MOTHER JONES – Politics | Politics & Government

On July 31, in the final days of the North American leg of her tour, Ariana Grande released the music video for “Petal,” her newest single from an album of the same name. The video instantly reignited the years-long discourse over Grande’s body into something of a new low, with many presenting the video as irrefutable evidence that the singer is suffering from an eating disorder. Reactions to those opinions, by turns emotional and censorious, have been intense. They revealed questions about a public unable to cope collectively with a woman’s body. Are such comments inherently sexist? Do well-meaning instructions warning us to refrain from speculation ever have exceptions? What does it mean to express “concern” for someone in the public eye whom we don’t personally know? How does the frenzied discourse land for people with eating disorders? I reached out to Dr. Rebecca Boswell, a director at Penn Medicine Princeton’s Center for Eating Disorders, to explain the complications of navigating these fraught conversations, and what patients with eating disorders often hear when a celebrity’s weight makes headlines. There’s been intense debate about the politics of talking about people’s bodies. On one hand, such commentary is often sexist; we aren’t privy to larger dynamics that may be going on with someone. But do we have a responsibility to acknowledge that some appearances may not be healthy? Many things can be true at the same time, and there’s truth in all sides of this debate. The media has a long history of idealizing and visually showcasing thin bodies in a way that can be extremely harmful to young, vulnerable people and to folks with eating disorder histories or active eating disorders. We know that media coverage and celebrity coverage can play a role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders, and that it’s a major risk factor for the development of body image concerns. “Every time there’s a media story about someone losing weight or being on a GLP one, therapists hear about it.” That context makes it important to have responsible reporting around other people’s bodies, especially because so much of this discourse centers around women and women’s bodies. It’s a bit of a Goldilocks phenomenon: What’s too hot? What’s too cold? What’s too big? What’s too small? That can leave folks feeling like there’s no right way to exist in a body. That being said, when… [TheTopNews] Read More.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how elder care services will be devastated by the end of the Temporary Protected Status program that has offered legal status to about 350,000 Haitians living in the US, many of them healthcare workers. Since then, I’ve heard some harrowing anecdotes from sources following the Supreme Court decision to end the TPS program, and President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to target Haitian immigrants. Real estate agents report that many in the community are considering selling their properties or placing another relative on the title of their homes. The Haitian American Chamber of Commerce of Florida told me that employers are reluctantly letting go of employees now that their work permits are no longer valid.  As several immigration policy experts explained recently, Haitian TPS holders will either try to remain in the US as undocumented immigrants or find another pathway to legal status. Many will likely be deported. But there’s another option many TPS holders are considering: voluntarily returning to the island. In recent years, the country has faced growing instability due to gang violence that has ravaged much of Haiti, including the capital of Port-au-Prince. The US Department of State has warned Americans to avoid travel to the country, citing armed conflict between these gangs, the risk of kidnappings and other violent crimes, and a ban on US commercial flights to the main airport in Port-au-Prince after several planes were struck by gunfire. But in more rural communities, building a life is still possible, MarieGuerda Nicolas, a Haitian American psychology professor at the University of Miami and co-founder of Ayiti Community Trust, told me. For many Haitians, they may prefer to leave the US on their own terms instead of living under the growing fear of deportation. MarieGuerda Nicolas, a psychologist, counsels Haitians returning to the island from the US. Photo courtesy of MarieGuerda Nicolas Nicolas has been thinking about creating options for returning Haitians for years. When thousands of Haitians were deported during the Biden administration, Ayiti Community Trust partnered with several organizations in the US and Haiti to create a program that would assist them in safely and compassionately returning to the island. Called Ayiti Home Link, the program is basically a case management system that assists in accessing employment, housing, and other community resources. There’s also a resource guide that helps them navigate the nation’s bureaucracy—think driver’s licenses and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson. We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The ­emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants. Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-­profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war. A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign ran a terrifying 60-second advertisement. It opens with a three-year-old girl in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting to ten. Then, a man’s voice begins a countdown, and a nuclear explosion fills the screen. The advertisement only aired once, but roughly 100 million people saw it. The message was clear: Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger who would put American children in danger and bring nuclear armageddon. Johnson won in a landslide, and the daisy video became America’s most infamous attack ad. Now, a Super PAC acting on behalf of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senatorial campaign is using an AI-generated, Frankensteined version of Johnson’s video to push a different message. In this version, instead of being wiped out by a nuclear bomb, the daisy girl—resurrected via generative AI—lies on an operating table in front of an AI-generated version of Texas Representative James Talarico. “She dreams of growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother,” a narrator intones. “The trans industry preys on confused children. Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries.” The Talarico campaign has stated that “James does not support gender reassignment surgery for minors,” and that “this AI deep fake ad is flat out lying.” It’s not the only AI advertisement Paxton’s allies have produced this cycle, nor is it the first designed to attack Talarico’s support for transgender youth. Another advertisement, which ran in June, shows an AI-generated James Talarico dancing in a dress, singing a parody version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music” reworked to be about giving girls hormones “til they grow mustaches.” Paxton has built his brand on ridiculing trans youth and making it as difficult as possible for them to access medical care. In May, he even took time during his runoff victory speech to call Talarico’s defense of trans youth “weird.” This $10 million ad buy, though, might be the Paxton campaign’s most egregious attack yet. The ad was developed by the American Principles Project, one of the earliest groups to push anti-trans laws. Their ultimate goal, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported, is to go beyond banning gender-affirming care for children and outlaw medical care for trans people of all ages. As the group’s president, Terry Schilling, admitted last year, he and his allies are starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.” The… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Opposing data center construction is one of the most popular positions a candidate can possibly take right now—and those who fail to do so are starting to lose elections. Will Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement cofounder who ran for Congress in Michigan’s Seventh District, won his primary on Tuesday. In his first major TV ad, Lawrence aimed at “tech billionaires” who he said want to turn Michigan’s farms into data centers that will “jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.” Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, used an under-construction OpenAI data center as the backdrop for a rally. “Until we protect local communities from the power of corrupting money and politics, we’re going to continue to see projects like this get pushed,” El-Sayed said.   Justin Pearson, a progressive candidate in Memphis who made fighting back against xAI’s data center construction a centerpiece of his campaign, just won his Congressional primary, too.  “Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a recent press conference. Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”  But the data center backlash isn’t strictly a Democratic-party issue. It draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among Democrats.  That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act. Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district. As the industry group Data Center Watch reported in 2025, 55 percent of politicians who have taken public anti-data-center stances are Republicans, who often raise concerns about tax incentives and energy grid strain, as opposed to focusing on environmental concerns. About seven in ten Americans now oppose the idea of a data center being built near them. Even in staunchly red states like Texas and Utah, politicians like Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller are warning those who won’t act on data centers that they might just… [TheTopNews] Read More.