2026-02-14 16:01:00
Cecelia Lizotte owns Suya Joint, a celebrated Nigerian restaurant in Boston. She’s a rising star in the city who was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2024 and operates two restaurants and a food truck. But last year, a key employee—who happens to be her brother—was detained by ICE.
“I’m not able to operate the establishment, basically,” Lizotte said. “It’s just, it’s crazy.”
Lizotte’s experience got us wondering what it’s like to run a restaurant, or any business, when a key employee suddenly disappears.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This week on Reveal, producer Katie Mingle and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind. We also talk to LA Taco reporter Memo Torres about how immigration raids continue across Los Angeles almost daily, even though the national spotlight moved on months ago.
The first two stories are updates from an episode that originally aired in September 2025.
2026-02-14 05:05:27
Elon Musk, who formally distanced himself from the White House last year, hasn’t stopped trying to influence American politics.
Musk took a step away from the Department of Government Efficiency—the agency he crafted and wielded against long-held federal spending practices. But, contrary to what some expected, that didn’t signal indefinite distance from Republican politics for the South African-born, Texas-voting centibillionaire. To the contrary, campaign finance records and his own social media profiles indicate that he’s ready to wield power whenever, wherever.
His public clash with President Donald Trump also doesn’t appear to be sticking. Musk has dined with the president and first lady Melania Trump and, weeks ago, attended the wedding of Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, at Mar-a-Lago alongside prominent administration officials.
He’s also been ceaselessly posting political commentary and recommendations on X, which he owns. Including frequent posts about the Epstein files, which he is in but has attempted to distance himself from.
One of his main targets of late has been the SAVE Act, Republican legislation that, if both houses of Congress pass it, could disenfranchise tens of millions of potential voters and uniquely target women through new voter ID requirements.
Republicans have been taking notice.
According to Politico:
The campaign has driven a huge volume of calls to member offices, according to two aides granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, forcing Republican after Republican to publicly state their support for the legislation.
After spending more than $290 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024 cycle, Musk claimed in May that he’d be cutting back. “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the time. “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason.”
His announcement came after pouring money into the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court election—to no avail.
Seems like he found a reason.
Musk gave $20 million to the two political groups by the end of 2025. With the midterms revving up, Republicans are considering what an influx of money from Musk, a divisive character due to his history of slashing government funding that affected Americans across the political spectrum, could do for their campaigns.
Talking to Politico, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) worried about how midterms tend to be rough for the president’s party.
“History is not on our side,” Gimenez said. “We’ll take any and all help possible to reverse that trend in history, because I think it’s important for the Republican Party.”
2026-02-14 04:11:24
This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.
But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.
Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.
So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.
There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.
When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”
“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.
Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)
Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.
Propaganda scholars say this is how it works. Suggestion, not through obvious symbols, but through repetition, emotional activation, and subtle normalization. Renee Hobbs, a communication professor who studies propaganda and founded the media literacy organization Media Education Lab, describes four pillars: stir emotion, simplify ideas, appeal to fears and hopes, and attack opponents.
It’s been reported that the purpose of these posts is to recruit specific people for specific reasons—a dogwhistle that only some can hear. But, as I point out in my latest video, whatever the actual intention or inspiration behind these posts, the result is a slow drip of extremist rhetoric that becomes familiar, official, and acceptable.
So, when officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem begin talking about things like checking papers, many Americans don’t recoil. They cheer.
2026-02-14 01:06:31
The first time I noticed it was last month, when he asked for a hug.
And not just any hug. “I could use a HUGE MAGA hug!” he wrote. “I love you. Do you STILL love me?” The love note was adorned with little hearts—and a request that I send him some money.
I didn’t respond.
Two hours later, another email. “Did you block me?” he asked in the subject line. “Are my messages getting through?”
The next day, he sent me half-a-dozen more notes—from two different email addresses.
8:25 am: “I’m attaching the letter I wrote to you”
9:48 am: “Don’t reject me!”
11:53 am: “Please confirm receipt of this email!”
1:25 pm: “Do not freeze me out”
7:27 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart”
10:40 pm: “Are my messages getting through?”
It was starting to sound kind of desperate. “Respectfully I’m asking, DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?” the president wrote. “I might be overthinking things. Here’s why: My love language is MAGA, and I need to confirm one last thing with you before I hit the hay.”
He asked me to fill out a survey and, of course, to send him money. But mostly he just wanted me to know: “I miss you.”
It all began to feel a bit creepy. I started thinking through his past letters; there had been a lot. Did I miss a few red flags?
Maybe it had started the morning of January 7, when he wrote that he’d “set aside some time just for” me, then followed up two hours later with: “Happy Anniversary?” It wasn’t really our anniversary. I guess he was talking about his work anniversary, which was still a couple of weeks away.
Things started getting pretty intense after that.
January 10, 4:09 pm: “Hello? Is anyone there?”
January 12, 3:52 pm: “Ouch, this is starting to hurt…”
January 12, 7:27 pm: “I’m alone and in the dark.”
It went on like this. I don’t know why he sometimes calls me “Bronte” when he tells me he needs me. His son even reached out.
I still haven’t written back. I’m not sure what I’d say. He doesn’t seem to be taking the hint.
February 1, 1:23 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart! – Will you show that you STILL love me?”
February 2, 12:05 pm: “Did you block me?”
February 2, 2:03 pm: “Pick up the phone PLEASE!”
February 2, 4:25 pm: “I love you, so will you fix this for me?”
Now it’s an “emergency,” and he’s quoting love songs.
I hope he’s doing OK. I hope there’s someone he can talk to. Valentine’s Day can get pretty depressing when you’re historically unpopular.
2026-02-14 00:18:19
Security detail for President Donald Trump’s budget chief and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is being paid for by what’s left in funding for the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.
There isn’t much left of USAID after Trump and Vought worked together to dismantle the agency last year. Just around 100 staff members are left to close out all operations by September.
Still, the White House Office of Management and Budget, which Vought oversees, is allocating $15 million from what remains of USAID operating expenses to pay the US. Marshals Service to protect the political appointee through the end of 2026.
Earlier this year, a man was arrested and is facing attempted murder charges after law enforcement said he showed up at Vought’s Northern Virginia home with rubber gloves and a surgical mask.
According to officials within the Trump administration, Vought has received increased threats related to his work since being picked by the president and his control over Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has influenced much of Trump’s second term.
Mother Jones has not seen or confirmed any of these threats.
As ProPublica reported in October, “Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies.” He’s overseen tens of thousands of federal employees losing their jobs and was tasked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “oversee the closeout” of USAID, the agency now bankrolling his security detail.
The Trump administration’s decision to cease USAID operations around the world that assist in treating and preventing diseases, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, will contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally, with two-thirds of them being children.
Vought, who said he hopes to put bureaucrats “in trauma,” has even faced protests from his own neighbors—though that pushback consisted of yard signs and messages written in sidewalk chalk and not violent threats, per reporting from Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias.
One such sidewalk read: “I was hungry and the USA fed me. Until Vought cut USAID.”
2026-02-13 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It’s not just federal headwinds that threaten to constrain renewable energy development. State and local restrictions on solar and wind are spreading across the United States, too.
Few states highlight this fact as well as Ohio does. The Buckeye State makes solar and wind farms go through extra hurdles that don’t apply to fossil-fueled or nuclear power plants, including counties’ ability to ban projects. Its siting authorities have also deferred to local opposition for renewable energy while granting opponents little say over where petroleum drilling rigs and fracking waste can go.
A bill now working its way through the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature threatens to raise even more barriers for wind power and solar farms. On Tuesday, the Ohio Senate’s Energy Committee held its third hearing on Senate Bill 294. It’s unclear whether the committee will hear additional testimony, so under state law the bill could pass out of committee as soon as its next meeting.
The bill’s primary backers are “among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there.”
The bill would declare it to be state policy “in all cases” for new electricity-generation facilities to “employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” But the bill’s definitions not only veer from common usage in ways that would exclude renewables but also threaten to block wind and solar development altogether.
“If Senate Bill 294 were enacted, the Ohio Power Siting Board would be unable to support renewable energy projects under the bill’s restrictive definition. This would place Ohio at a disadvantage,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, in joint testimony for that group and fellow industry organization MAREC Action. “At precisely the moment when Ohio needs every available energy source, this bill would tie the state’s hands.”
Based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, SB 294 is sponsored by Republicans George Lang of West Chester and Mark Romanchuk of Ontario.
Louisiana passed a similar bill last year that prioritized natural gas. A pending bill in New Hampshire says that energy sources “shall” be reliable, meaning not subject to routine daily weather variations.
Lang praised natural gas during his October 28 proponent testimony, noting the bill is designed to take advantage of the fossil fuel. In contrast, he claimed renewable energy “doesn’t meet those qualifications of being cheap. It misses the reliability…And it doesn’t really meet clean yet.” During the February 10 hearing, however, he claimed solar and wind were not really excluded and stressed that “there are definitions that have to be met.”
Those definitions, however, uniformly ding renewables.
SB 294’s definition of a reliable energy source would require it to be “readily available” with minimal interruptions during high-usage times and for it to have a 50 percent capacity factor. That’s the ratio of its actual power output to the potential maximum. This condition would exclude virtually all land-based wind and solar generation.
SB 294 “will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers.”
A high capacity factor “does not mean that an energy source will be available during extreme weather, or even generally available at peak times,” said Michelle Solomon, manager of electricity for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank. In practice, grid operators “consider how combinations of resources on the grid can work together to meet needs.”
Instead of ensuring systemwide reliability, a single-minded focus on a high capacity factor will distort markets and raise costs for consumers, noted Brendan Pierpont, Energy Innovation’s director of electricity.
In fact, a high penetration of renewables can reduce the intensity of blackouts and vulnerability to extreme weather, according to a 2024 peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy. And, in general, a portfolio of energy-generation resources is more reliable than dependence on only a few sources.
“Reliability is really not a characteristic of a certain technology,” said Diane Cherry, MAREC Action’s deputy director. “And so taking things out of the ‘all-of-the-above’ is a problem.”
SB 294’s perspective on what counts as clean energy is even more questionable than its definition of “reliability.”
Under the legislation, natural gas is called “clean energy,” and language in the bill could potentially even count some coal plants as clean. Meanwhile, solar and wind are only implied to be clean, by way of the bill’s reference to a federal law that deems them so. Nuclear power, which is carbon-free when generated but produces radioactive wastes before and after that point, is also dubbed “clean.”
The definition of “affordable energy source” likewise diverges from the common meaning of those words.
Data released by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie last October shows land-based solar and wind having lower average lifetime costs, called their “levelized cost,” compared with those of other types of power. Storage costs have also dropped substantially since 2020, and will likely fall even more.
Yet “the bill seems to want energy that is cheaper than renewable energy, which really does not exist,” Solomon said.
Ultimately, consumers would pay under the legislation, at a time when utility bills are already rising fast. Failure to add more clean energy sources to the PJM Interconnection region will cost the average Ohio customer roughly $6,500 more by 2035 than they would otherwise pay, American Clean Power reported in a Feb. 6 fact sheet.
Overall, SB 294 adds uncertainty for the industry and investors at a time when they want to build projects, Cherry said. Many companies are under the gun to start construction by July 4 or place projects in service by the end of 2027 in order to get federal tax credits.
The bill also does not mention energy storage, which can require permits from the power siting board. Pairing storage with renewables can raise their capacity factor.
“Energy storage will be increasingly critical to grid reliability and cost control,” said Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, calling for the bill to be amended to include storage so that the board “has the full toolbox to evaluate projects that can deliver reliability without increasing fuel-price volatility or long-term customer costs.”
For their part, representatives of ALEC and the Heartland Institute gave proponent testimony on the bill last fall.
Both are “among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there that have been funded by fossil fuel interests,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute. Yet they also “claim to be totally free-market and libertarian,” he added, an ironic point given the bill’s potential to distort the market in favor of fossil fuels.
To that end, SB 294 “will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers,” said Janine Migden-Ostrander, who formerly served as the Ohio consumers’ counsel and is a fellow at the Pace Energy and Climate Center. “The legislature should not be deciding this. Let the market decide. If projects are uneconomical, they will not be built.”
