Anna Merlan

Brooklyn

Senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering disinformation, tech and extremism. Author of REPUBLIC OF LIES. Tips: [email protected]. DM for Signal.

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Articles

As ICE Raids Continue, Parts of a Vibrant City Go Empty

6 days ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

On a normal day, the lines at Angel’s Tijuana Tacos’ many locations can easily stretch down a long block, as a team of workers make tortillas by hand, shave fresh meat in front of a roaring fire, and turn out some of the city’s best food at lightning speed. For several days this month, though, the local Los Angeles-area chain’s taco stands and trucks were abruptly closed, with only one brick-and-mortar location in neighboring Orange County remaining open.
Demonstrators are trying to make sure ICE agents can’t sleep

2 weeks ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Car horns. Tambourines. Trumpets. Call-and-response chants. Wacking a spoon against a metal folding chair. Demonstrators outside Los Angeles-area hotels—where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are believed to be sleeping—are employing creative methods to keep those ICE agents awake. “No sleep for ICE” is the rallying cry, and the medium is noise.
A LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house"

2 weeks ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Los Angeles County over the weekend to protest immigration raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Optical Illusion of Elon Musk’s Fading Influence

3 weeks 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.
Trump's brain rot cabinet

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.
RFK Jr. Is using a new study on autism rates to push his anti-vaccine agenda

2 months 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.
Who’s advertising on Twitter? One of its biggest investors: Saudi Arabia

2 months 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.
The JFK Assassination Files Didn’t Have a Smoking Gun, But a Very Weird Congressional Hearing Tried to Create One

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.
What was the plan behind this fake CDC website?

Mar 24, 2025 | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation.
Election denier Michael Flynn attended Trump’s Justice Department speech

Mar 15, 2025 | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

President Donald Trump stormed into the Justice Department on Friday to give a speech that news outlets described with a grab-bag of foreboding words, including “bellicose” and “unprecedented.” In the speech, Trump railed at his political opponents, whom he described as “scum” and “thugs,” and falsely claimed, once again, that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.