Mother JonesModify

2026-03-19 02:12:14

The Trump administration is scrambling to cover its tracks amid legislative pressure and a First Amendment lawsuit over its alleged “domestic terrorist” database, new legal filings and emails reviewed by Mother Jones reveal.

A federal class action lawsuit filed last month against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleges that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents unlawfully targeted and intimidated Maine residents who were observing immigration operations. The complaint details incidents in which federal agents collected biometric data and license plate information from two legal observers—Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton—and warned the women that they were being added to a domestic terrorist database.

“Why are you taking my information down?” Fagan asks an ICE agent in one viral video. The 31-year-old social worker had been observing and documenting ICE agents as they descended on her hometown of Portland—part of a statewide immigration enforcement surge dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day” by the Trump administration.

“’Cause we have a nice little database,” the ICE agent replies, “and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” 

Fagan laughs as the agent walks away. “For videotaping you?” she shouts after him. “Are you crazy?”

That exchange, captured on video by Fagan and posted to X on January 23, has since been viewed more than 7 million times. The ICE agent’s remark has sparked concerns among activists that the government is building a watchlist of its critics—especially as DHS expands its use of mass surveillance technology and Trump administration officials publicly condemn peaceful protesters and legal observers as “terrorists.”

DHS has repeatedly claimed that such a database does not exist. Appearing before the court on Monday, an attorney for DHS said a review of federal records did not turn up any data on Fagan or Hilton—and the government doesn’t know what happened to the photos that were taken of them.

“Defendants acknowledge that officers on the ground suggested otherwise, however, those statements were contrary to DHS policy,” government attorneys wrote in a March 10 brief. “Indeed, agents throughout Maine have recently been reminded of this First Amendment policy and requested to adhere to the guidance within.”

But records show that DHS emailed this policy to its ICE Boston Field Office on March 10, mere hours before submitting the email to the court as proof of the government’s documented commitment to protecting First Amendment activity.

“This email is entirely self-serving and for purposes of this litigation alone,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued in a reply. “It is not probative of any observed ‘policy,’ especially in light of record evidence showing that DHS agents in Maine and across the country have engaged in an undeniable pattern of threatening and harassing lawful observers.”

In fact, the policy in question is a 2019 memo that appears to have been rescinded—until defense lawyers needed to marshal it as proof that ICE agents are prohibited from “profil[ing], target[ing], or discriminat[ing] against any individual for exercising his or her First Amendment rights.”

At the time of the government’s March 10 filing, the 2019 memo was listed as “Archived” on the DHS website, and a page at the top of the document stated it “contain[ed] outdated information that may not reflect current policy.” That page was not included in the government’s submission to the court. The Wayback Machine, an internet archiving tool, shows that the policy was moved from active to archived status sometime between March 6, 2025, and April 2, 2025.

Last week, on the morning of March 12, I asked DHS if it has a current, active “policy for personnel regarding First Amendment protected activities.” The press team replied quickly, asking if I could be more specific. I explained that I was curious about whether DHS could point me to its current policy that “governs agencies’ storage/collection/usage of information related to how individuals exercise their First Amendment rights.” At the time of these emails, the 2019 memo was still listed as archived on the DHS website.

A day later, the DHS spokesperson got back to me with a link to the 2019 memo. “Archive” had been removed from the URL, which now redirected to DHS’s active publications library. The first page of the document no longer had a disclaimer about possible outdated material. The DHS website showed the page had been updated that same day, March 13. DHS did not respond to follow-up questions about why the policy had been unarchived.

While DHS claims that the threats made by ICE agents in Maine “were not approved or condoned by DHS,” there is no evidence that the agents—who remain unknown to the public—have faced disciplinary action. An ICE special agent said in a sworn declaration that he was still determining whether to discipline the agents who had violated DHS policy, despite those events having occurred more than six weeks prior.

Other developments in recent months have fueled fears that the government is targeting people for exercising their First Amendment rights. In September, Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, despite the fact that antifa is not a single, cohesive group. In an accompanying national security memorandum, the White House claimed that “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” are ideological threads found in many violent antifa terrorists. Civil liberties experts fear the directive could be use to squash legitimate dissent in the name of counterterrorism.

Meanwhile, ICE agents have been using Mobile Fortify, an AI-powered facial recognition app, to scan the faces of citizens and immigrants alike. It remains unclear how that biometric data is being used, though the government is retaining it for 15 years. And in January, CNN reviewed an internal memo directing ICE agents in Minneapolis to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.”

Scott Shuchart, who served as assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy at ICE during the Biden administration, said that the Privacy Act of 1974 “absolutely forbids” the government from maintaining a mass database of US citizens’ biometric data, while “the First Amendment forbids this domestic terrorism bullshit.”

“But it’s not just some technical thing,” Shuchart added. “It is just a complete affront to centuries of American values that hold it is not the place for the federal government to be keeping a panopticon database of everybody. Congress, as fucking ineffective as it is, hasn’t said much as clearly as it has said that.”

2026-03-19 00:44:17

“Tell the world why you believe I deserve to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken, and a damaged lung. Tell me to my face.”

“You told the media that I was a ‘freaking snake.'” 

The explosive remarks, from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), were directed at Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) during his confirmation hearing to be the new Homeland Security Secretary on Wednesday, following Kristi Noem’s firing earlier this month. They came as Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security committee, repeatedly questioned Mullin’s temperament to lead DHS.

The animosity stems from Mullin’s remarks at a February event in Tulsa over why the Oklahoma senator had voted against Paul’s appropriation bill amendment seeking to eliminate funding for welfare programs for legally approved refugees and people seeking asylum. Mullin reportedly explained that if Paul’s amendment was accepted, it would kill the other appropriation bills and lead to a government shutdown—and “the president made it very clear he wanted appropriation bills passed.”

“Rand Paul’s a freaking snake,” Mullin continued, arguing that Paul had proposed the amendment to kill the bill intentionally.

“I understand completely why his neighbor did what he did,” Mullin added, referring to the 2017 assault on Paul by his neighbor. “And I told him that to his face.”

The neighbor was sentenced to a total of nine months in prison for assaulting a member of Congress. Paul has described the neighbor as anti-Trump. 

“I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force,” Paul said at Wednesday’s hearing.

Mullin refused to apologize, though he did express willingness to set aside the “snake” accusations to do an effective job as DHS secretary.

“I’m not perfect. I don’t claim to be perfect. I make mistakes just like anybody else. But mistakes—if you own them—you can learn from them, and you can move ahead.”

Paul, unmoved, brought up Mullin’s threats to fight Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien during a 2023 hearing, to which Mullin countered that he is now friends with O’Brien.

“I get it. It’s about character assassination,” Mullin said after Paul showed the Senate committee recordings of his confrontation with O’Brien and, later, instances where he celebrated his actions in media interviews. “That’s the way this game is played. I understand it, and you are making this about you.” 

“It’s character assassination when you were the one lauding the assault?” Paul shot back.

At another point in the heated exchange, Mullin said that dueling was acceptable between “consenting adults.” Paul refuted the claim by stating that dueling had “been illegal for 170 years.”

2026-03-18 22:37:46

The world is on fire. Gas prices are rising. The US economy is in shambles. President Trump has bulldozed through his promise of “no new wars” and 6 in 10 Americans believe the country is worse off than it was a year ago.

But instead of addressing the issues that Americans actually care about, Senate Republicans are spending the next week or more attempting to further what has become the central organizing principle of Trump’s presidency: making it harder to vote.

On Tuesday afternoon the Senate began debating the Save America Act, which voting rights advocates describe as the worst voter suppression bill that Congress has seriously considered passing.

“Americans are watching in horror as Donald Trump bumbles this country into war,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference on Tuesday. “He’s tanking our economy and driving up costs for families. But what are Republicans prioritizing in the Senate this week?  They’re conspiring with Donald Trump to undermine democracy and disenfranchise millions of Americans.”

Trump calls the bill his “No. 1 priority” and claims it will “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.

It won’t. The centerpiece of the bill is a “show your papers” requirement mandating proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate, to register to vote. That could impact Republican-leaning constituencies more than Democrats. The ten states with the lowest levels of passport ownership all voted for Trump. Sixty-nine million women who took their partner’s last name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name could find it harder to register to vote under the bill. Republican women are twice as likely as Democrats to change their last name. And because voters would need provide this documentation in person at an election office, rural voters, who also lean Republican, could be forced to drive up to eight hours to register to vote.

“The SAVE America Act wouldn’t turn blue states red, and it can’t save Republicans from voter anger at unpopular policies,” the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote on Tuesday. In the MAGA era, the bill could even marginally hurt the GOP. Kamala Harris in 2024 won college graduates and voters earning over $100,000 a year. Mr. Trump carried those with no degrees and lower salaries. Which coalition is most likely not to have passports and birth certificates handy?”

On top of the proof of citizenship measure, Republicans added a photo ID requirement to vote, likely for messaging purposes, so that they can trot out the usual talking points about how you need ID to buy liquor, get on a plane, etc. That is intended to distract from how many Americans would be burdened by the bill’s core provisions.

For example, the bill’s requirement that voters provide citizenship documents in-person at an elections office would effectively end online registration, mail registration, and voter registration drives, methods that accounted for 1 in 3 registrations during the 2018–2022 election cycles. This requirement would apply not just to new registrants but every time someone updates their registration. Roughly 80 million people register or re-register every election cycle, and less than 6 percent registered at an election office. In addition to making it harder to register to vote, the bill would also require states to hand over their voter rolls, which includes sensitive personal information, to the Department of Homeland Security, which could lead to voters being wrongly purged based on faulty data.

When Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 people from registering to vote. If that happened on a national scale, 11 million Americans would be prevented from registering to vote every cycle. Suffice it to say there would be a national outcry if that happened, undercutting the alleged support for the legislation.

To appease Trump, Senate Republicans plan to go further, introducing amendments to outlaw mail-in voting, which even many Republicans oppose doing, and ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports, which just reinforces how the entire Senate debate is a political stunt.

At its core, the bill is a solution in search of a problem, predicated on the lie that non-citizens are systematically voting in American elections, which every major study has found to be an exceedingly small-to-nonexistent problem. At a news conference on Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) couldn’t cite a single example of fraud to support the legislation.

But that doesn’t mean we should simply dismiss the inevitable failure of the bill. The Republican Party’s repeated lies about the voting process have undermined the public’s confidence in elections. And the bill’s demise could embolden Trump to take more extreme actions to control elections, such as declaring a national emergency in an attempt to seize voting machines and ban mail voting, which right-wing election deniers are urging him to do.

2026-03-18 19:30:00

This story was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America. Sign up for their early learning Substack.

In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing along as they guide viewers through the experience of riding in a car amid a vividly colored, utopian backdrop. 

At first, the video seems harmless. The song is upbeat and informative. The animation aligns with the promised subject. 

Except, hold on a second, did those lyrics just say, “Red means stop, and green means right”? And why are the characters changing in every frame—different hairstyles and colors, slightly different outfits for the girl and boy? 

Worst of all, for a video that purports to be “educational,” the visuals are sending precisely the wrong message about riding in a car. 

The video opens with the children riding, without seatbelts, in the front row of a moving vehicle. The next scene shows the girl defying physics, floating alongside a moving car, while the boy is seated in what appears to be the hood of the vehicle as it travels backward down a busy street.

The third and fourth scenes show the children walking in the middle of the road with moving cars behind them. 

It’s not hard to imagine how the video could have gotten so many views. 

Maybe a parent needs to complete a task—fold some laundry, get dinner ready, hop in the shower—and is searching for an age-appropriate video on YouTube to entertain their toddler during that short time. Perhaps that toddler, increasingly independent and prone to running off, needs a better grasp of road safety. “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song | Educational Nursery Rhyme for Kids” presents itself as a win-win solution. 

But children’s media experts say this is AI-generated “slop,” and that it has infiltrated the internet, preying on young children and their unsuspecting caregivers.

“We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. 

She and other researchers, including Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, have warned that AI-derived products for babies and children need to be reined in. 

“This is not neutral content,” said Suskind, author of the forthcoming book Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI. “I think of this as toddler AI misinformation at an industrial scale. It’s very risky for the developing brain.”

It’s hard to say just how pervasive this type of content is, but it’s clear the problem is widespread and getting worse. One report published by video-editing company Kapwing in November 2025 found that about 21 percent of YouTube’s feed consists of low-quality, AI-generated videos. 

Jo Jo Funland, the creator of the “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song,” has posted more than 10,000 videos since its first release just seven months ago, in August 2025. That’s an average of about 50 new videos each day. Sesame Street, meanwhile, has published about 3,900 videos on YouTube in its entire 20 years on the platform.

The cognitive decline associated with the consumption of AI slop—such as a shortened attention span, decreased focus, and mental fog—is sometimes referred to as “brainrot.” But when the audience is children, there’s not much to rot, Suskind said. Because a child’s brain is still in its early development, still being built, what you get instead, she said, is “brain stunt.”

“Every experience is building a million new neural connections,” Suskind said of children who are still in their early years. “You will be unintentionally wiring the brain in incorrect ways.”

That comes at a cost. A child may absorb the implicit messages of something like the Vroom Vroom video and end up mimicking the “downright dangerous” behaviors they saw depicted there, said Carla Engelbrecht, who has created digital experiences for children’s media brands such as Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and Highlights for Children and considers herself an AI educator and creator.

Engelbrecht is also something of a whistleblower when it comes to child-targeted AI slop. She has found countless examples of AI-generated videos that could cause real physical harm.

“The more content I find,” she said, “the more horrified I get.”

They include videos of a scared child being chased by a T-Rex; a crawling baby biting into an apple that appears bloody, swallowing whole grapes (a major choking hazard), and eating honey (which carries the potentially fatal risk of infant botulism) and a teacher eating raw elderberries (which are toxic when uncooked).

But there’s another category of AI slop in kids’ media, she said, with consequences that are more difficult to capture. These videos claim to pertain to learning and development, focusing on topics like literacy and numeracy, but due to the speed with which they are produced and the lack of quality checks, they end up introducing or enforcing the wrong lessons. And sometimes, the errors don’t come until midway through the content. That means if a parent previews the first few seconds of a video, they may miss the unreliable information that appears later in the clip.

A video about vowels includes visuals of consonants. It also depicts letters on screen that don’t align with the audio overlay. A video promising to teach about the 50 US. states sings along as butchered state names appear in text at the bottom of the screen — Ribio Island, Conmecticut, Oklolodia, Louggisslia. A video about the seven continents frequently shows a compass with more than four points and indecipherable symbols where the “N,” “S,” “E” and “W” should be.

These may seem like silly slips from a machine, but for a child, every “input” is part of their learning process, Engelbrecht explained. “Mixed signals means you are delaying them learning the cause and effect of a thing,” she said. “If you learn that red is blue and blue is red, that’s a delay.”

“If you’re inconsistent, it takes that much longer to learn,” she added. “Every delay they have means everything else gets pushed back. That’s taking their executive function offline to go learn nonsense.”

Amid all of this internet muck, the question of responsibility is a tricky one.

“Fundamentally, everybody has a responsibility,” Engelbrecht said, including platforms like YouTube; companies that operate large-language models, like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic; the people creating and publishing these poor-quality videos intended to reach kids; and parents. 

YouTube’s current policy requires creators to disclose videos that have been generated by or altered with AI when that content “seems realistic.” This does not apply to cartoons and animated content—which seems to be the majority of what’s reaching children—because it has long been assumed to be fictional content, Engelbrecht explained. 

The platform does have stricter “quality principles” for content targeting children than it does for its general viewership, said Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson, in a statement. It also has a “child safety policy.” (These web pages, however, do not specifically address the use of AI.)

Due to the volume of content on the platform, YouTube does not catch every video that violates its policies. (It did take action against at least seven channels on the platform in response to The 74’s reporting, including terminating two.) 

“The trust that parents and families put in YouTube is a responsibility we take very seriously, and we’ve invested deeply in age-appropriate environments that empower parents,” Bullwinkle wrote in the statement. “YouTube Kids, for instance, offers industry-leading parental controls and rigorous quality principles designed to provide a safer experience for families.”

YouTube Kids is a distinct version of the platform with content that has been curated for children from birth to 12. Many families continue to use the main YouTube platform to view children’s content, though, which means many creators still have an audience and earning opportunities there. None of the AI-generated videos reviewed for this story were found on YouTube Kids, although recent reporting in The New York Times found AI videos had penetrated that space as well.

Sierra Boone, executive producer of Boone Productions, a children’s media production company that makes original content for children ages 2 to 6, noted that kid-friendly competitors to YouTube, such as Sensical by Common Sense Media and Meevee, do exist. But they have struggled to break through to families. 

“Overcoming that juggernaut is extremely difficult,” Engelbrecht said of YouTube. “There’s a graveyard full of failed attempts to create a safe YouTube alternative.”

Boone suggested that some effective labeling would go a long way, not unlike the “content credentials” LinkedIn is phasing in, which aim to disclose when media has been created or edited by AI, in part or in whole. 

Engelbrecht thinks labels are a good idea, not least because they would be important for AI literacy, but she also believes they would penalize creators like her who use AI “thoughtfully” in their work. (She is developing, among other projects, an AI tool that detects AI slop in children’s videos on YouTube.)

As for who’s behind the videos, some of it is coming from overseas, but plenty of it is home-grown, created by Americans with access to phones or computers who are just trying to “make a quick buck,” as Boone put it. 

These people are often using AI at every step of the process — to develop themes and scripts for children’s videos, to generate the videos, and to automate the process of publishing the content regularly on “faceless” YouTube channels, in which the creator is anonymous and has no on-camera presence, Engelbrecht explained.

A little over a year ago, a popular content creator posted a video to YouTube in which she raves about a “huge opportunity” that would lead to “many millionaires.” The opportunity? AI-generated animated videos that inexperienced users could create with a simple prompt in just minutes. The target audience? Young children. 

That video has been viewed more than 335,000 times. 

“AI in general isn’t inherently good or bad, but it exposes people’s intentions,” said Boone, whose production studio is responsible for The Naptime Show. 

The flood of AI-generated content, she added, reveals how many people have “no regard for children or how they’re impacted,” as long as it benefits them.

For Boone, who works painstakingly with her team on every episode of The Naptime Show — researching, writing the script, editing the script, placing props, doing table reads, going to set, filming, editing the video, publishing and promoting the final product — creating children’s media is an “honor” that should be taken seriously. 

“The very foundation of creating children’s media is you are creating something that a child, in their core developmental years, is going to be consuming,” Boone said. “So what is the level of intention that you’re bringing to that? I think we need to be holding the people who are uploading this content more accountable.”

Ultimately, though, in the absence of more regulation or content moderation, the burden falls on parents. 

Parents are likely putting YouTube videos in front of their children in the first place because “they are already so stretched,” said Suskind, who still sees patients in her pediatric practice and interacts with families often. So it’s inherently challenging to ask them to more closely monitor the content that is coming through their children’s screens. 

Yet that is what must be done, Hirsh-Pasek said. Until a better solution emerges, the onus is on parents to separate the slop from “the good stuff.”

“We owe it to our kids to protect them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “That’s what they look to parents for, to keep them in safe spaces. If we don’t deal with that or do anything about that, we’ve absconded [from] our responsibility.”

2026-03-18 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For years, scientists have been keeping a wary eye on the massive system of currents that carry water and nutrients across the ocean from Greenland to Antarctica. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate, but it appears to have been weakening in recent years as the Earth warms. Should it collapse, drought would spread across the Southern Hemisphere and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see catastrophic sea level rise. It could also trigger a series of other tipping points, from which the Earth would likely not recover. 

To avoid this scenario, 195 countries signed onto the Paris Agreement in 2015—a landmark treaty that aimed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the Earth’s climate could begin to deteriorate in unpredictable and irreversible ways. The past few years have been the warmest on record, and the importance of staying within this limit has been driven home as deadly heatwaves and rampant wildfires have become routine.

A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters claims that warming has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, with temperatures rising almost twice as fast as they did between 1970 and 2015. The study echoes the findings of a report published last year, authored by the scientist James Hansen, who famously testified about the dangers of global warming in front of the US Congress in 1988. Should warming continue on this trajectory, the latest study says, the planet could cross the 1.5 degree threshold before 2030. 

The authors arrived at this conclusion after isolating the “noise” from the climate system—controlling for the El Niño weather pattern, which warms the earth, as well as for volcanic eruptions and solar flares. What they found was that while the Earth warmed by 0.2 degrees each decade between 1970 and 2015, it has warmed by 0.35 degrees in the decade since—a 75 percent spike. 

This puts us on a collision course with the climate’s tipping points, said Stefan Rahmstorf, an author of the study and head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, “has concluded that the risk of crossing such tipping points increases from moderate to high between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees of warming. So we are basically moving faster into high risk territory now.” 

Over the past few years, scientists have warned that we’re entering a period of overshoot, in which the world pushes past the 1.5 degree Paris limit. How bad things get, Rahmstorf explained, all depends on how long the planet stays above 1.5 degrees. The Greenland Ice Sheet, for example, might be salvageable if people figure out how to bring emissions down and actively cool the planet, limiting that overshoot period to two or three decades. But if it reaches a tipping point, it will enter a feedback loop that’s impossible to stop—ultimately causing 24 feet of global sea level rise. 

“I think that it is actually quite tragic that the US government has decided to put their head in the sand and pretend there is no problem when the data are showing exactly the opposite,” Rahmstorf said. 

Outside experts cautioned that the situation might not be accelerating quite as fast as the study makes it seem. “They don’t consider underlying uncertainties that you might refer to as structural uncertainties in the reconstruction of global temperatures,” said Sofia Menemenlis, the lead author of a study on satellite-era readings of sea surface temperatures published in Nature Climate Change last summer. The study found high variability within satellite sea surface temperature readings, which are often used to reconstruct the last century of climate data. While there has been a clear and dramatic warming trend since the 1950s, a decade is a very short timescale when it comes to the climate. 

“I think that trends calculated over a short period of time have to be understood as a somewhat provisional way of looking at the rate of global warming,” said Menemenlis, a doctoral student at Princeton University’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences program. 

Daniel Schrag, a professor of environmental science and engineering at Harvard University, put it a little more directly. The authors say “they’ve corrected for the El Niño, but that’s almost impossible to do, because every El Niño is different,” he explained. “That’s a very shaky thing to do, so I don’t really buy that analysis.” Schrag said climate models rarely capture the Pacific Decadal Oscillation—a 20- or 30-year routine shift in sea surface temperatures sometimes described as a “long-term El Niño.” Without accounting for that, it’s difficult to remove enough “noise” from the climate data to ensure you’re getting a clear warming signal over a period as brief as a decade. 

“I think it’s really important for the public to understand what we know, but also what we don’t,” Schrag said. “This whole phenomenon is terrifying. It doesn’t need to be exaggerated, and when you exaggerate, you lose credibility.” 

2026-03-18 18:00:00

Fifty years ago, in a small San Francisco office above a fast-food restaurant, a handful of plucky journalists started a new magazine. It was a time not that dissimilar from today. Corporations were growing more powerful. Massive social movements were transforming the country. Journalism—under a political microscope following the Watergate scandal—seemed more important than ever. But to the writers and reporters in that tiny office, America’s newsrooms weren’t properly holding politicians and those in power to account. And so, they founded a magazine they hoped would do so and called it Mother Jones.

Over the last half-century, the nonprofit magazine has broken some of the era’s defining stories, including some of the earliest reporting about the dangers of Big Tobacco, its investigation into the exploding Ford Pinto, and Mitt Romney’s now-infamous line about 47 percent of Americans viewing themselves as “victims” who are “dependent on government.”

Monika Bauerlein has been part of Mother Jones’ story for half of its existence, first as an editor and now as the CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, as well as the public radio show Reveal and its sister podcast, More To The Story. “Mother Jones was always kind of at the tip of the firmament for me of an independent, fearless news organization that would tell it like it is,” she says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Bauerlein joins host Al Letson to look back at the magazine’s Bay Area origin story. Plus, they examine how the politics of the 1970s are strikingly similar to today and look forward to what the next 50 years holds for independent nonprofit news in the US.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.