Stress Test, from Mother Jones

Anything for Selena is more than a podcast about the iconic 1990s superstar Selena Quintanilla. It’s a nine-part series about belonging itself. Journalist Maria Garcia documents her own journey as she discovers what it means to love and mourn Selena, and what her legacy can teach us about pop culture and Latinx identity today.

As a fearsomely talented singer and dancer, Selena dazzled on stage with bold red lips and large hoop earrings, wearing sparkly bustiers and tight, high-waisted pants. She mesmerized audiences in Texas and along the US-Mexico border first, then took Mexico by storm. She built a loyal fanbase across the United States and sold millions of albums worldwide. But the devotion she sparked wasn’t a simple case of celebrity. Before she was tragically killed in 1995, she had become the queen of Tejano music and culture, adored by both United States and Mexico for being unapologetically herself, as she navigated both cultures with pride—something that left a huge impression on a young Garcia. Selena’s mere existence sparked mainstream conversations about race, language, and identity.

“The podcast is truly a lifelong culmination of my quest to understand why this woman has meant so much to me and has been a profound flashpoint,” Garcia says on this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast. “I had to go back to little Maria who was new to this country, trying to figure out where she belonged.”

Today, more than 25 years later, we’re still grappling with the loss and meaning of Selena, the cross-cultural phenomenon. Just last Sunday, Selena was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 Grammys; she only received one Grammy in 1994 before her death. For older fans, This recognition brought back memories of Selena at the peak of her career, and joy to a new wave of young Selena Stans, who weren’t even born until after her death.

Anything for Selena is a collaboration between WBUR in Boston and Futuro Studios. Each episode is available in English and in Spanish. This week’s show features MoJo reporter Fernanda Echavarri in conversation with Garcia, and Futuro senior producer Antonia Cereijido.

Stacey Abrams has a name for the series of bills that just passed the Georgia state legislature: “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Abrams joins the Mother Jones Podcast to explain why your right to vote is once again under attack—perhaps more so now than it has been in generations. Donald Trump’s big election fraud lie sparked a deluge of voter suppression efforts across the country. Over the past two months, GOP legislatures have pushed 253 new voting restrictions in 43 states. Under the guise of “election integrity,” these restrictions run the gamut: enacting voter ID laws, limiting early voting, repealing no-excuse early voting, and purging voter rolls. The Roberts Supreme Court has gutted the section of the Voting Rights Act that would protect against voter suppression in states with long histories of voter discrimination. HR 1, the so-called “For the People” bill, could put crucial voting rights protections back in place. It’s the most ambitious democracy reform bill since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But right now, it remains unlikely that it will ever pass the Senate. Why? Because of the filibuster. Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman joins Jamilah King to talk through the contents of HR 1, the issues with the filibuster, and how Republicans are benefitting from minority rule to further curtail democracy. The 2020 election might be over, but voting rights are still very much at risk.

Roxane Gay is one of the most prolific and versatile writers of our generation. She’s written a best-selling collection of essays (Bad Feminist), a blockbuster memoir (Hunger), Black Panther comics, and countless essays of cultural criticism. That’s not to mention her New York Times advice column, her book of writing advice coming out in November called How to Be Heard, a YA novel, and a screenplay for Hunger. Oh, and don’t forget her podcast. Or the TV show that she runs.

How does she do it? How has she cultivated her voice over the years? How does she write things that make a difference?

Gay has distilled these lessons into a new MasterClass series called Writing for Social Change, and she joined host Jamilah King for a conversation about the project in late February. You can read a lightly edited and condensed transcript at MotherJones.com.

A new coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson has been approved. A new coronavirus variant in New York City has been identified—and is spreading. New data shows structural and racial disparities in who is receiving the vaccine, and who is still waiting in line. As the one year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic in the US approaches, we’re seeing a flurry of both hopeful and concerning developments. Kiera Butler and Edwin Rios, two Mother Jones reporters who have been on the pandemic beat for the past year, join host Jamilah King to provide much-needed context about what it all means.

Butler, a senior editor and public health reporter, explains that while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has lower efficacy rates than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, it is still highly effective at preventing the worst outcomes of coronavirus infections. “It prevents hospitalization and death 100 percent of the time,” she says.

While millions of vaccine dosages have been shipped out this week, and vaccination rates are on the rise, there are concerning reports of low vaccination rates among communities of color—the very the same communities disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic itself. Black, Latino and Native Americans have been dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of white Americans. Those disparities widen in younger age groups. But despite the fact that Black Americans account for 16 percent of COVID deaths, they have received just six percent of the first dose roll-out. “The pandemic exacerbates preexisting inequities,” Rios says. “It's not as if those barriers kind of the barriers to access go away when the vaccine rollout starts.” In this episode, we attempt to tackle solutions to vaccine hesitancy by putting trust at the heart of the rollout.

Overflowing ICE detention centers. Families separated at the border. A multi-billion-dollar border wall. Over the course of his four-year presidency, Donald Trump used executive power to wage war on the United States’ immigration system–leaving millions of immigrants and asylum seekers in impossibly tough situations. Now, President Biden is making immigration reform a top priority. Mother Jones immigration reporters Fernanda Echavarri and Noah Lanard join Jamilah King on this week’s show to walk through the actions that Biden has undertaken during his first month in office to try to reconstruct a broken system. Biden’s slew of executive actions include: an end to the travel ban for majority-Muslim countries; halting construction of the border wall; ending new enrollments in the “Remain in Mexico” policy (officially named Migrant Protection Protocols) and starting a new system to slowly allow some asylum seekers on MPP to enter the US; an unsuccessful attempt to pause deportations for 100 days; and directing the Department of Homeland Security to form a task force to undo some of the damage caused by Trump’s family separation policy. Plus, a huge new immigration reform bill has been introduced to Congress. Trump left Biden with a Gordian knot of immigration policy to untangle. Doing so will likely take years. Lives hang in the balance.

House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin delivered a speech during Trump’s impeachment trial last week in which he made a direct appeal to reality: “Democracy needs a ground to stand upon,” he said. “And that ground is the truth." There’s a lot of demand for reckoning in America right now. Cities around the country are debating and in some cases instituting some forms of reparations for Black residents. Last June, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to establish a “United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation,” which has gained 169 co-sponsors. In December, even anchor Chuck Todd asked his guests on “Meet the Press” about the political prospects for a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The calls for a rigorous public accounting of Trump-era misdeeds reached a crescendo in the aftermath of the violent attack on the Capitol in January: the impeachment proceedings against the former president became, all of a sudden, the de facto court for establishing the reality of the 2020 election results, even as Republican lawmakers voted to acquit. It raised the fundamental question: How do we establish the truth, amid a war on truth itself? On today's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, journalists Shaun Assael and Peter Keating share their deep reporting into the history of the "truth and reconciliation" movement, here and abroad, and what we can learn from its promises and pitfalls—presenting a realistic view of their effectiveness as building blocks for reality, rather than magic bullets. “There can be no reconciliation before justice,” Keating says. Keep an eye out for their written investigation, appearing later this week at motherjones.com.

Tears on the Senate floor. Shocking footage of the insurrection. A bumbling and widely panned performance by Donald Trump’s legal team. The former president’s second impeachment has now moved to trial, and House Democrats came prepared. A little over one month after a riotous mob laid siege to the very chamber in which the trial was now taking place, Democrats presented such a damning trail of evidence that that it caused one GOP senator, Bill Cassidy, to change his vote on the trial’s constitutionality.

Mother Jones national political reporter Pema Levy joins Jamilah King from DC to recap and explain what went down on Day One. Pema explains how the House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, will set out to prove Trump responsible for the deadly attack. Meanwhile, Republican Senators are expected to try to wiggle out of the toxic political shadow of their former president by sticking to an argument that the proceedings are unconstitutional, letting Trump get off scot-free. Trump’s acquittal is all but a foregone conclusion, and the trial is expected to be an unusually swift one. But as Pema explains, what happens over the next week or so will still be incredibly consequential and perhaps even more damaging for Republicans than Trump’s first impeachment.

Stopping climate change is back on the White House agenda. President Biden came into with the most ambitious climate change plans of any administration to date. He not only promised to reverse the Trump administration's regressive climate policies, including regulatory rollbacks and a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, but also to push the United States farther on climate change action than it has ever gone before. He named climate change action as a top priority, right alongside the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, and racial justice. Rebecca Leber, Mother Jones’ environmental politics and policy reporter, joined Jamilah King on the podcast this week to talk about Biden’s executive orders and what they mean.

"That was the first time we had a president enter office saying climate was that high of an ambition," says Rebecca Leber. ""Any one of these items on their own would be huge. But the fact that we're seeing them all together is even bigger."

In his first few days in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders to get the Untied States back into the Paris agreement, to pause the lease of fossil fuel on public lands, and to establish environmental justice in multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of State, Energy, and Treasury. He issued an executive order to set up a Civilian Climate Corps. He promised to get the United States on track to conserve 30 percent of lands and oceans by 2030. He directed federal agencies to eliminate subsidies to Big Oil and invest in clean energy solutions. His actions already seem to be prompting change in US industry. General Motors (GM) announced last week that it aims to move entirely into electric vehicle manufacturing by 2035.

Trump is gone. But assessing the wreckage wrought by his lies has only just begun. Emerging, battered, from a year advising the former president, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah Birx, the former coronavirus taskforce coordinator, both agree: Trump’s embrace of disinformation and chaos made the pandemic worse. “I think if we had had the public health messages from the top right through down to the people down in the trenches be consistent, that things might have been different,” Fauci told CBS on Sunday. On Face the Nation, Birx described working around Trump, and competing with “parallel data streams coming into the White House.” In his first press conference as President Biden’s top medical adviser, Fauci described the “liberating feeling” of letting “the science speak.”

The damage done by anti-science messaging—along with self-delusion, denial, and happy talk—can’t be underestimated, says Dr. Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, epidemiologist, and author of the new book, Viral BS. It amounts to a pandemic within a pandemic. “It’s not just a pathogen that threatens our public health,” she tells MoJo’s Kiera Butler, on this week’s episode. “It’s the misinformation and disinformation about the disease, about the vaccine, about the pandemic, that can undo everything you’re trying to do in public health.”

Effective communication is the “make or break”, she says. But it’s been in short supply. “Public health agencies and other establishments have not taken the information aspects seriously for many years,” she says. And so the challenge is even tougher when it comes to encouraging Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine, especially in marginalized or underserved communities. “If you interviewed six of them, you would have six different reasons—historical, cultural, religious, all of that—for being vaccine-hesitant, so we have to meet people where they are.”

Yasmin lays out her playbook for tailoring messages across a wide range of groups during this live-streamed Mother Jones event, recorded earlier this month. You can also replay the full video on our YouTube page.

Today, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. Two weeks after an armed mob stormed the Capitol, the new president painted a picture of hope and collective effort in his inaugural address. His message sharply contrasted with former president Donald Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” speech from four years ago. “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,” Biden said in his address. “And unity is the path forward.”

DC Bureau Chief David Corn and Senior Reporter Tim Murphy joined Jamilah King for live coverage and analysis of the event. David Corn was at the Capitol, where he witnessed a very different inauguration from ones he had attended in the past. There were no large crowds, but ubiquitous face masks, heavy security, members of Congress wearing body armor, even in the midst of the traditional pomp and circumstance. The US Marine Band played their trumpets and drums, the Capitol was bedecked in huge American flags, and the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Obamas were all in attendance. President Biden said he spoke with former president Jimmy Carter, who was unable to attend. The inauguration is usually a passing of the torch, but since Trump boycotted the inauguration in a final venal, norm- busting gesture, the event had the quality of the nation turning the page and ushering in a new era. "We were literally standing where blood had been spilled, where violence had occurred just two weeks ago," says Corn on the show. "Yet democracy prevailed, she persisted as Elizabeth Warren might say, and we were here carrying out this grand tradition which has gone on for over 200 years."

Jamilah asked Tim Murphy about the historical context, including Trump’s early escape from the city and non-attendance. “He’s a deeply petty person,” says Murphy, but still there is some precedent.  “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president has to attend the inauguration, and historically that hasn’t always been the case. John Adams didn’t attend Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration. And that’s the election that brought us the peaceful transfer of power that Trump brought to an end by inciting a riot on the Capitol.”