Ian Gordon

@idgordon.bsky.social

19483 Followers 573 Following

Editorial director for teams and coverage, @MotherJones.com. Immigration, Latin America, sports, and serial commas. Dadfluencer. Work: igordon@motherjones.com Signal: idgordon.325 Proton Mail: idgordon@proton.me

Mother Jones March/April 2018 cover image, depicting a White House with smokestacks belching black smoke on its roof and a polluted fountain in the foreground. Trump can be seen in a second-floor window, looking out at the contaminated landscape.
Screenshot that reads, "The meeting broke up without a decision — a vague consensus to keep thinking about it. But it had been clarifying in its own way. Even after the administration’s posture had helped escalate tensions in Minnesota, even with the blowback mounting, the vice president and Mr. Miller were still searching for a reason to put federal troops on American streets."
Screenshot from story that reads: "The release of the autopsy raises as many questions as it answers. Why is there no discussion of Palestine or Israel? Was Rivera told not to include them, or did he leave them out of his own accord? Neither option is flattering to Democrats. In the former, they are still in denial—trying to paper this over won’t make it go away. In the latter, they still can’t pick the right person for the job at hand."
18"ish Farmington River holdover (?) brown trout, in my landing net
Screenshot from text: When we took part in a peaceful protest here, one guard here told us that they were going to charge all of us with crimes for obstructing the law and then separate all the fathers and send them to a prison if we ever did another protest. They also said they were going to use the cameras to identify who was participating in the protests. After hearing these threats, we felt overwhelmed with fear. —33-year-old father of a four-year-old girl, on their 49th day at Dilley (February 11)
In the letter on the left, a 9-year-old writes, “Please help me get out of here. I want to study, I want to be free with my sister,” with the words “freedom” and “help” above her drawing. On the right, she writes, “We’ve been here four months but for me and my sister it seems like a year.”
Screenshot of a story from The Athletic with the headline, "Is hating Duke falling out of style in college basketball?"
Screenshot from text: We are scared to ask for anything, because the officers start threatening us that they’ll put us in different detention centers and put our children in foster care…It feels like we were in fascist Germany, and it feels like they are going to put gas into the room and just let us die. —Father of 4-year-old boy, 11-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy, on their 45th day at Dilley
Screenshot from text: There is not a school here. There is a place for the children to go for an hour where the teachers seem to be trained to get information out of them about their immigration cases rather than teach them. One of my daughter’s friends told her that the homework was to write a story about why she was scared to go back to her country. That is not healthy for my daughter or any of the kids to write about. The questions about immigration they ask the kids during class are not proper. What does ICE have to do with math? —31-year-old mother of 9-year-old girl, on their 46th day at Dilley
Screenshot from text: There was recently a measles outbreak at the detention center where we were “quarantined” for about 20 days. They did nothing to help reduce the spread of this. We were not even given masks to help prevent us from getting sick. We were also not put in isolation; it was business as normal. The only thing they did in those 20 days was check some people’s temperature using the same thermometer without even cleaning it before putting it on others’ faces directly. It almost felt like they were intentionally trying to infect us. —Mother of 16-year-old boy, on their 47th day at Dilley
Screenshot from text: After being at Dilley, [my 13-year-old son] Carlos became anxious. He couldn’t sleep—he began to suffer from nightmares and insomnia. He was waking up 5 times during the night yelling for me every night. Carlos also began to pee himself in bed. Carlos has been wetting the bed at night for the last 12 days…[The psychiatrist] prescribed pills for Carlos. I do not know the name of the pills. They are to relax him and help him sleep better. But these pills are affecting him a lot because now he sleeps all day. Today, for example, I had to wake him up to bring him for this meeting and it was already late morning. Before he started taking the pills, Carlos woke up at a normal time in the morning. Since [the psychiatrist] gave him this prescription, he sleeps until 11 unless I wake him up. Even the caregivers come to give papers or meds and he is sleeping. One time, the caregivers found him asleep on the floor. They thought he was hiding, but he was sleeping. I often have to wake him up so he can go have lunch…I just want my son to be okay. I don’t want him to be over medicated or to be suffering from insomnia. I want him to be a normal child. —31-year-old mother of 3-year-old girl and 13-year-old boy, on their 19th day at Dilley
Screenshot from text: It is impossible to get good rest here. The guards check on you every 20 minutes. One guard in particular comes into our room every 20 minutes and says exactly the same sentence. He wakes us up—it doesn’t matter if my children are sleeping or I am sleeping. He comes in and says “Hi my name is ___. If you need anything contact me. I am checking that everything is okay with you.” Every 20 minutes. Now it just feels like a mockery, and he is just coming in to make it impossible for us to get any rest. —33-year-old mother of 8- and 10-year-old boys, on their 24th day at Dilley
I have been served raw meat at Dilley. I noticed this when I was cutting into it. Another person was served raw meat, but you didn’t have to cut into it to see how raw it was. Another person said they found worms in her beans. I stopped eating the beans since then. One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood. Another woman had to take antibiotics for an infection she got from the food being served to us here at Dilley. —49-year-old mother, on her 63rd day at Dilley
Screenshot from the story: They say the water is drinkable, but it’s not. We are all without drinking water. It has a fake smell, like perfume or lotion. Maybe it’s chlorine, I don’t know. If you drink it, your stomach hurts so badly. More than anything, I worry for the kids. If you don’t have money, you can’t buy bottled water from the store. Then, you just don’t drink water. —26-year-old mother of 8-year-old girl, on their 17th day at Dilley
Screenshot from story that reads: Ms. Huerta struggles to reconcile the Cesar Chavez she knew, who inspired so many and achieved so much, and the man who assaulted her and publicly humiliated her. She said she was unaware of any sexual abuse of teenage girls. Moments after some of that abuse was described to her, Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing. (Last sentence highlighted by me)
Screenshot of Wordle Bot saying it’d have solved the puzzle in one guess
NYT’s Spelling Bee game with the word “incel” played—and a “not in word list” result
Screenshot of two stories from the UNC homepage about Robertson scholars taking on the basketball traditions of their rivals
Screenshot from post: Part 2: El Mencho is Dead. Now what? Now, for the regular readers who are used to my usual doom and gloom, let’s get into the analysis of what happens now that El Mencho has met Santa Muerte. Imagine three scenarios after a cartel leader’s death: A leadership succession occurs, and everything stays the same. The cartel divides, and violence worsens The cartel is defeated, and the situation becomes more secure. Scenario C never seems to happen in Mexico. In contrast, you might (but only might) argue that the killing of the FARC leadership in Colombia in the late 2000s or the take down of the Shining Path leadership in Peru in the 1990s made things better, but those were better defined as ideological insurgencies than profit-motivated criminal groups. When the violent gangs are motivated by money, removing the leaders doesn’t change the incentives for them to be violent.
NYT headline that reads: "Bench Presses, Pull-Ups…Kid Rock? The White House Had a Very Manly Week."
Screenshot reading: During the last legislative session, Republican leaders created an immigrant enforcement office and declared that public records from the agency would remain confidential, including programs funded with federal tax dollars. This year’s legislation will require teachers, judges, social workers, and others to report undocumented immigrants to ICE and the state’s immigration division. Schools could also be required to verify immigration status for children attending school and either exclude them or charge tuition if they are undocumented. Another bill would allow state troopers to check the immigration status of out-of-state drivers passing through the state. And state or local officials who share information about ICE officers will face a felony charge and removal from office, an apparent response to Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s release of public documents naming some of the ICE agents involved in the operation last May.
Screenshot that reads: …In one instance, a trooper pulling over a car with four Latino men in it says to the ICE agent next to him, “This might fill us up. They’re definitely not English speakers.” On a separate occasion, a trooper runs a license before immediately handing it to an ICE agent. “Check him, he doesn’t speak any English,” he says. Yet another trooper tells an ICE agent in a different video, “Nolensville’s always gonna be good,” referring to a road that runs through an area with immigrant-owned businesses. There’s also footage of a highway trooper and ICE agent commandeering a Nashville police officer’s traffic stop after noticing that the driver is Latino. When the ICE agent asks whether Nashville police are aware of the operation, the trooper answers, “They have no idea."
Screenshot reading: Putting all this together, the results are clear. Moderation used to help candidates in past decades, but in the Trump era, a candidate’s ideological moderation has no consistent, measurable effect on their vote share. Moderation as a strategy hit its ceiling in 2024. With moderates already dominating the battlefield in every competitive district, the potential gains from moving further to the center were exhausted. Still, Democrats made their wager: from the presidential nominee down to local candidates, they fully deployed the popularist strategy of moderate, “kitchen table” messaging. The result? A Republican trifecta. The party bet on moderation, but the strategy, on its own, proved unable to meet the moment. The record of who actually wins and loses reinforces the point. Of the twenty-two Democratic incumbents who lost competitive seats between 2016 and 2024, twenty-one were moderates—only one was a progressive.
Screenshot from article that reads: Her antics were a problem well before airportgate. During her first term, staffers say Mace would command them to bring her liquor after midnight to keep parties going at her home, which is technically an abuse of her office according to House rules. “Look, when I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,”a former staffer claimed of incidents they recalled going back to 2021. When they weren’t buying booze for her, they were doing her housework, according to former staffers. They say she made her aides clean multiple properties she was renting out on Airbnb instead of paying for a maid. On Election Night in 2022, for example, Mace instructed aides to spiff up her $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms for a watch party, according to a former staffer with direct knowledge. She would routinely do the same when she rented out her Washington townhouse, according to the same source and other Mace alumni I spoke to, including another former staffer assigned to do the cleaning. She was obsessed with monitoring her reputation online. In addition to reportedly having her staff create burner accounts to defend her, Mace allegedly instructed a staffer to go on Reddit forums about the “hottest women in Congress” to boost her standing in the rankings and comment where needed. Mace was “very adamant” about getting the staffer to upvote any posts about the congresswoman and her attractiveness, according to a second former staffer.
A sign reading "FREE SNOW" pops out of a snowed-in front yard in Connecticut
“She behaved horribly,” Mr. Trump said. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over —” We told the president the videos on social media were unclear. “I’ll play the tape for you right now,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump’s aide Natalie Harp brought a laptop over to the Resolute Desk to show us what he said would be evidence of the woman’s wrongdoing. Before the video began, Mr. Trump acknowledged the tragic nature of the shooting. “With all of it being said, no, I don’t like that happening,” he said, before pivoting to his common refrain of criticizing illegal immigration.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which details major trafficking organizations, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual World Drug Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do the same. But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Mr. Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.
I think back to the vigil I went to on Sunday at a local park, when it seemed like the authorities had the suspect in custody. In that moment, I saw what looked like the very beginnings of a community healing. Hundreds of bundled-up people stood in the park, snow flurries drifting off the trees, listening to speeches, a few singers, or simply hugging or standing quietly. But now the city has retreated back into itself. Downtown looks like an empty movie set. Parking anywhere is a breeze. The governor canceled the annual event that opens to the community the state house and its holiday decorations, and additional police were sent to local schools. Everywhere from the mall to the convention center and even the zoo are adding security. There is virtually no one on the sidewalks in my neighborhood, save for the occasional dog on a bathroom break or a person scurrying from their car into the house. With people unable to gather to process and heal, they’re instead congregating online, watching city officials’ daily press conferences and obsessing in text threads about the crumbs of information the public has about the shooter. Everyone is trying to find meaning when there isn’t any, about why this happened, who is responsible, and what the future holds. “I go into the classroom to teach in the morning and try to reassure my students that they are safe,” texted one friend, a fellow Brown alum living in Providence and a teacher at a local school. “But I don’t fully believe my own words.”
According to a sealed motion filed in court that Constantinescu posted to X and was reported on by the Houston Chronicle, lawyers have told the court that Constantinescu has begun to threaten the case’s prosecutors, calling them from multiple phone numbers in the middle of the night, offering to pay his X followers thousands of dollars for compromising information on the prosecutors, and even threatening the lawyers and their children—saying he would “choose violence” and “destroy” them.
Morstatter said that crypto pump-and-dump schemes often follow a pattern: Influencers target smaller or less known coins because their prices are easier to influence. Then they use their own accounts to generate enthusiasm about the coin with frequent and positive posts. That’s what Constantinescu seems to have done with $ZACK, he says. Multiple reports from crypto researchers have outlined similar trends when it comes to memecoins. Alexander outlined a similar pattern: Influencers announce the coin after “having already secured a significant number of those coins for themselves and their friends…And then they say this thing’s going to the moon.” Not long after, they seek someone outside their circle—“who looks like an outside, independent third party”—to say the same thing.
Several days later, $ZACK’s price began to falter again—going from about 5 cents to almost half of that within a week. On social media, Constantinescu and his followers upped the ante, tagging Pulte in dozens of tweets about the coin. One X user called Pulte “the spiritual vice president” of $ZACK, and soon other users thanked him for holding his $ZACK and “believing in us.” About two weeks later, Pulte tweeted that he had bought even more $ZACK that day, even as the price had sunk. The implication was that he was a believer. Again, the price went up.
Poppy Alexander, an attorney who specializes in matters that involve cutting-edge financial frauds, including those involving cryptocurrency, said that niche memecoins are almost always pump-and-dump schemes: “The only people who make money are the people who usually get in before the coin is even launched.” A report from crypto-tracking company Solidus Labs published this year echoes this assessment: It found that 98.6 percent of the memecoins launched on the exchange where $ZACK was started were pump-and-dump schemes.
The memecoin at issue, $ZACK, was backed by a man who goes by the X handle @MrZackMorris, after the popular main character of the 1990s TV show Saved by the Bell. His real name is Edward Constantinescu, and along with seven other defendants, he was accused in 2022 by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors of at least $114 million through a form of stock manipulation known as a pump-and-dump scheme, in which a person spreads misleading positive information about a stock to raise its price, only to then sell off their own holdings at a profit—often leading to the collapse of the share price and financial pain for the remaining investors. A year and a half after this case began, Pulte took to Twitter to announce that he was investing in $ZACK—even as Constantinescu’s dogged online promotion of the coin closely resembled the relentless stock hyping that had gotten him into legal trouble in the first place.
“Their theory of change involves cutting off all support to Cuba,” said Juan S. Gonzalez, who was President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s top White House aide for Western Hemisphere affairs. “Under this approach, once Venezuela goes, Cuba will follow.” Mr. Rubio has hinted at the idea in public, telling NPR in early 2019 that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said. In private, he has been more direct. As a senator, Mr. Rubio routinely discussed Mr. Maduro’s support for Havana in detail with his colleagues, as well as with U.S. officials and foreign diplomats, according to a former Senate aide who was often present for the discussions. The former aide said Mr. Rubio had “articulated a vision” in which splitting Venezuela from Cuba would have disastrous consequences for the Cuban government. “It all goes back to Cuba — anything he can do to weaken the regime in Cuba,” said another U.S. official who was in briefings with Mr. Rubio during the first Trump administration.
Screenshot of lede that reads, "Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a "creepy fetish for Asian women."
A few months later, when JP Morgan recommended that investors view the company’s stock with caution, emails show that MPT’s top executives circulated a lengthy list of analysts they believed were somehow connected to each other. They named five different investment funds and investors, and the many possible ways they were “connected”—to each other, to a Journal reporter, to Hedgeye, to Viceroy, even to liberal megadonor George Soros. And they wondered if anyone in their “army of advisors” had an in with regulators. Included on that email chain was exactly that kind of connection, someone who used to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney, who also had been President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, was helping to run a consulting firm called Actum. Leaked emails show that MPT brought Actum on to help it “combat” what they saw as people conspiring to target the company. To counter their criticisms, Actum drafted a white paper praising MPT, calling it a company “investing in the future of health care and communities.” (Actum did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)
Anonymous Twitter accounts started to follow and harass him, asking if he had security and even tweeting that “his life [was] in danger.” Simone’s company, Hedgeye, grew concerned about this safety and provided him with enhanced security, but neither they nor Simone ever figured out who was behind the accounts. One tweet even warned that if he didn’t stop reporting and tweeting about MPT, “he could end up like Daphne,” an allusion to the murder of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed after reporting on a Steward hospital deal in Malta in 2017. 
Redacted email that reads: Hi XXXX, Great to see you earlier. As discussed, please find attached: (1) Rob Simone background and (2) WS' article, featuring Apollo Global Management Inc. To reiterate, our aim is to: 1. Understand Rob Simone's: (1) intentions regarding MPW, (2) whether this is a long-term investigation project for him or just temporarily, (3) what else is he planning to publish on MPW and (4) whether this is his own interest or past to him from his boss? 2. Identify who is behind the Twitter account: @BigRiverCapita 1 Linked to the above, please let me know what time on Wednesday you would like to speak. Many thanks and all the best, XXXX [[Audere letterhead in the signature]]
“I’m tired of this guy,” Aldag wrote, adding that the former employees Spegele had cited anonymously were “absolutely fake.” Then he called his team to action: “We already know what he is going to say and I refuse to let him tell the story…We need to devise a plan to be proactive in our storytelling outside of the WSJ.” He told his PR advisers that if this wasn’t a project they could take on, he imagined they could find other companies to help. “Ladies,” he wrote, “it’s time we go on the offensive.”
The Journal published Spegele’s piece in February 2022. It claimed that MPT was quietly infusing hundreds of millions into Steward through complex loans and other means, enabling its hospitals to continue to pay rent. This meant that MPT’s largest tenant was actually struggling, which boded poorly for MPT, as well. Yet the article also pointed out executives’ excessive spending on things like Aldag’s multimillion-dollar salary and the regular use of the company’s private jets. Investors started emailing and calling MPT, and its stock price began to slide.
AI image of a crowd with two identical smiling women in different rows
An AI image of a crowd with two of the same dude with a red flannel hat and red ski cap
AI image of identical twins with identical clothes
Another AI image of a basketball fan with disturbing markings
AI image of a basketball fan with disturbing markings all over