MoJo Wire

Quick hits from the Mother Jones newsroom

  • Florida Man Goes to Wyoming to Cancel His GOP Colleague

    January 29, 2021

    Michael Ciaglo/Getty

    Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) thinks cancel culture has gone much, much too far. Though the definition of cancel culture is extremely elastic and typically only deployed in bad faith attacks, Republicans have created a vast ecosystem of complaining about the horrors of liberals “canceling” others for the crime of merely speaking their minds. But the term is so thrilling, it has now morphed into canceling a conservative who dares to have a different opinion or, apparently, when Democrats demand accountability for inciting an insurrection. If Donald Trump, as the president of the United States, can’t incite a deadly attack on the Capitol after lying for months about the election being stolen from him without being canceled, are any of us safe from cancellation? 

    As Gaetz tweeted about a proceeding that is designed to hold presidents accountable for crimes and is enshrined in the Constitution:

    Then, just three days after lamenting cancel culture run amok in those seven, eloquent words, Gaetz boarded a plane to excoriate one of his Republican colleagues for having the nerve to disagree with him, and, of course, the former president.

    Earlier this month, after then-president Donald Trump encouraged a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol building, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) joined nine other members of her party and voted to impeach him. To Gaetz, who presumably loves the marketplace of ideas that has been so undermined by cancel culture, Cheney’s vote was beyond the pale. So he decided to take the battle to Cheney’s home state. 

    Other Trump loyalist GOP House members, like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), had already begun making moves to do their own Congressional version of canceling the third-term Wyoming representative. They attempted to strip Cheney of her leadership roles in the party soon after the House voted to impeach Trump a second time. But a Florida representative flying across the country solely for the purpose of rallying against his colleague for breaking with Trump is absolutely farcical. And alas, this transparently hypocritical move probably won’t inspire Republicans to stop complaining about cancel culture. But it’s extremely instructive in figuring out what cancel culture really is: Basically anything Matt Gaetz doesn’t like. 

  • AOC to Cruz: You Almost Had Me Murdered

    January 28, 2021

    Caroline Brehman/ZUMA

    If you, like me, have been struggling to muster interest in the GameStop news cycle, I’m here to tell you that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has given us a reason to care.

    After Ted Cruz attempted to get cute and show some rare agreement with the New York congresswoman by joining her criticism of the trading app Robinhood for blocking certain GameStop trades, Ocasio-Cortez promptly told Cruz to fuck off. While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said the move is unfair to rank and file investors, the Texas senator had a prominent role in backing pro-Trump demands to overturn the election, a role that gave succor to the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol. Since the January 6 riot, Ocasio-Cortez has been candid about the trauma she faced, telling followers in an Instagram Live that she thought she “was going to die” in the attack.

    In doing so, Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet went beyond one of her trademark social media dunks, deploying a clear directness that offers a stark contrast to the Republican party’s current efforts to obfuscate what they did this month: immediately following a murderous attack on the Capitol, an insurrection their party’s leader had directly incited, a majority of House Republicans, joined by prominent senators like Cruz, went back inside to deliver exactly what the mob wanted.

    Keep Ocasio-Cortez’s straightforward account in mind, as Republicans are all but certain to keep misrepresenting the facts of the insurrection throughout Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.

    And with that, feel free to go back and join me in avoiding news about GameStop.

  • The Best Boston Accents in Politics

    January 28, 2021

    Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty

    “It’s a big day for Boston in the briefing room,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a press conference yesterday introducing two Red Sox fans: former Massachusetts senator and current climate envoy John Kerry, and national climate adviser Gina McCarthy.

    “It’s a big day for Boston every day,” McCarthy said, before launching into a speech tinged with the most charming Dorchester accent I’ve ever heard.

    As a Massachusetts native, I have a soft spot for the Bay State, and I find those dropped “r”s and broad “a”s particularly endearing. The Boston accent is a dying art form, after all. Since there’s a dearth of authentic Boston accents out there (John Kerry’s weird Brahmin thing does not count), I decided to compile a list of the politicians most likely to ask where they could find a bubbler in the halls of the Capitol.

    Paul Tsongas

    Paul Tsongas, who served as both a congressman and a senator from Massachusetts, also won the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary against Bill Clinton. That could be because of the various scandals dogging Clinton at the time: reports of an alleged extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers, accusations of his having dodged the Vietnam War draft, and outrage over his refusal, as governor of Arkansas, to stop the execution of a disabled Black man. Or, it could be because Tsongas talked like he just swung by the packie.

    Tip O’Neill

    Tip O’Neill, a Democrat from Cambridge, was the 47th speaker of the House. And speak he did—exactly the way you’d guess a guy named Tip O’Neill representing Boston would.

    Gerry Connolly

    Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) caught me by surprise when, during the House vote on Trump’s second impeachment, he addressed Nancy Pelosi as “Madam Speakah.” What was a congressman from Virginia doing with a Boston accent?

    Well, it turns out there’s a strong Boston contingent in Virginia politics, and they all kept their accents. Lo and behold, Connolly was born in Boston, supports the Patriots and the Sox, and vacations on Cape Cod. And, until 2015, he represented Virginia alongside fellow heavily accented Bostonian Democrat Jim Moran. Who knows, maybe “Dirty Water” was really about the Chesapeake Bay.

    John Kelly

    A good accent does not make someone a good person. John Kelly is many things: Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump’s former Homeland Security secretary, retired Marine Corp general, Bostonian. His accent is subtle, but it’s there. Here he is talking about North Korea just as easily as if he were talking about the North End.

    Marty Walsh

    Boston’s mayor is required by law to have a wicked good Boston accent, and the successor to the larger-than-life Mayor Menino had big shoes to fill. Luckily, your new Secretary of Labor—and the star of one of last year’s best films, City Hall—can’t even spit out his own name (Mahty) without giving away his place of birth.

    Ed Markey

    Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) famously wove his own Boston accent into a Senate primary campaign video that took down Joe Kennedy III. The ad, featuring Nine Inch Nails’ covers of “Old Town Road” and “All Along the Watchtower,” flipped the famous JFK quote on its head and brought Markey’s Boston accent to new memeable heights. Listen in particular to the way he says, “are,” “organize,” and “arms.” Kennedy, descended from the most famous Boston Brahmin family in history, had nothing on this Malden-raised milkman’s son.

  • Montana Lawmakers Really Want to Force Women to Share Parental Rights With Their Rapists

    January 27, 2021

    Antonio Guillem/Getty

    This week, Montana lawmakers are considering a bill to amend the state’s child custody laws. A provision in the not-so-fine-print: “Alleged sexual intercourse without consent resulting in the birth of a child is not independently grounds for terminating the parent-child legal relationship.” To put it in laymen’s terms, mothers could be forced to co-parent with their rapists. 

    The bill is expected to be heard by Montana’s House Judiciary Committee on Friday. But even if it doesn’t go anywhere, Montana’s current laws require an offender to have been convicted of sexual assault before parental rights can be terminated. As Mother Jones reported back in 2019: 

    As many as 32,000 women get pregnant through rape every year, and at least one-third decide to raise the baby instead of getting an abortion or choosing adoption. But because more than a third of all states do not terminate an assailant’s custody rights unless he’s been convicted of felony sexual assault, the women who make that choice can be forced to co-parent with their rapist. Even in states that make it easier to deny rapists’ parental rights, loopholes abound, and prosecutors and judges have broad discretion in these cases.

    Until 2015, the majority of states allowed rapists to maintain custody of their children, legally binding them to the child’s mother, their victim. That year, the Obama administration encouraged states to pass laws terminating parental rights if there was “clear and convincing evidence” of rape, no conviction required. Only about half of the country has implemented such standards. (Montana is not one of them.)

    “Personally having to have contact with this person after what happened was terrifying, but now having to share my daughter with no supervision is worse,” one survivor wrote in a statement to Nebraska’s state Judiciary Committee in 2017. “I was told that it is in the best interest of my child to have a father in her life. And what makes this rapist safe to be a father?”

    You can read the original Mother Jones story, about yet another way states are attempting to ban abortions and control women’s bodies, lives, and futures, here.

  • 12 Facts About Sen. Bob Menendez’s Marriage Proposal

    January 27, 2021

    Michael Reynolds/Getty

    Update, September 22, 2023: Senator Robert Menendez and his wife, Nadine, have been charged with taking bribes—including in the form of cash and gold bars—to aid three New Jersey men and the Egyptian government in a scheme involving halal meat, military officials, and a no-show job. The prosecutors allege, as my colleague Dan Friedman reports, that Menendez’s wife ”worked to introduce Egyptian intelligence and military officials to” the senator “for the purpose of establishing and solidifying a corrupt agreement.” In a statement on the prosecution, the senator said officials had “misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office.” He added, “On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

    The post has been updated to reflect there is a 12th interesting thing about Menendez’s proposal—that his marriage was later involved in a federal indictment.

    Update, October 12, 2023: In a superseding indictment, Menendez was charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent for Egypt. This post has been updated to reflect that prosecutors allege the senator offered to assist Egypt in September 2019 during a trip to India. This is the same trip on which Menendez proposed by singing a song from The Greatest Showman in front of the Taj Mahal.

    To celebrate those who got married in 2020, the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times included their “favorite” stories of how people proposed. Among them is the story of how Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey popped the question in December to his girlfriend, Nadine Arslanian, described by Politico as “an international businesswoman from Bergen County.”

    I want to list a few things about that proposal and about this story. These items are factual, according to the paper of record:

    1. Menendez “sings all the time,” according to his bride. “He sings every morning, every night, and in-between while he smokes his after-dinner cigar.”

    2. Menendez met his future wife at the IHOP in Union City, New Jersey.

    3. Menendez was introduced “by the owner” of the IHOP to his wife.

    4. Menendez was engaged five months later.

    5. Menendez and his wife visited four continents in five months and he sang to her on each trip.

    6. Menendez was “very, very hot” upon first sight, according to his wife.

    7. Menendez proposed at the Taj Mahal.

    8. Menendez stood behind his future bride at the Princess Diana bench and sang to her, as a prelude to his proposal at the Taj Mahal.

    9. Menendez—who long hinted that “a certain song” would let her know the engagement was coming—sang “Never Enough” from The Greatest Showman, the film released in 2017 in which Hugh Jackman plays P.T. Barnum, as a prelude to his proposal at the Taj Mahal.

    10. Here is the video of that moment.

    11. Despite the proposal taking place in front of the Taj freaking Mahal, the whole vibe here is so very Jersey that you wonder why Frankie Valli isn’t there

    12. In 2023, over two years after this post was published, both Menendez and his wife were charged in a federal corruption indictment for a bribery scheme involving halal meat and Egyptian military officials. In a superseding indictment, prosecutors alleged that during Menedez’s trip to India to propose—see above video of himn singing in front of Taj Mahal—the senator “offered to provide his assistance to Egypt.”