2026-03-25 05:19:45
Editor’s note: O’Rourke ended her candidacy on March 23.
On an unseasonably hot October day, a small crowd gathered at Genesis Farm, a 226-acre nonprofit in Blairstown, New Jersey, to help pull up beets before winter set in. It was the farm’s annual harvest festival and for Megan O’Rourke, a former federal climate scientist running for Congress, a natural campaign stop.
O’Rourke, after all, knows her way around a farm: At 46, she’s spent more than half of her life studying, teaching, researching, or otherwise advocating for sustainable agriculture, most recently at a small agency within the Department of Agriculture that supports food and farming research. Or at least it did. After President Donald Trump took office in 2025, taking aim at climate research and unleashing doge, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture was forced to freeze its funding and suspend accepting new grant applications. She quit NIFA in July and launched her campaign, in part to resist the policies that drove her from government.
At Genesis Farm, seven or eight festivalgoers gathered around O’Rourke. She’d dressed appropriately for the setting, in cuffed black jeans, hiking boots, and a salmon-colored Oxford shirt. Most of the group didn’t seem to know who she was. “You’re running for…” said one attendee, his voice trailing off. “Congress,” she answered warmly, brandishing a business card.
She hopes to unseat Republican Tom Kean Jr., O’Rourke explained, the second-term congressman who she says “inherited” the seat from his ex-governor father. “I emphasize Junior,” she said. She leaned into her wide-ranging résumé, which includes a tenured professorship at Virginia Tech, a congressional fellowship, and eight years as a civil servant. “So this would be your first public office?” a guy wearing a Smithsonian cap asked. “Yeah,” she said, adding with a laugh, “Start big.”
There’s no doubt her race has big stakes. While the district narrowly went for Trump in 2024, with control of the House up for grabs, Kean is considered to be among the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, and there’s no shortage of Democrats gunning for him. As of March, at least eight had joined the contest, including a former Navy pilot, a marketing entrepreneur, an icu doctor, and a Biden-era Small Business Administration leader, who will first face each other in June. “It’s a bit of a crowded primary,” O’Rourke told the group.
O’Rourke says science—hustling for grants, spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning.
However things go, O’Rourke’s candidacy reflects a shift in how scientists are pushing back against Trump. Since he returned to the White House, researchers—traditionally a politics-averse group—have organized “Stand Up for Science” protests, published letters of dissent from within agencies, rescued datasets erased by the administration, and carried on research that would have been abandoned. If elected, O’Rourke would be among the first women in Congress with a scientific PhD, but she is hardly the only scientist running in 2026. In December, 314 Action, a fund that backs Democratic candidates with science backgrounds, announced it was already working with nearly 100 campaigns—more than double what it says is typical.
This shift, O’Rourke believes, is in part a response to Trump’s “assault” on science, which caused “a shock to the system.” “I think it took us a little while, including me, to even start thinking about becoming an activist, because we haven’t had to,” she says, adding that scientists are now figuring out “what should we do and how do we get organized?”
Growing up, O’Rourke was fascinated by food and where it came from. As the “poor kid” in class, she and her family relied on their church’s food pantry. Her father’s mental health issues and her mom’s long hours meant she and her three siblings typically had to fend for themselves, eating things like dry oatmeal, bread slices rolled up into a ball, or hot chocolate mix poured into a glass of milk. “It wasn’t that we went hungry, per se,” she tells me, “but nobody was feeding us.” She also loved the outdoors. Nearby her childhood house in Blairstown, in a forested wilderness now held by the Nature Conservancy that her family nicknamed “Dinosaur Mountain,” O’Rourke and her brother skipped rocks, fished, and picked berries to supplement their lunches.
Agriculture blended her interests in food and the natural world. As a master’s student in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, adviser Ricardo Salvador recalls, O’Rourke was a quiet, steady presence. “Whenever she did engage,” he says, “you could tell that she had been observing, that she had been thinking, asking questions.” She went on to earn a PhD in agricultural ecology from Cornell University, researching insect pest population dynamics on nearby farms while running a small fruit and vegetable farm and raising three children with her husband, Aaron Rust, whom she met as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. After working as a climate change adviser at the usda’s Foreign Agricultural Service and an environment adviser at the now-dismantled US Agency for International Development, she landed a job at NIFA at the tail end of Trump’s first term. There, she oversaw the allocation of more than $170 million in agriculture research funds related to climate science.
After Inauguration Day in 2025, things turned south. She’d worked under three administrations, but Trump 2.0 and its executive orders targeting climate science were “just so beyond what I’d experienced,” O’Rourke says. At NIFA, she recalls, DOGE and other Trump-friendly bureaucrats hunted out work they deemed counter to the administration’s priorities. The agency’s animal reproduction portfolio was flagged, O’Rourke suspects, over the word “reproduction” and its possible proximity to sex and abortion. Her publications on climate change were deleted from the usda’s website, and her projects funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act were terminated. At one point, with so much canceled, including all meetings related to the National Climate Assessment, Rust recalls O’Rourke looked at her calendar and found it empty. O’Rourke had read that her congressional district in the state’s northwestern reaches, New Jersey’s 7th, was among those Democrats hoped to flip. Considering a run, she did what any academic would do: study. She took trainings from the Democratic National Committee and Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. And she resigned from NIFA.
Her calendar is no longer empty. The day I visited the harvest festival, she’d had at least two other events, including a local Democrats meeting. (To save time, she keeps a hairbrush and granola bars in her Prius.) “I work harder at this than I have ever probably worked at anything,” she says, “and I’ll compare that to getting my PhD with three little kids [while] running a farm.” She’s earned key endorsements from science-minded Democrats like Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer, and former New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, a plasma physicist. In February, more than 200 scientists across the country publicly announced their support. But so far, that hasn’t led to a windfall in financial support. While she reportedly raised $175,000 on her first day as a candidate, by March, O’Rourke had brought that to only $459,000—significantly less than her better-heeled primary opponents.
In biology, there’s a concept of an ecological niche—how organisms precisely fit into their environment. If the same idea applies in politics, O’Rourke occupies a distinct niche in the Democratic Party: She’s an active member of her Mormon church, a mother, and—as she’d say herself—more of a listener than a talker. When I asked her about political role models, she mentioned Washington state Blue Dog Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (a “rural Democrat,” “working-class,” and “willing to reach out across the aisle,” O’Rourke says), as well as New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury (who also earned a Cornell graduate degree) and New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim (like her, “dorky”)—two lawmakers who’ve been members of the party’s progressive caucus.
If she feels out of place as a scientist in politics, she doesn’t show it. Back at Genesis Farm, she got into the weeds with a farmer on cover crops and seed phenotypes while admiring two species of bees buzz through sunflowers. “I heard you talking about pollinator conservation,” an attendee wearing a flannel and no undershirt said to O’Rourke, asking if there were anything the government could do to encourage pollinator-friendly gardening. On the way out, they posed for a photo.
O’Rourke says doing science—hustling for grants, running a lab, and spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning. And, she suggests, more scientists should join her. “I never really wanted to be a politician,” she told me toward the end of my visit. “This is not what I thought I would do with my life.” But “now is the time that our country needs people to step up.”
2026-03-25 04:22:43
On Monday, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Sacramento mother who was detained at her February green card interview and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez had active protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which temporarily shields undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, at the time of her arrest and removal.
In a 15-page decision granting Estrada Juarez’s motion for a temporary restraining order, Judge Dena Coggins ruled that she must be returned to the US within seven days of the court order. Estrada Juarez, the judge wrote, “was removed in flagrant violation of the regulatory protections afforded to her under DACA” and the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. The judge determined that she should have the protections afforded by DACA restored “as if her February 19, 2026, removal never occurred.”
Estrada Juarez’s ordeal began in February, when she attended an appointment as part of her adjustment of status process to become a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen, her daughter Damaris Bello. Having lived in the United States for almost 30 years, and with her DACA status valid through at least April 2026 pending renewal, Estrada Juarez didn’t think she had reason to fear being detained. Still, at the interview, Estrada Juarez was told her case couldn’t be completed because she had a decades-old order of removal from when she first entered the country in 1998. The government then reinstated that order, which Estrada Juarez didn’t know about, to deport her.
In early March, I spoke with Bello, who accompanied her mother to last month’s scheduled interview. She described what happened that day:
Bello recalled that after a brief period of time, someone knocked on the interview room’s door and asked for Maria Estrada. When she answered, Bello said agents without uniform or name identification came in and said she was going to be detained and deported to Mexico. Before the officers could handcuff her, Estrada Juarez asked if she could hug her daughter one last time. She held Bello’s face and told her to be strong, that God would guide them to the right place.
“It was so sudden and unexpected,” Bello said. “It felt like she never really had a chance.”
By the next morning, Estrada Juarez had been sent to Mexico, a country she hadn’t lived in since she was 15 years old. The separation proved devastating for Estrada Juarez and Bello, an only child. After Estrada Juarez’s sudden deportation, Bello said she would likely have to move out of their shared home because she couldn’t afford rent or utility bills without her mother’s income from her job as a Motel 6 regional manager. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” Bello told me. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.”
On March 10, Estrada Juarez filed a petition in the district court for the Eastern District of California, arguing that her removal was unlawful and violated her due process rights. Estrada Juarez has continuously held DACA status since 2013. In 2014, the government authorized her to leave the country for a short trip, and she was lawfully admitted when she returned. The petition claims Estrada Juarez never received a copy of the 1998 reinstated expedited removal order or notice of the reason for her February deportation. Instead, it says she was handed a document stating she was barred from coming back to the United States because an immigration judge had ordered her removed, even though she didn’t appear before one. Records show Estrada Juarez refused to sign the form.
“They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist. The whole thing has fallen apart.”
Still, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denied her adjustment of status application on the basis of that decades-old removal order. But Estrada Juarez’s lawyer, Stacy Tolchin, said the 1998 order, which the government submitted as part of the record in the case, wasn’t signed by a supervising officer and can’t be considered final. “They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist,” Tolchin said on Tuesday. “The whole thing has fallen apart.” Even if the order was valid, she explained, Estrada Juarez’s DACA status should have prevented it from being enforced. (Tolchin has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the order of reinstatement of removal and filed a motion to reopen and reconsider the green card denial with USCIS.)
The government opposed Estrada Juarez’s petition, arguing the court lacked the authority to review “discretionary decisions” to execute a removal order and mandate her return. The administration also contended that the court didn’t have jurisdiction over her habeas claims because Estrada Juarez had already been removed and was no longer “in custody.” Judge Coggins disagreed, citing Ninth Circuit precedent allowing a noncitizen unlawfully deported from the United States “under extreme circumstances” to seek their return, despite not being detained in the district where they are challenging their removal. “Indeed, it is difficult to argue that Petitioner’s removal constitutes anything less than an ‘extreme circumstance,'” the judge wrote.
She further rejected the government’s position that Estrada Juarez didn’t meet the “extreme circumstances” standard because she hadn’t, within the less than 24 hours between her detention and deportation, rushed to court to secure an emergency order stopping her removal. “Essentially, Respondents argue that the government is immune from liability from any claim for violation of a noncitizen’s right to due process in removal proceedings so long as that right is violated quickly,” the decision reads.
Judge Coggins recognized that “each day Petitioner remains unlawfully separated from her daughter, they both suffer unimaginable irreparable harm.” In a declaration submitted to the court, Estrada Juarez and Bello described the “severe emotional trauma and financial hardship” they have experienced, adding that her “wrongful deportation has deeply broken [her] family.” Bello wrote in her own declaration that her mother’s removal “has left [her] feeling completely alone and afraid.”
To Tolchin, this case shows why the courts and due process are important. “We’re seeing [the Department of Homeland Security] trying to hide due process and people’s constitutional rights from them,” she said. In a statement, Estrada Juarez expressed relief and hope of coming back to the United States soon: “I followed the rules and trusted the process, and I just want to return to my family and rebuild my life.”
2026-03-25 02:38:28
Top White House advisor Stephen Miller, the longtime architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, asked Texas Republicans last week in a closed-door meeting to kick undocumented children out of public schools, according to reporting from the New York Times.
It’s an escalation in the right’s push to restrict public education to children who can prove they are US citizens. Such a move could violate a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, which held that withholding funds to schools teaching undocumented children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That case was a result of a class-action lawsuit in Texas in the 1970s.
As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias reported back in 2022, this isn’t the first time that Miller has attempted this. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, he reportedly led a similar push. One that, according to TIME, he’d been driving at since 2017.
In the decades since Plyler, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to upend the highest court’s ruling. The current one is buoyed by the Trump administration’s multi-pronged anti-immigration campaign that has come to define his second term.
Miller isn’t alone. Also this month, Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, led a House hearing to discuss how Plyler “was wrongly decided and how it harms America’s schools and students,” according to his press office.
During the meeting, Roy said in his opening statement: “It’s time for it to go.” Roy went on to criticize programs in schools that taught English to language learners and refugees. Roy is currently vying for Attorney General of Texas in a runoff election.
Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, cited Roy’s hopes in his response: “Toying with children’s futures to win a primary election is the tactic of a small, sad man.”
This enlivened push to restrict access to public education comes as scores of immigrant children are already afraid to go to school across the country as Immigration and Customs Enforcement have repeatedly been seen near schools or bus stops. (The Department of Homeland Security has said they do “NOT raid or target schools” despite “media force-feeding the public stories about parents and children being scared to return to school.”)
In Texas’s largest public school district, in Houston, the immigrant student population plummeted by nearly 4,000 students, or a decrease of 22 percent, this school year. In Maine, absences at some schools hit 25 to 30 percent during a week of heavy ICE presence in January. In Minnesota, up to 40 percent of students stayed home during the agency’s violent operations in the Twin Cities.
As Justice William Brennan wrote in the Plyler majority opinion, “It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries.”
A lower court judge put it like this two years earlier: refusing to educate children based on of if their parents came to this country without certain documentation, or were in the process of obtaining that documentation, would create “a permanent underclass of persons who will live their lives in this country without being able to participate in our society.”
2026-03-25 01:01:52
President Donald Trump visited Memphis on Monday to praise a surge in federal law enforcement there, while some locals took to the streets to protest the surge.
“For years, our leaders allowed entire cities in America to be destroyed by crime, drugs, and gang violence,” he said during a roundtable discussion about the Memphis Safe Task Force, which launched in September. “Tolerating this violence was always a choice.”
Trump credited the task force—a collaboration of more than 30 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, and the subject of my recent Mother Jones investigation—with a substantial drop in crime in Memphis over last year. Officers have arrested more than 7,000 people.
But protesters say the task force also has changed daily life in less desirable ways. Police are riding around with immigration officers, who ask people of color for proof of citizenship. The law enforcement presence is so pervasive that immigrants have been sheltering at home, afraid to shop for groceries or bring their kids to school.
In November, I saw this firsthand during a visit. I hid in a dark apartment with terrified immigrant parents and their citizen children, who told me they didn’t go outside much anymore because they were scared of police. I also drove around town and talked to activists, business owners, cops, local politicians, teachers, volunteers, and ordinary people. One resident compared the vibe to 1930s Germany—helicopters circling overhead, National Guard patrolling downtown, unmarked law enforcement vehicles roaming the streets, and immigrant citizens carrying their US passports, lest they be detained.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, a Democrat who opposed the task force, speculated that crime—which had been a problem—was dropping at least in part because people weren’t venturing out nearly as much. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semiautomatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.”
Check out the full investigation here.
2026-03-24 23:04:46
Next week, the Trump administration’s bid to deny birthright citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented immigrants and non-green card holders through an executive order will arrive at the Supreme Court—yet again. Last year, the justices didn’t address the constitutionality of the order directly; instead, they ruled on a procedural question to limit the power of federal judges to block the government’s actions nationwide. Now, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court is asked to determine whether the administration’s rewriting of the Constitution has merit.
With its executive order, the government is claiming to want to restore the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens of the country. In a brief to the Supreme Court, the administration argues that the amendment—ratified in 1868 in repudiation of the Dred Scott decision that declared Black Americans couldn’t be citizens—specifically intended to extend citizenship to the children of former slaves and their descendants, but not of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors.
Most constitutional law scholars and historians disagree, pointing to longstanding tradition, legislative history, and legal precedent that support a broad understanding of the citizenship clause. (An understanding that includes extremely narrow exceptions, such as for the children of foreign diplomats and enemy invaders.) The courts have also resoundingly rejected the Trump administration’s executive order, finding it unconstitutional in light of the plain 14th Amendment text.
The highest court has grappled with challenges to birthright citizenship before—and turned them down. In the late 19th century, at a time of rampant anti-Chinese bias, immigration restrictionists and the federal government argued that Wong Kim Ark, born in the United States to Chinese parents who couldn’t become naturalized due to exclusion laws, didn’t have a claim to citizenship. The dispute made its way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark ruling reaffirming that the 14th Amendment applies to virtually everyone born on US soil, regardless of parentage.
Ahead of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on April 1, I spoke with Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and counsel of record in the Trump v. Barbara case. He talked about the government’s ahistorical reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, and how it mirrors previous attacks on birthright citizenship.
The ACLU’s brief to the Supreme Court characterizes one of the government’s arguments in support of its executive order as “atextual, contradictory, and irrelevant,” adding that they relied on “authors engaged in a concerted effort to undermine the Citizenship Clause.” Can you explain what that effort to undermine the 14th Amendment has looked like?
In the late 19th century, there were two threads of legal and political activism that came together. One was ongoing opposition to Reconstruction and opposition to the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment. These are the amendments that eliminated slavery and enshrined the principles of equal protection and due process as to States, as well as voting rights, into the Constitution. The other thread was rising anti-Chinese sentiment. There was huge bipartisan opposition to Chinese immigration, which culminated in a whole series of statutes at the federal level excluding Chinese immigrants and imposing extraordinary burdens on those communities. What we see is those two threads coming together in a set of authors that the government is now relying on, who spent years looking for ways to try to limit the text of the 14th Amendment to exclude the children of Chinese immigrants.
These authors essentially opposed what the framers of the 14th Amendment had put into the Constitution and were looking for ways to rewrite it. That argument came up to the Supreme Court in the context of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the Wong Kim Ark case, and the Supreme Court rejected it. It saw through the racist efforts to exclude Asian Americans from citizenship and essentially said, the Constitution means what it says. The fact that the Trump administration is recycling these same discredited ideas to try to exclude the children of immigrants today just goes to show that it is borrowing from the same playbook that the Supreme Court has already rebuffed.
“It’s remarkable that the Trump administration has taken aim at birthright citizenship. It’s a foundational American value that’s enshrined in the text of the Constitution.”
Much of the debate revolves around the meaning of the sentence “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Some scholars supporting Trump’s executive order argue that children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors fall outside the birthright citizenship rule because, under British common law, their parents wouldn’t have owed allegiance to—or been protected by—the king in a type of mutual contract. In the present context, the parents wouldn’t be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and, therefore, their children should be excluded from automatic citizenship. What do you make of that legal theory?
The text of the 14th Amendment says “subject to the jurisdiction,” and that meant then what it means now: subject to American law. There are some people who are exempt from American law in full or in part, and ambassadors are the classic example of that. The government’s argument, echoed by its amici, uses a lot of different words and phrases that don’t carry a whole lot of meaning. At the end of the day, what they’re arguing is that the citizenship clause has this idea of a domicile requirement that a child’s parents need to not only be in the United States and subject to its laws but also be living here with an intention to remain indefinitely.
But the rule before the 14th Amendment was squarely to the contrary. The absolute leading common law case leading up to the framing of the 14th Amendment specifically held that a temporary visitor’s child born in the United States is a US citizen. That was the rule in the treatises. That was the rule across a variety of different sources. That’s what the framers understood, and that’s totally consistent with the language that they use, which is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. What the government’s really trying to do here is muddy the waters enough so that we won’t notice that it is rewriting the clear text of the Constitution itself.
Looking at the Supreme Court case docket, I counted more than 40 briefs against the Trump administration’s executive order—from historians, constitutional law scholars, civil rights groups—and about 25 in support. Do you think these legal theories questioning birthright citizenship have gone mainstream among Republican and conservative circles?
The overwhelming consensus of historians and legal scholars is that we are right, and the government could not be more wrong. This isn’t the first time the principle of birthright citizenship has come under attack. If you think about this historically, the idea that people born in the United States are citizens goes all the way back to the founding of the country and before. At that time, there were racial limits because of the scourge of slavery. But what Dred Scott—that shameful decision that helped trigger the Civil War—said was that Black people were excluded from citizenship, whether they were enslaved or free. It was an attempt to imagine a kind of citizenship based on parentage that would exclude a whole caste of people. And that is exactly what the people who were putting together the 14th Amendment rejected. They wrote these words specifically to reject that idea.
Then you see the same idea coming up again in 1898, in an effort to twist the words of the clause to exclude the children of Chinese immigrants. And we’re seeing that same effort once again to come up with some way to exclude a politically disfavored part of the country from their birthright as citizens, using political rhetoric and concern about immigration. In some ways, there’s nothing new in that, but the rule that has stretched back to the beginning of the country has always been steadfast. The Supreme Court had no trouble turning aside the last effort to restrict birthright citizenship, even at a time of immense anti-Chinese political rhetoric and organizing.
I think that up until recently, most people would have considered the question of who gets to be an American citizen a settled matter. What is the significance of having the Supreme Court now consider an executive order that puts into question the history and meaning of the 14th Amendment?
It’s remarkable that the Trump administration has taken aim at birthright citizenship. It’s a foundational American value that’s enshrined in the text of the Constitution. But given the executive order that was issued last year, it’s not particularly surprising that the Supreme Court is taking up the issue. The Trump administration told the Supreme Court that this was a top priority for the administration, and that alone is often enough to get Supreme Court review of an issue. But we are extremely confident about the ultimate outcome of this case. The government is wrong on the text, the history, and the tradition, going all the way back to English common law, and we expect that’s exactly what the Supreme Court will say at the end of the day.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
2026-03-24 20:08:19
“Did I ruin your life, or did I help your life?”
Taylor Frankie Paul first asked the question in the early days of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the Hulu reality show that follows what is known as MomTok, a group of young Mormon influencers in Utah. At the time, when the show debuted in September 2024, Paul’s question was rhetorical, but the answer had already seemed obvious: None of the women would be on television had it not been for Paul’s public admission to “soft-swinging.” That, for better or worse, their nascent fame was directly tied to Paul’s chaos.
Four seasons later, the swinging scandal that catapulted MomTok to reality TV stardom feels small, even quaint, against new domestic violence allegations between Paul and her on-again, off-again partner, Dakota Mortensen. But they are only new in the sense that older ones exist; similar allegations between Paul and Mortensen played out in the show’s very first season and resulted in Paul’s arrest. (She later struck a deal and pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated assault.) On Thursday, TMZ published a video recording of that 2023 incident, which captured Paul throwing chairs at Mortensen with her young daughter in the room, quickly forcing the big decision: Shortly after the video, ABC announced that it was canceling Paul’s season as the next Bachelorette, just three days before it had been set to premiere.
It’s as if by broadcasting outrage, they believe they have done the moral work of untangling our addiction to reality TV toxicity.
The fallout has since churned out a mix of condemnation—ABC should have known better than to cast Paul, some say—and cheers for supposed accountability. Others have hurled labels like “ghetto” to characterize Paul. Even Laura Ingraham is disappointed.
Whatever the case, I take issue with how some of the admonishments appear to absolve viewers of the fact that we, too, have long known about Paul’s assault—again, the allegations were right there in the first season, albeit without video—and yet we continued to watch intently. Similarly, it’s been disorienting to watch friends take to Instagram to chastise ABC or rail against Paul as “trash”—only to privately express excitement about MomTok drama. It’s as if by broadcasting outrage, they have done the moral work of untangling our addiction to reality TV toxicity.
Any discourse that centers Paul is probably good for MomTok. The pain, trauma, and conflicts they share with the world are the trade of the larger reality TV ecosystem.
None of which is to suggest that I’m not personally conflicted. Should there be another SLOMW season, even with Paul included, I tend to believe that I’ll stay watching. After all, voyeuristic trips into someone else’s chaos are the bread and butter of the medium, and I’m a fan of the genre. But at some point, are we due for a reckoning? If so, when? Is it when a young child is seen in the margins of assault videos? When Snooki gets punched in the face? When cast members out their closeted housemates, and are then slapped in the face as they exit the show? When Housewife after Housewife openly struggles with substance abuse? Viewed against reality TV’s long record of platforming, sometimes exploiting, troubled characters and bad behavior, Paul is merely a new entry. Sometimes, as with America’s Next Top Model, the damage can take decades to assess. But the same throughline remains: We keep up with these traumas because of our own cravings for dark narratives; the concerns we express for toxic behavior get set aside when it’s time to be entertained.
As for the other Mormon wives, the shock they now profess has been strange to watch, considering the resurfaced clips strongly suggesting that they all knew about the specifics of the video long before the rest of us. I can’t help but wonder whether such collective silence would ever have been extended to Paul had she not been key to the group’s business opportunities—or if she weren’t white. Just look at how the heartwrenching admission this season by Layla Taylor, the only person of color on the show, that she has been taking GLP-1s and struggling with an eating disorder, has been treated like a minor detail. As she told The Cut:
It bummed me out to see how short it was. There were even more scenes that I had filmed talking about it that weren’t shown. It’s so hard. We have such a big cast. And we have a cast full of girls that have dealt with so much trauma. I was definitely sad to see that I only got a little bit, because this is something that I’ve been dealing with my whole entire life
So can MomTok survive all this? The uncomfortable truth is that any discourse that centers Paul is probably good for MomTok; the pain, trauma, and conflicts they share with the world are the trade of the larger reality TV ecosystem. Paul likely knows this too, having presciently asked the rhetorical question of whether her private drama hurts or benefits the group. But what’s good for MomTok might not be best for its leader—or us, for that matter.
