Anna Merlan

5 days ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

On Friday, Elon Musk once again pledged to depart his role at DOGE, taking with him his bad personality, weird public behavior, complicated family life, troubled businesses, alleged regular illegal drug use, compulsive social media habits, exploding rockets, messianic conviction that he control all of earth’s resources so as to colonize Mars, and a remarkably poor track record in his brief life as a quasi-public servant.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration. “We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In the summer of 2023, Mohammad bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a 55-year-old retired teacher, was sentenced to death by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for posts he made on Twitter and YouTube, criticizing the country’s ruling family and calling for freedom for religious clerics.

2 months ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

On Tuesday, MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet of JFK researchers, including famed director Oliver Stone—succeeded admirably.