2025-11-13 00:58:36
Beatings. Sexual assault. Psychological abuse. These are some of the horrors endured by the more than 250 men the United States sent to El Salvador on flimsy evidence of gang membership, according to a new comprehensive report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a human rights group focused on Central America.
In early 2025, the Trump administration flew Venezuelan migrants to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they were held for four months without communication with their families and lawyers. The US government had accused the men of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua and removed most of them from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act—an 18th-century law that President Donald Trump has invoked for only the fourth time in US history.
The men sent to CECOT by the Trump administration used their own blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet.
As Mother Jones and other outlets have reported extensively, most of the men had no serious criminal history in the United States or elsewhere in the world. What they often had instead were tattoos that bore no relation to the gang.
The new report offers even more evidence of the inhumane treatment the Venezuelan migrants endured in El Salvador. Based on the testimonies of 40 men who were detained at CECOT, as well as interviews with 150 other people—including lawyers and relatives in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States—it paints a damning picture of the abuses inflicted at CECOT.
The Venezuelans were released in July and returned to their country of origin as part of a prisoner swap deal. Shortly after their release, three of the men told us that they faced severe abuse.
“They’re going to kill me here,” Neri Alvarado told us he remembered thinking. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.” Alvarado’s case was emblematic of the cruelty of the CECOT detentions. He was targeted by the Trump administration because of his tattoos—the largest of which was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his younger brother.
These stories were common. Once free, many of the young men were finally able to recount what had happened to them in the Salvadoran prison. They described routine beatings and humiliations, medical neglect, and severe punishments in an isolation cell referred to as la isla, or the island, according to our reporting. “What they did there was torture us,” one of the men said.
HRW and Cristosal found similar evidence of abuse. They concluded that the Venezuelans sent to CECOT “were subjected to what amounts to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance under international human rights law.” They also found that detainees were subject to “constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment,” including sexual violence. They also noted guards withholding food and medicine. “Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law,” the report says.
The human rights organizations determined that the abuse was the result of “systematic violations,” rather than independent actions by guards and other officials at the prison. All forty of the men interviewed reported facing severe psychological and physical abuse on an almost daily basis.
The researchers found that the United States became complicit in the men’s forced disappearances by repeatedly denying family members information about where their loved ones were being held. According to the report, the Trump administration violated its legal obligation to uphold the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured or persecuted.
In several cases, the men had originally left Venezuela fleeing threats and persecution by the government’s security forces and criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua. After seeking asylum in the United States, they have now been sent back to their home country before they could make their case for protection before an immigration judge in the United States.
“These are hundreds of men who were disappeared into a prison, never accused of anything, with no due process, and no jurisdiction to appeal,” Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, said in a press conference on Wednesday outlining the report.
“After the gringa left, the guards came in to beat us,” said one detainee of what occurred after a visit from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
The report also sheds new light on the nightmares faced by family members trying to locate relatives who disappeared from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detainee locator system after being flown to El Salvador. It documents numerous cases in which ICE officials refused to tell relatives where their loved ones were. Instead, the agency’s representatives would only say that the men were no longer in the United States. “Don’t insist,” one family member recalled being told over the phone by an ICE official. “They’re no longer here, find a lawyer to help you.”
The men interviewed by the human rights organizations reported facing severe beatings following visits by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Red Cross officials. “After the gringa left, the guards came in to beat us,” one former detainee recalled. “The usual, kneeling outside in the hallway and we were hit with sticks, fists, kicks, slaps on the head … I think that lasted about seven minutes, and then they took us back to our cells.” He also recalled that guards took away their food and confiscated the hygiene products that had been distributed before Noem arrived.
Another Venezuelan, identified in the report as Daniel B, said that after speaking with Red Cross staff, he was taken to “the island” and hit in the stomach until he started choking on the blood.
“My cellmates shouted for help, saying they were killing us,” he recounted, “but the officers said they just wanted to make us suffer.”
In April, riot police retaliated against the men, after they protested guards pepper-spraying a fellow detainee who fainted, by firing rubber pellets at close range. At some point during a hunger strike, the men even used their own blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet.
Along with beatings, the Venezuelans were denied any contact with their families and lawyers as they were held in inhumane conditions. The men said the cells were dirty and moldy and the water—which they used for bathing once a day, as well as drinking—had “visible vermin.” Thirty-seven out of the 40 former detainees interviewed reported falling sick while detained. CECOT, the report states, “appears to have been built to violate the dignity and rights of the people held there.”
The Venezuelan migrants interviewed by HRW and Cristosal said guards repeatedly told them they would never leave CECOT alive and that their loved ones had forgotten them. Some expressed feeling suicidal. “I thought I would be better off dead,” one former detainee said. After their release, many have reported lingering physical injuries and trauma from their time in prison. They described feeling depressed and anxious and having trouble sleeping. “I wake up traumatized, thinking that they are going to arrest me and beat me up,” a man identified as Felipe C. said. “I can’t sleep well. Another told the interviewers: “I feel like I’ve lost everything.”
The organizations are now calling on the Trump administration to stop sending any so-called third-country nationals to El Salvador. They also recommend that Trump revoke the Alien Enemies Act proclamation, and that Venezuelans deported to El Salvador under the act be given a chance to return to the United States to pursue asylum claims.
Human Rights Watch’s Washington director Sarah Yager said the White House, when presented with the findings of the report, repeated that the men sent to El Salvador were criminals.
2025-11-12 22:51:12
“All art is propaganda,” George Orwell wrote in 1940. “On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”
That, in Orwell’s view, was a lost understanding: clear to Victorian authors like Dickens; obscure to his contemporaries of the late 1930s, who were too coy or deluded to square “art for art’s saking in the ivory tower” with “political propaganda” and “pulling in the dough.” The man born Eric Blair was not.
The filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, a sweeping overview of the writer’s life and work, opens with a snippet of “Why I Write,” the 1946 manifesto in which Orwell laid out an aim to “make political writing into an art”:
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
Orwell had been shot in the neck by Franco’s fascists in 1937, as a foreign volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He was stunned by writers who used their pen to write around the jagged, bloody, earnest, coarse, partisan demands of the moment. Nazism was an event horizon. There’s no floating above it.
Jackboots are back. Orwell is bluntly relevant. But he’s an interesting subject for Peck, known for his definitive film on James Baldwin (2016’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro), historical dramas about the iconic Congolese decolonial leader Patrice Lumumba and the young Karl Marx, and Exterminate All the Brutes, a brutal survey of European colonial genocides.
“I reject that word [dystopian] for Orwell—no, he’s writing about something he knows, that he went through himself.”
There’s more to Peck’s Orwell than 1984 and Animal Farm: Intercut with contemporary footage, the film follows Orwell through his imperial twenties—a cop in colonial Burma, doing “the dirty work of empire”—his anti-fascist thirties, and his truncated forties, producing his best-known works as he battled tuberculosis, which killed him at 46.
And there’s much more to Peck, Haiti’s former minister of culture, than Orwell. with an academic background in economics and engineering, his documentaries are the product of exhaustive archival research and broad historical scholarship; like Orwell, his thinking bridges the colonial era and our own.
We spoke in Los Angeles about the new fascist moment, the arc of his work, and the genesis of Orwell: 2+2=5.
You started work on this documentary before the election, when it was still of the moment, but obviously a little less. What’s that been like—making this film in the middle of this kind of change in America?
My films, usually, I try to make sure that they will still have value and impact in 10, 20, 30 years. I never go for immediacy, for whatever is going on in the world. My work is always about going to the fundamentals to try to explain how democracy functions, how power functions, how abuse or authoritarianism functions, to explain what capitalism is. Because whether we like it or not, we are still in this long piece of history that we call capitalism.
You’d call this a film about capitalism, in the long view?
Well, of course. Because again, if you have to analyze what is happening in your country or in any other country, you have to contextualize, you know, what is this time in history? What is this society? How does it function? And we know economy is the central part of it. We know class is another part. When you have those elements, you are always capable to analyze where you are, with cultural differences or historical differences. We are not the same people all the time. We change, we evolve.
“The first thing they do is to change the law, to give a semblance of authority, of legitimacy.”
But more or less the way you would analyze what used to be called rabid capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century—the concentration of news ownership, you have those same symptoms today. You know that the press are in the hands of a few billionaires until there is a backlash, until the state comes in and regulates—those are cycles that we’ve seen before.
That’s why in my films I always make sure that I contextualize: Where are we in that long, dramatic arc of history, and how can we analyze what is happening right now? It’s part of understanding what’s going on: if you don’t know where you come from—where did that story start? What were the consequences?—you won’t understand what’s going on, and you won’t be able to imagine what’s next.
That’s interesting, because I was going to ask how you see Orwell’s life in conversation with others you’ve focused on: what’s the dialogue between Orwell and James Baldwin, or Orwell and Marx, or influences of yours like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire?
All of them have analyzed society, their own society, in the historical moment that they lived. And all of them have traveled, all of them have included me in their analysis. I know my place through them. They all differ from the Eurocentric history, the rewriting of history. All of them deliver you instruments to analyze your own situation, your own life, your own place.
One of the authors I use immensely in Exterminate All the Brutes is Michel-Rolph Trouillot, his work Silencing the Past. All my life, I’ve tried to come to that understanding of where I come from, what I am, in the bigger story of the planet and human history. Fanon, Baldwin—that’s the basis of all their work.
Baldwin is probably the greatest psychoanalyst of [the] American psyche, of the white psyche especially, and I learned from them. For me, they are my elders. I stay on their shoulders and use them to continue that job, you know, to make sure that our current generation are aware of that heritage, those instruments of analysis.
Was it particularly important to you to have as much footage as you did of Palestine, of Gaza, in terms of understanding of the present moment?
Yes, Gaza in particular, because we are witnessing a genocide on TV every night—the one TV that shows it, of course. I’ve made at least four films that deal with genocide, and I know the signs; I recognized it very early on, since the beginning, and saw also the parallel: how states refused to recognize that word, scholars are hesitating to name it what it is.
“[Trump] tends to accuse you of what he did. He reverses, constantly, his own deeds and puts it in your words.”
I remember that footage that I use in Sometimes in April where the US spokesman is struggling in front of journalists to name the genocide going on in Rwanda. And she’s telling the definition, while realizing she’s exactly describing what is happening, but still trying to—we are in an Orwellian world there, you know, where you’re twisting words, or you don’t want to recognize what the words are saying, just not to say the truth.
It seems like genocide is such a point of genesis of [Orwell’s] Newspeak—it’s the one thing people can’t bear to name, would rather lie than name.
The word itself did not exist until after the Holocaust; Raphael Lemkin had to invent the word. And that tells you the if you can’t even name something, it doesn’t exist. But when you name it, it makes an impact. It forces you to have a political position on it. Do you support it? Do you agree with it? But you can’t say it doesn’t exist.
Definition is the thing. You see that what’s happening today with Donald Trump is the destruction of words, even the illegality of certain words. What is a lie becomes truth, and the truth becomes a lie. He makes sure that you are lost. You don’t know. He tends to accuse you of what he did; he reverses, constantly, his own deeds and puts it in your words.
Orwell [addressed] that when he said the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy, and it’s exactly that. They attack academia because academia is supposed to be the place where you define words, where you survey words, where facts are on the table.
And you attack justice. You attack all the institutions that are supposed to make sure that we speak the same language and have the same definitions, that there are laws we follow, that there are regulations. When you explode all that, or you make a sort of Italian salad with it, of course you’re lost, and that confusion is what they need to continue.
What makes people so vulnerable to that in a time when, in theory, you can get your information from wherever and whoever you want?
We overestimate the capacity of people to to stay awake all the time. It’s exhausting. That kind of propaganda of constant pummeling on you every day—and the news is part of it as well. It’s hard to keep up. People have jobs. They have problems every day. They have to survive. How long can you support that?
“Fukuyama would say [we’re] at the end of history. No, it’s capitalism.”
Even more, a big part of society is very often just to obey the law. People obey the law. That’s why a dictatorship or authoritarian regime, you can see in history that they the first thing they touch is always the law—to give a semblance of authority, of legitimacy. They need some cover. They need some sort of justification. So a big bulk of a population says, Well, it’s the government, it’s the law, and if they do it, it’s because they can do it, et cetera.
[Then it’s] let’s erase everything, reframe everything, and let’s start from scratch, and now I’m going to fill up your head with new material and tell you two plus two equals five. The same toolbox.
It seems like you trace an arc in Orwell’s work. In the ’30s, in Spain, he’s full of hope for a future where we take charge of our destinies. Post-war, when he’s writing 1984, he’s much less optimistic about people. Like you say, just taking care of the necessities is a struggle.
Does that resonate with you—in your own work and your own life, do you see an arc where it’s gotten harder and harder for people to resist the pressure?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because, first of all, the constant bombardment that we have today is unprecedented. We have that object [the phone] with us day and night, and I know I try to stay away from it, but it invades you whether you like it or not. You are afraid to miss something, which, of course, doesn’t make sense. So it’s harder today.
There is also a deterioration of institutions: the deterioration of schools [means] schools can’t keep up. They have been cutting their budget since the ’70s. Teachers have too much to do every day. They can’t follow each student the way they could sixty years ago. Life is quicker; it’s difficult even to concentrate. We’ve accelerated the destruction of the planet as well. So we are on the verge of something that’s never existed.
Fukuyama would say at the end of history. No, it’s capitalism [that’s] brought us on the verge of explosion. Will it explode? We don’t know. Will there be another crisis? Yes, probably, because that’s the cycle of capitalism. When the profiteers have gone too far, there is a bubble explosion. And who comes each time to save them? It’s the state. The last time was 2008: we were really near a [global] explosion, and Obama had to take care of that here and everywhere. Everyone had to save the banks who had made, very consciously, the damage. They knew what they were doing. Everybody was bailed out.
Not long after he died came Sputnik and an age—it was still a scary time, but one where you could argue that a lot of human development tilted towards progress. Do you look at this moment in a similar way, where there are also changes and developments that give you some optimism?
Yeah, but you have to distinguish between technological progress—you know, we have [made] incredible progress. But the problem is, in what hands are those new instruments, that new progress?
“People can’t imagine how a billionaire is so scared—like a little boy—to lose his billions.”
As long as profit is the first reason, or the first goal, to continue to develop, we are in trouble, because profit cannot be a rational way to deal with human society, to deal with common life. You know, it’s an aberration.
Marx’s economic analysis demonstrated the absurdity of that cycle. And by the way, something people don’t realize: Marx did not say the capitalists are bad guys. He said they are almost puppets in that system. You know, there is not—people can’t imagine how a billionaire is so scared, like a little boy, to lose his billions. You would think that, you know, it gives you a maturity, you are sure—no! How do you explain it psychologically? Why do you hang on [to] hundreds of billions when you know there is [only] so much you can do a day about eating, sleeping, and having fun, or even help other people? It’s totally irrational. So you let something irrational decide the fate of humanity. It doesn’t make sense.
Look at AI today. My problem is not AI as such. My problem is AI unregulated. The internet was an incredible instrument, an instrument of progress. But when it became privatized for profit—I remember the day I heard that first little music of AOL. I said, Oh my God, we are fucked. I knew that because we have seen different development, technological development, medical development, go the same way.
The progress of medicine. How many sicknesses are not cured because capitalistically, they’re not worth it? [Where] you have, actually, the technology to cure those sicknesses, but because the people who are sick don’t have the money to pay for it—usually poor people, Black, indigenous people—they estimate that there is no buying capacity, so let them die. So no research.
Do you see any counter to those trends? When you talk about the conjuncture of colonialism, authoritarianism, capitalism—when you look at the situation, do you see opportunities for politics to move in a different direction?
If we take humankind as a whole…you know, even democracy is progress. It’s in the renewal of democracy that we have been let down. The role of the citizen within democracy—especially in the Western world, where we have become perfect consumers, and where the self, [personal] happiness is the most important, not the collective—we’ve lost that. We’ve lost the connection with the other, not only the other far away, but the other very close to you.
“We’ve accelerated the destruction of the planet as well. So we are on the verge of something that’s never existed.”
Your world, your surroundings, are getting smaller and smaller. The connection with society is not as close. And you become more isolated, more fragile, if you can’t discuss what’s happening, [or] trust the person you’re discussing it with. Or if you’re just doing it through the social network, where you don’t shake hands and see eye to eye. It is hardly possible today with the life we are having.
If you take all the small organizations in the whole country here, they’re all doing a great job. But to connect them means that they have to sit down and discuss and come to an agreement about the diagnosis, and then an agreement about what’s next. What is our strategy? What is our tactic? That takes time. And you can’t do it on the internet.
The Civil Rights Movement was one of the last big movements. It was a lot of meetings, in churches, in universities, in every place where you can have people—people of different race, class, gender—with fights. Some of them were pushed back. Some of them were excluded. But if you take the whole movement, young people decided that they would go to the South and risk their life. And some of them were arrested, tortured, killed. They knew that [was possible], and they took that choice.
That’s the thing you can only do when you you feel that there is a collective behind you, there is a sense of the history, and everybody agrees to it. This is where we need to go, because our survival depends on it. As Orwell said, if there is hope, it lies in the proles. Not in the definition of the Marxist proletariat, but the bigger definition of society—civil society, with all its nuance and differences.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
2025-11-12 22:25:45
House Democrats on Wednesday released a set of emails in which Jeffrey Epstein called President Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.
“[Trump] has never once been mentioned,” Epstein wrote in a 2011 email.
In another 2019 email, Epstein wrote to the writer Michael Wolff, of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop.”
The shocking correspondences, part of 23,000 additional documents in the Epstein case, further tied Trump to Epstein despite the president’s repeated and vehement insistence that he did not know about his longtime friend’s sex trafficking.
This is a breaking news post. We’ll update as more information becomes available.
2025-11-12 20:30:00
In the winter of 1996, a cadre of police officers met an airplane as it landed in Portland, Oregon. Santa Claus had come to town.
It was the early years of what would come to be known as Santacon, and the plane carried a contingent of pranksters aiming to create a bit of Yuletide mischief. While the event is best known today as a Christmas season bar crawl, at the time, the Santas involved were all connected to the Cacophony Society, a group of artists, urban explorers, and troublemakers with chapters in several cities.
“It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”
Their first events in San Francisco in 1994 and 1995—then loosely known as Santarchy—were designed to plumb the chaos-producing potential of a crowd dressed up like Santa, and were greeted with a mixture of bewilderment, amusement, and some hostility: the Santas packed department store escalators and danced through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, chanting “ho, ho, ho” in a militaristic and frankly terrifying fashion. They rode the hotel’s revolving doors like a merry-go-round, tossed fake snow, and, once they were inevitably kicked out, flooded the street to stand on newspaper boxes and exuberantly greet passing cars. In Santacon, a straightforwardly named new documentary examining the event across three decades, camcorder footage from that day makes it clear this was a different era: pre-meme, pre-flash mob, pre-viral stunts performed for the internet. Bystanders’ faces reflect unedited shock, worry, confusion, and wild delight. A Hyatt security guard grimly demands, “Who are you guys?”
“Santa!” comes the reply, in a boisterous chorus.
While each member and chapter of Cacophony Society was different, they all saw comedic and artistic possibility in holiday masquerade. But today, Santacon has become a bit of a different sort of cultural juggernaut, a now-infamous yearly event wherein drunken Santas take to the streets of major cities and loose unspeakable quantities of bodily fluids upon them. People hide in their apartments from Santacon, take alternate routes to avoid it, and write screeds against it. It is, safe to say, a nuisance, a bummer, and a major cause of power-washing large areas of midtown Manhattan.
While the chaos is well known to the NYPD, when the Santas came to Portland in 1996, cops there were convinced that something akin to terrorism was taking place. The police knew their itinerary and trailed them around. “There were like 200 cops,” says John Law, an early participant. “Someone dropped the dime on us. I have a lot of suspicions about who. They said evil anarchist Santas were coming to Portland.”
The Santas edged cautiously around town, unsure what activities would get them arrested, or maybe even beaten up. The weekend culminated with a line of Santas facing off against a line of riot cops in face shields, who seemed, the Santas thought, worryingly eager for an excuse to crack some furry-hatted heads.
“We really didn’t want to get arrested,” Law says. “Our intention wasn’t to fight the police. It was just to have fun.” By the end of the weekend, the Santas returned home, and Portland was safe from the too-exuberant Christmas cheer for another year.
You can see these tender and utterly weird early years of Santacon in the documentary from director and co-producer Seth Porges, the filmmaker behind Class Action Park and How to Rob a Bank. (He knows a little something about crime, chaos, and injury.) The movie, which premieres November 13 at the DOC NYC festival, combines interviews with some of the earliest Santas with archival and little-seen footage of the first Santacons. With Christmas just around the corner, it is a timely reminder that the event’s roots are far more interesting, anarchistic, and creative than what it has become.
“People go into the film like ‘Fuck Santacon,’” Porges told me. “By the end, they come to a more nuanced perspective, that’s like acceptance in a way.”
The unruly seeds of what would eventually become Santacon were accidentally planted in the US by this very magazine. In 1977, Mother Jones ran a story about Solvognen, a radical Danish theater troupe who had launched a cheerful anti-capitalist protest counterprogramming Christmastime materialism. The article’s description sounds remarkably like what the first few American Santacons looked like, with Santas descending on a Copenhagen department store, pulling books off shelves and insisting shoppers take them for free. After police arrived, the Santas were beaten and thrown into paddywagons.
“Watching bystanders are horrified,” author Ellen Frank wrote. “Children became hysterical.”
The Danish Santas also scaled the walls of a recently closed General Motors plant and serenaded the remaining employees, and delivered a disquisition on workers’ rights outside a local court. All of it, one participant explained, had a larger purpose: “We are trying to help the political movement to not be so square.”
While this Mother Jones connection isn’t mentioned in the film, the movie does make clear that the event’s earliest American participants were, and are, the kind of people who take part in influential art stunts; ambitious urban exploration expeditions; site-specific, secretive, highly weird parties; and other things that usually stay mostly hidden. (Full disclosure: in a jolly coincidence, a number of my friends and acquaintances in New York and San Francisco were early Santacon participants, including Law. I didn’t know this for years, because most of them will not publicly admit it. Recently, I told a close friend I was working on this story, and he began to speak about what he experienced at the first New York event. He stopped the moment I took out my phone to take notes. “Put it away,” he instructed, stonefaced. “I disavow.”)
One person who read the article was Gary Warne, a co-founder of the Suicide Club, a, secretive San Francisco collective who, according to Law, “were the first group that I know of to formalize urban exploration.” Law, now 66, was an original member, as well as an early member of the Cacophony Society, which came later and shares cultural and artistic DNA and a few common members. Law is also a co-founder of the Billboard Liberation Front, which helped pioneer the now-well known practice of “culture jamming” billboards, and also of what was then known as the “Burning Man Festival,” though he hasn’t been involved in that project since 1996. (While he has a great deal to say about what the event has become roughly once a year, otherwise he tries not to think about it.)
“The beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume—it allows you to be who you really are.”
Something about a mass of Santas causing anti-consumerist, merry chaos felt deeply appropriate to the Suicide Club ethos. Warne, who died in 1983, passed the Mother Jones article around, even including a copy in the group’s newsletter, which went out to around 100 people. “He was like ‘Wow, what a funny idea,’” Law says.
One could call this foreshadowing, a faint trembling before the stampede. What would become Santacon didn’t actually begin until two decades later, when Rob Schmitt, a Bay Area Cacophony Society member, saw a postcard with a drawing of a bunch of Santas playing pool at a bar. The idea struck him as beautifully simple, elegant, and very funny. He was also inspired by Burning Man’s first themed camp, which was a Christmas camp, replete with decorated trees and, of course, Santas. While Schmitt says he wasn’t inspired by Warne’s sharing of the Mother Jones article, it doesn’t surprise him that two people connected to the same prankster movement would be struck by the same notion.
“It’s a wonderful thing…Nobody really has an idea. Everybody has it in their head, somewhere, some way,” he says, “It was time. It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”
That first San Francisco event was “magical,” Schmitt says. Besides their hijinks at the Hyatt, Schmitt says he secured 100 cable car tickets so the Santas could stuff together and glide across San Francisco’s hills. They snuck into a debutante ball while the Smothers Brothers performed, and began, as Schmitt puts it, “stealing wine and dancing with the ladies.” They were chased out, but headed to the Tonga Room, a renowned tiki bar where the band plays on a pool-borne boat, and took over the craft. The vibe was uncontrolled but not violent; the goal was to confuse, disorient, and possibly even delight.
“Nobody expected all these Santas,” Schmitt says happily.
“You can’t control Santa,” he adds. “You just can’t.” He loved “the anonymity of this whole thing,” he says, especially when it came to dealing with cops and security guards: “‘Who’s doing this?’ Santa. ‘Who’s in charge?’ Santa.”
“We did it organically,” Law says. ”We didn’t sit down and figure out a ten-point situationist plan on what we were going to do. That’s pretentious bullshit.” (Law was, at one point during the 1995 Santacon, mock-lynched in costume, which does make its own point fairly clearly.)
The one thing Schmitt doesn’t support, then or now, he says, is a bad Santa. “Santa is a good thing. You don’t destroy people’ cars or faces by fighting and things like that. A good Santa doesn’t destroy.”
Not everyone is so tenderhearted about Santa. Chris Hackett—a Brooklyn Cacophony Society member and a co-founder of the Madagascar Institute, an “art combine” that he describes as conducting “massively collaborative” guerilla projects since 1999, helped organize New York’s first Santacon in 1998.
Like Schmitt, Hackett saw Santacon as a time to consider the role of anonymity and mass disguises in society—but he doesn’t think what comes of that is always a beautiful or magical Christmas. “It’s not noble,” he says, sounding upbeat. “It’s not good. It’s kind of fucked up. And that’s the beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume… It allows you to be who you really are, and who you are is fucking disgusting.”
The New York group prepared gifts, wrapping cigarettes and matches in copies of the Village Voice’s x-rated backpage ads. They wrote “Start early, kids” on the packages, Hackett says, and “handed them out to children.”
“I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”
Mo, another early New York Santacon attendee who didn’t want her full name used, recalls a slightly different approach. While she remembers a “workshop” making mutilated toys to be handed out along with “a whole lot of coal,” she also says there were “one or two people who were designated to interact with children and they had candy canes, and clean costumes, and were mostly sober, and they had non-messed up toys.”
“We had fun,” she says. “But ‘Don’t fuck with the cops, don’t fuck with kids,’ that was our MO.”
“Everybody had different ideas about what they were doing with Santacon,” Law concedes. “We had no ideology whatsoever. We were really anti ideology.”
Almost as soon as Santacon began, though, this circle realized it had very little continued creative or chaos potential. Many never participated again. (“One and done,” Hackett says dryly. “I don’t drink.”)
As the original participants drifted away, Santacon took on a new life, becoming the “largely unmediated,” as Law puts it, street party that it is today. “It became the ultimate sign of depravity,” he says. “A lot of my friends, these sophisticated quasi-intellectual types, got embarrassed.”
“I apologize to people all the time,” says Mo. “But I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”
“People are going to take and bastardize something and make it their own,” Hackett says, philosophically. “The thing is, this is a weird balance. You have to have some group of people creating the stuff, the organic movements, so that the people whose job it is to exploit those things have a pipeline.”
Schmitt says he hopes that people are inspired by Santacon, past or present: “Art gives people ideas. I hope other people have ideas, and realize they have permission.”
There is an organizational structure to the current version of Santacon, which describes itself as a “charitable” event. But in 2023 Gothamist found that over an eight year period “less than a fifth” of the money raised by the New York event went to charitable causes, with more than one third of that money going to “groups or individuals who appear connected to Burning Man.” Ryan Kailath, the investigation’s author, also reported that the organization made—and lost money on—crypto investments. (Santacon NYC did not respond to an email seeking comment.)
Porges’ documentary is not the first such evaluation of the event; a particularly beautiful 2017 Harper’s story examined the early years of Santacon, and Schmitt and Law’s long and generative friendship. (The two men are housemates, surviving in San Francisco at a time when many artists and creative troublemakers have been pushed out.) Archivist Scott Beale, the founder of the influential culture site Laughing Squid, has collected the most complete selection of material on Santacon’s earliest years.
But the current-day Santacon organizers seem particularly excited about the new film, even as they don’t seem entirely in on the joke. “When I first heard about this project a few years ago, I worried it might be another ‘shit-on-Santacon’ hit piece,” a Los Angeles Santacon organizer, who calls himself Santa Vescent, wrote on Substack. “But it’s not that at all.” (Maybe not. But without spoiling the documentary’s ending, I can tell you that while its final, more contemporary, scenes are hilarious, they are also deeply unsettling.)
“The folks who created Santacon disowned it as it transformed into something they no longer recognized,” Porges, the filmmaker, told me. “Eventually, that happens to all of us: We find ourselves living in a world we no longer understand or feel at home in. But what do we do next? Do we choose to be angry and demand that things return to some imaginary good old days? Or do we find a way to keep on going through it all, despite it all?”
The more time he spent with the Santacon founders, Porges added, “the more I began to think of this as a movie about living in the rubble. About that most 2025 of feelings: That maybe we now live in a world that doesn’t make much sense to us anymore, even if we were responsible for creating it in the first place.”
2025-11-12 19:00:00
About 2,100 people are on death row in America. Some have been there for decades, in part because executions have been on the decline in the US. But that’s changing. So far this year, 41 people have been executed, up from 25 last year, and six more executions are scheduled.
Early in his second term, President Donald Trump—a longtime proponent of the death penalty—signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment. One man has seen many of these executions up close.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.The Reverend Jeff Hood is an Old Catholic Church priest, an ordained Baptist minister, a racial justice activist, and something of a go-to spiritual adviser for many currently on death row. Hood often tells people that his job is to become death row inmates’ best friend “so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed.” On the day of the execution, he goes inside the chamber for the final moments of their lives. This kind of work, he says, is a natural outgrowth of his longtime activism for racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.
On this week’s More To The Story, Hood sits down with host Al Letson to describe his work as an advocate for death row inmates, what it’s like being a white Southern reverend vocally advocating for racial justice, and how capital punishment in the US today illustrates American society’s increasing movement in a more violent direction.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: Tell me, Jeff, right now the thing that I am the most curious about is how did Jeff Hood become Jeff Hood?
Jeff Hood: Man, I thought you was going to say, “How do I keep this head shaved?” Man, that’s what you was going to ask. I grew up in South Atlanta and that had a tremendous effect on me growing up. I mean, I was constantly influenced by all of these great civil rights heroes, Andy Young, Joe Lowery. I don’t think you can be around that without it getting in your bones.
Yeah.
I guess as I got older, I looked at Atlanta and I said, “They got enough help.” And so they got a lot of people working up there, and so I needed to go somewhere that was terrible and Little Rock, Arkansas fit the bill.
See, I ain’t going to talk bad about Little Rock like that. I can say some things, but I ain’t going to do it.
I’ll tell you, this is the ultimate nowhere place, which has its pluses and minuses.
When did you join the ministry?
Man, I was a young man. So I grew up in a southern Baptist congregation that was sort of this bastion of white evangelicalism and a world of sort of black middle-class folks on the South side of Atlanta. I always tell people, man, that one of the defining characteristics of where I lived is that a couple streets over, Tiny had her nail shop. So that tells you everything you need to know.
So growing up, we had a very conservative theology, but I was also again, very influenced by the civil rights culture that somehow faith can achieve change and faith can mean more than just sitting in the church praying, that you can actually make the world a better place. I came through my undergrad and was interested in the ministry and I had this mentor that matters so much to me.
I mean, he was in a conservative religious environment, but he was very open-minded, poured into me, encouraged me to think widely and deeply, and I go to seminary and I’m right there in the middle of seminary again preparing for ministry, and I get a phone call from him and he revealed that he had lung cancer.
I go down to Atlanta and he brings me into next to his bedside. They had the hospital bed set up. I mean, just a classic sort of, he was dying with his wife and kids in the next room over. He reveals to me that he had lived his life as a closeted gay man.
Wow.
And he had pastored all of these churches as this-
Wow.
… southern Baptist minister. And so all of a sudden I’m sitting here with this sort of epiphany and it’s like, “I love Jesus, but here’s this person that had really been Jesus to me and poured into me so much, and all of a sudden Jesus is gay.” And that sort of blew up all that theology that I had had prior. And I think that that pushed me deeper into this sort of search. And I felt like if I could push into the liberal and I’ll keep “Liberal.” Now, tell everybody I’m doing my fingers with the liberal in the air quotes.
Yeah.
But I thought I’m going to pour, push into the liberal crowd and see what they can teach me. So I went to Emory. I did a graduate degree there in Atlanta at Emory in theology. And man, I began to find these liberal folks just as backwards as a lot of these conservative folks, I’m going to put up the flag but don’t expect me to march. I had been so influenced by again, those civil rights leaders that I knew I was supposed to go all the way. I was supposed to give my body.
I began to find a lot of the sort of black gay culture in Atlanta and was ready to push into these spaces of injustice in a way that I had never seen before. And so I was so affected by this sort of courage that these folks were showing. I mean, they was going into the black church and saying, “Y’all can talk about social justice all the time, but y’all are treating us like shit.”
And then going into white spaces and saying, “Y’all ain’t just racist, you’re homophobic, you’re transphobic” and on down the line. But I was brought into the ministry in a conservative environment, 22, 23, and then sort of baptized in this sort of queer culture that in many ways led me to this sort of radicalization that continued to come through the years that’s led me to Black Lives Matter work, work in queer liberation and eventually to death row. Most people, they’re their radicalists when they get first ordained. I feel like I-
It seems like you-
I went the opposite direction.
Right. You kept getting more radical after the ordination.
Yeah. And it just seems like now I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of conservatives. And the reason I have sympathy for a lot of conservatives is a lot of the times it feels like a lot of these folks don’t know no better. I don’t have any sympathy for liberal folks. I find liberal Christians to be one of the most disgusting group of people that I have ever encountered because, and apologize for some of the folks who would call themselves liberal out there that’s actually nice people.
But my point is this sort of space in the middle that Dr. King talked about in the letter from the Birmingham Jail, those are the people that are most bothersome to me now. I mean, look, we are in a society right now where we’re getting undocumented folks being pulled out of the houses, drug through the streets, and I hear all the time, “We’ll pray for you.” I don’t need your damn prayers. I need your help. I need you there in the streets with me. I need your bodies. And it’s the same way with these guys on death row. And I encountered churches all the time who say, “Well, we’ll pray for you.”
Yeah.
This guy is about to literally be killed.
Let me ask you, in your trajectory, how did you find yourself working with Black Lives Matter?
I think my gateway, if you will, was when Troy Davis was about to be executed in Georgia. And I was a student at Emory at the time, and I remember Officer Mark MacPhail was the victim in that case out of Savannah. Everybody had on the “I am Troy Davis T-shirts.” That was the swag I guess back then for the moment. And I remember just thinking about that situation and really being so deeply convicted that if Officer Mark MacPhail had been black, then none of this stuff would be happening.
Of course, I was an Obama kid 2008, 2009, and I was a part of this generation that was so determined and dedicated to see this hope and change and looking at the White House and saying, “Everything we’ve hoped for has finally arrived.” And I remember doing that Troy Davis campaign, everybody saying, “Obama’s going to find a way to save him.”
And I remember getting to the night the execution there in Jackson, Georgia. On one side, the phalanxes of troopers and police are lined up. They got all their fancy equipment. And on the other side is all of these students from Atlanta and various activists. And I remember even then people talking about, “Well, Obama’s going to do something.” And I remember that night when he was executed, going home and just being like, “Something has to get more radical, man.”
Do you feel like that was the moment that radicalized you? You had been building up.
Yeah.
And learning all of these things and then Troy Davis happens and it’s just like that was it, that broke the dam open.
I think that my minister coming out to me was something that put me on a different trajectory and caused me to start asking questions. But I do think that that Troy Davis moment was the moment where I said, “Change can’t happen through these venues that everybody tells me it can happen.” I began to realize political change wasn’t going to happen through elections. And that’s not to say that we need to have this violent overthrow of the government, but it is to say that you can’t trust anybody.
I mean, and when you start trusting folks, that’s when you start getting complacent. And in the years that followed, obviously you had incident after incident, shooting after shooting. I went to Ferguson and was there and marched. And the reality is that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the language, I didn’t have white guy trying to do right. I mean, I didn’t know anything except that I wanted to be where I felt like Jesus was and I wanted to be where I felt like real hope and real change was. I found it in the streets.
In 2016, you helped organize a rally in Dallas that was in response to the killings of two black men by white police officers. At that protest, five officers were shot and killed. Can you tell me about that? What happened?
It was me and another guy named Dominique Alexander, and we had done a lot of organizing together and I had called him and I said, “Look, we got to do something.” He was like, “Okay, set up the Facebook page.” So I set up an event page and started inviting people. And I remember he was out pocket and I couldn’t get ahold of him. And I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit, we’re about to have thousands of people in the streets and I’m going to be there by myself.” So we get to the day of, I mean, it was really, really hot.
And by the time I got up there, I remember thinking, man, “If I don’t meet the anger of this crowd, then this is going to be a nasty moment.” Because people were angry, very angry and rightfully so. And so I got up and I said, “God damn white America.” And then I said, “White America is a fucking lie.” And at the time, I mean that shit hit, man. Those were the words that needed to be said, really pushing into this idea that white America, the things that we’re being taught, the history that is being upheld is a lie. That’s not the totality of the American story. It’s not what’s important. What is important is all of us.
Describe for me the scene in Dallas and what was that feeling like?
It was a real feeling of eeriness. It really felt like, here’s a lot of people we don’t know and we don’t know what could happen.
And just to help our listeners remember, is that this was a really tense time in the country. The spotlight was being turned on black people dying at the hands of police. So tension had to be high with everybody, not just with the protesters, but also on the police side as well, because they don’t know what’s coming as well.
And also at the end of the day, this was a situation where we were trying to make it as safe as possible. So you’re protesting the police, but also working with them.
Working with them. Yeah.
We always felt like if something horrific was going to happen, it was going to be the police shooting protesters. We were never prepared for something to come from within. We got all of these people, people of goodwill coming together and then all of a sudden it’s just crushed by this act of violence. We are going down the street. I had an officer right next to me and really good guy, somebody that I had become friends with, he had served as sort of a protection for me and other organizers.
And so I’m going down the street and I’m looking up ahead and I started seeing these shots fired and these officers dropping to the ground and this officer pushes me to the ground and literally ready to give his life for me. And I had a big old six foot cross I was carrying. I was ready to go for the protests, but I wasn’t prepared for those shots. I guess what I’m trying to say is I feel like I’ve become who I am based on the difficulty of trying to be human in this society, trying to figure out a way to let love make a way instead of hate in vengeance.
I think my life has been defined by these conundrums, being a Southerner, having this accent, but at the same time wanting to see a new South. And I think a lot of Southerners experience this in that you’re proud of this civil rights history, you’re ashamed of this history of slavery, while at the same time you realize that the entire region is defined by violence, it’s defined by the violence of slavery, the violence of placing your body on the line to try to secure justice and whatnot. So it feels like all of these pieces just keep crashing together in my life, and I, for whatever reason, feel like God just keeps calling me to push into the chaos.
Let me ask you, in all of this, do you get a lot of pushback for being a white man who is speaking loudly about racial injustice?
Hell yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a white guy, I mean, come on.
And I’m sure you get it from both sides, right?
Yeah. I feel like the nature of following Jesus is often finding yourself in these places where you got one side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.” And you got the other side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.”
I mean, I can’t tell you how many rooms I’ve sat in with old white women talking about and crying the whole time about how racist they are, and I’m sitting here going, “Do something, do something. Quit talking, do something.” I think we have grown as a society where we are willing to hear different perspectives. There’s different leadership.
Oh, Jeff, I disagree. I don’t think we’ve grown at all.
Well, maybe not.
I think we’ve regressed. I think that the truth of the whole Black Lives Matter is that it was forcing America to look at itself in a way that was very uncomfortable. And I think that America looked at it and said, “Nah, I’m good.” And doubled down into closing its eyes and pretending like that thing didn’t happen. So I think that what was happening is that America got to look in a mirror and it said, “Yeah, I’m good. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”
Yeah. I guess what I was, the point that I was trying to make is that you do have white leftist politicians that are talking about race now in a way that they never would have, I feel like 10 years ago.
Yeah, I agree.
The opposition has gotten more diverse. But I do think that you are right. I mean, we are in a space where racism has become normal. I don’t know. I mean, I think you’re right, Al. I think that there is just this space now where people don’t want to talk about it.
I want to talk about your work on death row because I feel like when we talk about death row, I feel like number one, we really don’t want to talk about it. Society would prefer to let this thing happen in a dark corner and not bring it up and talk about it. On the flip side, you have a lot of people would consider themselves pro-life but are also a pro-death penalty. Tell me about your experience with it.
I think one of the things that influenced me the most, there was a rash of trans murders in Dallas, trans women of color being murdered in Dallas. And I was part of a group of people that were doing vigils at the sites where the bodies were found. Some of the most powerful organizing I’ve ever done because you’re lifting up people that society has said, “These people are absolutely disgusting and we want nothing to do with them whatsoever.” At the same time, I’m doing that organizing.
I was working with a guy on death row named Richard Masterson, who was a serial killer of trans women. He had been convicted of one, and there was a speculation that he had committed many other acts. And that sort of dichotomy of people getting really ticked off that I was working with this guy on death row that had been such an oppressor of the community while trying to uplift the community. It’s sort of, unless you know you ain’t going to have a home. And if you ain’t got a home, then you just want to do what’s right. And I think that that’s how I felt about the BLM movement, that’s how I felt about responding to folks who are critical of me. I just wanted to do what was right.
Yeah. When you work with these men and women on death row, tell me about them. Who are they?
Well, they’re all sorts of people. I mean, one of the places where I get in trouble by the sort of anti-death penalty crowd, anti-death penalty movement is when I say, I said this the other day, it was a guy named Chuck Crawford who was killed in Mississippi and he had murdered a young woman and horrible crimes, snatched her up. All of these crimes are horrible. And I said, somebody asked me at a press conference, they said, “What would you do if it was your daughter?” And I said, “Well, I would want to take my hands and rip them apart myself. I would want to kill them myself.”
The question is not what do we want to do as much as it is, what should we do? I don’t meet the person who committed the crime as much as I meet the person 20, 30 years later whose sat in prison and had a lot of time to grow and move and expand their life and their horizons. I mean, it’s sort of like most of these guys are committing these crimes at 19, 20, 21 years old. Well, that person is incredibly different than somebody that’s 50. These folks are most of the time desperate for any sort of touch, any sort of connection, any sort of relationship, any sort of just humanity. They just want to be treated like human beings in a system that has dehumanized them to the point where it wants to kill them.
So you’ve been to several executions, right?
Man, 10 right now.
What is it like going into that chamber?
I mean, it’s horrible. I say that it’s like going down a rabbit hole. And I tell people all the time that the question is not whether I’m going to go down the rabbit hole with these guys, the question is whether I’m going to come back. And what I mean by that is there’s such an emotional and physiological and psychological toll that it takes that you… I mean, its… I don’t know, Al, there’s just not words to describe the starkness of the walls, the feeling that the ceiling is going to crash in at any moment. The cold sweat that comes over you, the windows and seeing witnesses come and feeling like you’re in a fishbowl.
And there’s all of these sort of spaces that experientially are so horrible. And then you look up and here’s this person that you’re very close to strapped down, defenseless, and most of the time they already have an IV in and or in the case of a nitrogen execution, they already have the mask on. It looks like a respirator mask. And you’re sitting there, Al, and this is when we talk about moral injury, this is about as big of a moral injury I think as one can face.
You’re asked to sit there and pray with this person, love this person, your best friend. I tell people that my job is to come in six to three months, when somebody has six to three months left to live, and my job is to become their best friend so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed. And so literally someone that you have worked so hard to develop that intimate of a relationship with, and your job is to sit there and do nothing while they’re murdered. And you think about it, I mean, imagine if your wife, your kids, your best friend, I mean, even a stranger being asked to sit there while they’re murdered and being expected to do something.
I mean, I get all the time, “Oh, you’re a hero, you’re so brave, you’re so this, you’re so that.” And it’s like, “No, no, I’m not. In many ways I’m a coward because I don’t do anything.” And I think that what I’m trying to speak to is the, again, that conundrum, that moral conundrum and just trying to do what is right and what is best, even amidst the horror. And I don’t know. Last night I had this nightmare that I saw all the guys that I’ve been with who’ve been executed, all of my friends, people that I’ve loved so much, and they all look at me in my dreams and say, “Jeff, why didn’t you help me?”
In the moment, in this horrible circumstance, and I’m not asking for any hope or anything like that, I’m just generally curious. These men have lived with this for well years, but as it’s getting closer and closer and closer, it must consume their thoughts as it has to consume your thoughts as well. I mean, it’s a countdown to death. Do they have a moment of peace? Are they scared the whole time? How does that play out?
I’ve had many of my guys say, “I’m the lucky one.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” The constant thing that they say is, “We’re both going to go through this, but you’ve got to walk out of there and I get to not have to deal with any of it anymore.” And so I think the piece comes from it being the end. The thought that there’s peace in murder, I mean, it’s horrible obviously. I would be remiss if I didn’t describe what one of these nitrogen look like.
Yeah. I was just about to ask because I think it’s not because I have weird a curiosity, but I think that we as a society, whether we agree with the death penalty or not, the fact that the state is doing it, the state is basically doing it in our name, and if the state is doing it in our name, we should know exactly what the state is doing. We should deal with the weight of that.
You said a phrase that I think activists love to use, and I feel like it is the most liberal, wishy-washy bullshit is when people say, “Not in my name.”
Yeah.
And it’s like, “No, hell no. It is in your name.”
It is. It is, because you’re a part of the state.
You are guilty.
Right.
Yeah. Everybody wants to, it’s like Pilate. Everybody wants to wash their hands and act like, “We’re doing the best that we can.” Well, fuck your best. We don’t need your best, we need your body. When you go into these spaces, you hear people say all the time, “I’m either for the death penalty” or “I’m opposed to the death penalty.” And the reality of it is they don’t have any clue what they’re talking about. You catch these Southern governors all the time, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they’ve executed 14 people this year, and he’s always talking about how awful they are and how terrible they are, and blah, blah, blah.
And he’s so glad that justice was served. These folks are cowards, man. If you are so interested in killing people, then do it yourself or at least have the courage to be there. These folks don’t want to see no executions. Judges and juries, they hand down these death sentences, but they never have to get their hands dirty. They never have to see it. They never have to participate in it. And I think we have a criminal justice system in which the courtroom and the sentence is so far removed from the lived experience of the condemned that it’s like nobody knows what they’re talking about.
Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was executed last year, somebody that I was very close to, when he was executed, I came in and he was a really funny guy, really sweet guy. But he was messing with me and I had brought some oil in the room and it was in a little bag, and I had pulled it out and I was going to anointing and said, “Well, oh.” And he said, “Shit.” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “I thought you done brought me some weed.” And so here he is, and we’re having this really human loving interaction.
And on the other side, you’ve got these state officials who are just acting like they’re at the water cooler. “What’d you do last night? Did you watch the game?” All that kind of stuff. And they ask him for his final words, and you can see the poison coming through the line and when it hits, there are seconds before the paralytic hits. And I told him I was sorry, that I did everything I could to try to stop this thing. And I told him I was sorry. And he said, really, one of the kindest things he’s ever said to me. He said, “We wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did if it hadn’t been for you.”
And it just is devastating. And then all of a sudden he goes quiet. And a lethal injection now looks like a medical procedure in a lot of ways. The paralytic hits and they’re completely unconscious. And there’s movements which sort of speak to the fact that something happens after the… I mean, obviously death happens after the paralytic, but something physiological torturous happens.
It takes sometimes 21, 22 minutes to happen and they begin to sort of gargle. And there’s this sort of watery, yawn, watery breath. And what that seems to indicate is that there’s feelings of drowning. Fluid begins to feel the lungs. The real horror there is losing your friend and just the sitting there and watching again, someone be murdered. But on the other hand, these nitrogen executions, which I was in the first one in January of 2024, Kenny Smith in Alabama.
Yeah, I’m not familiar with this.
What has happened is companies have consistently said that they don’t want their drugs used in these lethal injections like Pentobarbital and a number of other drugs, Midazolam. The pharmaceutical companies have said, “These are not what these drugs are created to do.” And so the more that people have pushed back, the harder it’s been for states to get drugs to execute people. And so what states have turned to is more novel ways of executing people and including firing squads. And also this process called nitrogen hypoxia. And it’s been done in Alabama and once in Louisiana. In January of 2024, I walk into the chamber and that was the first time they’d ever tried it.
And so nobody really knew what it was going to be like. The state of Alabama made me sign a waiver to say that if they killed me, my descendants wouldn’t hold the state accountable, liable. We go in and this respirator mask is on his face. It’s goes from the top of sort of the hairline underneath the chin. And as I go in, I pray with him, hold his hand for a bit, read scripture, and then I back up. And they start this thing and we were told that it was going to be like going to the dentist. You get knocked out and anesthetized and that’s it. It’s peaceful and whatnot.
Well, they turned the nitrogen on and Kenny begins to heave back and forth, back and forth over and over, and the face mask on this respirator mask is sometimes glass, sometimes Plexiglass, but the back of the mask was attached to the gurney. So every time he slammed his head forward, it was like his face was hitting like a plate glass window, just boom, boom, boom, over and over. And he’s popping back and forth and back and forth. And as he does that inside the mask, saliva and blood and snot, it begin to coagulate on the inside of the mask. There’s this waterfall of body fluid, and he just keeps heaving over and over and over again. It looks like there’s a million ants underneath his skin.
His skin is going every different direction. His muscles are tensed up. This lasted for almost nine minutes, eight or nine minutes. And I guess what it speaks to is the fact that there was a certain level of violence that people were accustomed to in carrying out these executions. I mean, it’s violent to strap someone down to, run an IV and kill them. This is a whole other level of violence. And it speaks to the fact that as a society, we have moved in a more violent direction. We’ve moved in a space where we are comfortable with terrorizing marginalized and oppressed people. And I think it really speaks to the fact that a lot of the movements and moments that happened in the 2010s have become just that, moments. And we’re in this space again where violence seems to be raining.
What is attending these executions, what has it done to your mental health?
Oh man, it’s terrible. I mean, it takes months after these executions to be able to function. I don’t want to even say normally, but yeah, it’s awful. And I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody. But at the same time, scripture that talks about anybody putting their hand to the plow and looking back is not fit for the kingdom of God. And so I feel like as long as there’s someone who needs me, I have to keep going until I can’t.
2025-11-12 03:50:29
On Monday night, the Senate passed a bill that marks the first step towards potentially reopening the government after the 42-day shutdown.
For Democrats, the bill comes with a major cost: It does nothing to address the rapidly-approaching expiration of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies which, according to health policy think tank KFF, will more than double enrollees’ monthly premiums. While Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has pledged to hold a vote on the issue next month, it’s unlikely to pass in any form Democrats would want in the Republican-controlled Congress, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to commit to holding a vote on the matter in the House. (Spokespeople for Thune did not respond to a request for comment.)
But the 60-to-40 vote passed thanks to seven Democrats, and one Democrat-aligned independent, who defected to pass the bill. As Mother Jones‘ editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery pointed out on Bluesky, none of the lawmakers are up for reelection next year. The officials have said they cast their votes because Americans were already being harmed by the shutdown—low-income Americans have gone without food stamps and flights have been delayed at the busiest time of year for holiday travel—and they felt confident in Republicans’ commitment to give them a later vote on extending the ACA subsidies. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), one of the defectors, also cited the fact that the bill has a provision to rehire federal employees who lost their jobs during the shutdown and to provide back pay to those who had been furloughed.
Predictably, all this has caused even more infighting among Democrats, who have already been sparring over their party’s future following President Donald Trump’s reelection and the party’s subsequent internal reckoning over how it happened. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it “a very bad vote,” and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “there’s no way to defend this.” Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios the bill is “complete BS,” while Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said it “sounds like a lousy deal to me.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have also opposed the bill for failing to address the expiring ACA subsidies—but Schumer is also facing blowback from congressional Democrats who say the defection of some members proves he is not up to the task of leading Democrats in the Senate. (A spokesperson for Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mother Jones readers are also, overall, quite angry about the Democrats’ response. When I asked subscribers to our daily email newsletter yesterday to weigh in with their thoughts, we received a flood of replies. Many described being, as one anonymous reader put it, “mad as hell.” Reader Andrea Scharf called the vote “disgraceful” and “another show of weakness.” Tom Chojnacki wrote: “Those Democrats are weak minded cowards. They are aiding and abetting the Republicans goal of remaking the US into an oligarchy.”
The word “spineless” came up frequently to describe the eight defectors: Steve Anchell said, “I think they are spineless cretins that don’t deserve to hold public office. The only thing they seem to be good at is begging for campaign money.” Angela Ross wrote: “I THINK THEY ARE SPINELESS, MEALY MOUTHED, BLOOD SUCKING, TWO FACED BOTTOM FEEDERS.”
Several joined in the calls for Schumer to be ousted as the Senate Minority Leader. Eileen, who did not give her last name, said Schumer “needs to hand over the minority leader position to a Democrat who will fight tooth and nail.”
Other said the defectors were mistaken to believe the Republicans would actually vote to extend the ACA subsidies. “Trump and the GOP have time and time again broken promises. They will do so again,” wrote David Clayman. “The pain inflicted upon the populace has been in vain.”
Some, like Grace Hammond, said they believed the Democrats gave up leverage they had following their spate of wins in last week’s elections. “Democrats had clear, tangible leverage for the first time in this fight, undeniable pressure, and they cave,” Hammond wrote. “I was having a glimmer of hope after the elections,” Suzann Cornell said. “Now that we caved, those hopes are dashed again.” (Polling also showed that most Americans blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the shutdown.)
A smaller group of respondents, such as Kathy Walker, reported having “mixed feelings” due to “too many people suffering” during the shutdown. Some readers reported already feeling those effects themselves.
“Our son and wife will be unable to afford medical insurance until next year when they will qualify for Medicare. In the meantime, I, nearly 90, will have to help them pay their premiums from my Social Security benefits,” wrote Dell Erwin.
Michelle Mellon said her family’s premiums will triple next year, adding, “It’s this politicized, short-term, zero-sum thinking that’s going to be our downfall as a nation.” Christine Morrissey said the premium increases “are forcing families, including mine, to cancel insurance policies in favor of paying for energy costs, grocery costs, rent costs, mortgage costs, and home owner’s insurance costs, all [of] which have also increased since Trump became president.”
A handful of anonymous readers shared stories about how ACA subsidies helped them, and their family members, receive necessary treatment and medications. Without the subsidies, they wrote, they will lose their coverage, and potentially their health. As one put it: “I am distraught. I feel betrayed by the Democratic Party.”
