one, love it. 

Listen, I’m not a music critic. I’m not a musician. But, I am a longtime enjoyer of music. I love that “Diet Pepsi,” in all its iterations, took us to so many different places as listeners, offering a little something for everyone. At a time when our algorithms are so siloed to our tastes and it feels like mass culture is dead, it’s special when we can still collectively enjoy something. While “Diet Pepsi” will certainly never be as iconic as Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk or Britney Spears performing on stage with a python, it managed to transcend our niche timelines and find surprising resonance many months after its release. That feels like a feat in and of itself, and it only further proves that yes, pop music really is sooo back.

2025-12-19 20:30:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

Viewers tuning in to Fox Sports to watch this summer’s North America–hosted World Cup will find themselves hearing from one the sport’s loudest and arguably most disliked voices: Alexi Lalas. 

The soccer commentator and former US men’s national team player’s public persona centers on grandstanding nationalism, dumbed-down analysis, and incessantly controversial takes to generate buzz—an “edgelord,” per Politico’s apt description. For any NBA fan, Lalas is the annoying, redheaded younger brother of Stephen A. Smith. Both spray audiences with hot takes and relish the hate they get in return. It’s not creating division for rivalry or sport, it’s creating division for attention. It’s why a simple “Alexi Lalas is bad for US soccer” T-shirt had a viral moment earlier this year, designed in response to his contention that “diversity” has hurt the US men’s soccer team. (The claim was met by Eric Wynalda, another national team legend turned pundit, pointing out Lalas’ own background: His father is an immigrant from Greece, and his legal first name is Panayotis.)

For years, many, many, many writers have argued that Lalas has dumbed down public understanding of the sport and harmed its growth in the US, calling him “villainous and ultimately untrustworthy,” “the lowest common denominator,” and “a man who would power rank his own farts, if given the opportunity.” As a Guardian op-ed put it, “There can be no real improvement in the coverage of soccer in this country as long as [Alexi Lalas] continues to have a job.” 

Since that article ran in 2024, not only has Lalas continued to hold his job at Fox, but he even picked up a new gig helping advise President Donald Trump’s White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026. The role makes sense: He hasn’t exactly been shy about signaling his MAGA beliefs and how they set him apart. “I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics,” he told Fox News in a radio interview while attending the 2024 Republican National Convention. (“A cool place to be,” he’s said.) Beyond attacking diversity in soccer, he’s lifted up anti-trans rhetoric around sports by advertising Clay Travis’ book Balls: How Trump, Young Men, and Sports Saved America and propped up Trump as the “soccer president” ahead of the first World Cup to be played in the US since 1994. 

Despite this blatantly political rhetoric, Lalas criticizes the same behavior in others, most notably targeting the women’s national team—saying the players’ advocacy made the squad “unlikeable” after the four-time world champions were knocked out of the 2023 World Cup in early rounds. Former US women’s captain and Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe, an advocate for LGBTQ rights and social justice issues, responded to Lalas’ comment in an Atlantic interview.

“One thing that America does really well is backlash. I think there’s a huge backlash against women happening right now. I think we see that with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing that with the trans argument in sports. Does Alexi know exactly what he’s saying? If I was saying stuff that anchors on Fox News are also saying,” she explained, “I would be worried about the co-sign.”

This wasn’t the first time Lalas publicly went after female players from the US. In 2020, Lalas tweeted about National Women’s Soccer League professionals who took a knee in protest of police brutality, claiming that it “takes courage to actually stand for the national anthem.” He later apologize for the “hurt” that tweet caused, but even in a 2023 post celebrating Rapinoe’s career and retirement, Lalas couldn’t keep from mentioning that he disagrees with her “on many things.”

Despite all this, Lalas may prove to be useful as the world’s game is forced to navigate the rubble dome of the White House. He confided in Politico that he told Trump, “This is on our watch, and so let’s not fuck it up.” He’s even raised concern about how news of ICE raids will deter people from coming to the cup—though his preference is not changing policy, but fighting the “perception out there that people have that it’s not going to be a welcoming environment.” For foreign fans considering visiting the US for the tournament, Lalas has said that if “you pass the vetting process, you are going to have a wonderful time.”

Of course, Lalas wants the 2026 World Cup to be a success, seeing as his bosses at the Murdoch-controlled Fox Sports shelled out some $400 million to secure airing rights for nearly 70 percent of the games, and given that the future of the sport in this country and his own career prospects are intertwined. But to those who see his voice as harmful to the game, the dynamic sets him up as US soccer’s parasite—he depends on its success to create his own, while being a force that stunts its growth.

The power, the politics, and the media might of Fox have set the stage for Lalas to emerge from the 2026 World Cup with more prominence than he went in. He’s laid the groundwork. He has his podcast. He has his own original patriotic music. He’s spoken about more formally carving out a profile in political commentary, as long as someone will “pay me to talk.” He just needs the ball to bounce his way.