Florida’s ongoing war against so-called “wokeism” has reached a new low. On Wednesday, 28 presidents of Florida’s state and community colleges announced that they would seek to eliminate policies and academic programs that are viewed as forcing a “belief in critical race theory” or subjects related to intersectionality.

“Our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed/ improved upon,” the Florida College System presidents wrote in a joint statement.

The alarming move comes weeks after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered Florida’s colleges and universities to submit comprehensive reports outlining spending data on programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory, prompting fierce condemnation that the move would pressure universities to simply cut such programs from their budgets. The request builds on Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which aims to restrict race-based teachings in Florida schools and colleges.

Speaking to WFTV 9, Jonathan Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida, said that he stopped teaching classes on racial inequality thanks to the “Stop WOKE” Act. 

“A lot of the proponents say they want to help develop critical thinking skills and not indoctrinate them, but they’re really doing the exact opposite,” Cox said. 

Soon after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in late October, the tech mogul reinstated Donald Trump’s account, which the company had shut down permanently after Trump used Twitter to help instigate the January 6 insurrection. The twice-impeached ex-president hasn’t tweeted again yet, instead sticking to posting on his own far less influential and financially shaky Truth Social platform. But he is planning to use Twitter again soon and his presidential campaign is actively seeking his reinstatement on Facebook, according to news reports this week.

As Trump eyes the White House in 2024, his desire to once again exploit social media platforms with vast reach is no mystery. A tsunami of political advertising and misinformation deployed by his 2016 campaign on Facebook was widely credited as key to that year’s election victory. He later used Twitter not only to galvanize a delusional movement to overturn his 2020 election loss but also to distract from and dominate news cycles throughout his four years in office.

Trump’s influence is comparatively tiny via Truth Social; he has under 5 million followers there, versus more than 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook. Yet, that has not prevented him from further stirring random extremist violence with lies, deranged conspiracy theories, and demonization of his alleged enemies. Trump long ago honed this incitement technique, known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. It is a destabilizing and ongoing danger to the nation—and one certain to scale back up with Trump’s return to mainstream social media.

Political violence provoked by Trump and extremist allies who now mimic his playbook has indeed continued ever since the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s banishment from Twitter and Facebook. Central to the phenomenon, of course, is the endless lie from Trumpworld that the 2020 election was supposedly stolen through fraud. (Many official investigations and court proceedings proved it was not, and Trump knew so.)

In the past few weeks, that false narrative apparently motivated a series of shooting attacks at the homes of four Democratic officials in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The alleged ringleader was 39-year-old Solomon Peña, a defeated GOP candidate for the state legislature, who, according to court documents detailed by the Washington Post, is accused of hiring several gunmen as well as participating in the drive-by attacks. No one was injured in the late-night shootings, but bullets that pierced through drywall at one house narrowly missed a state senator’s sleeping 10-year-old daughter.

There is something odd about the relationship between GOP fabulist George Santos and Andrew Intrater, a sophisticated and wealthy New York financier, Republican donor, and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Intrater was one of Santos’ top political donors. At Santos’ behest, he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos worked. And even after this company was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme that threatened Intrater’s investment, Intrater and his domestic partner continued to pour money into Santos’ political campaign. What’s the explanation for his curious and sustained support for Santos? Intrater, Mother Jones has learned, the wealthy head of a sizable investment fund—seemingly as savvy an investor as they come—has told associates that he, like others, was conned by Santos. 

The bizarre tale of Santos, the world-champion Long Island liar and conniver who’s now in Congress, has myriad subplots: his alleged criminal past in Brazil, the mysterious origins of millions of dollars he claims to have earned in the past three years, his suspicious campaign finance shenanigans, and much more. One of these involves his interactions with Intrater, who hit the headlines in 2018 for having hired Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as a business consultant after Intrater made a whopping $250,000 contribution to Trump’s inauguration committee. Intrater ran an investment business then named Columbus Nova that had deep and direct ties to Vekselberg’s Renova Group conglomerate. In April 2018, Vekselberg and the Renova Group were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for assisting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “malign activity around the globe.” After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Spanish authorities seized Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht at the request of the United States.

Intrater has been one of Santos’ most generous patrons. During Santos’ first congressional bid in 2020, Intrater and his girlfriend, Diana Pentinen, each donated the maximum amount of $5,800 to his campaign. In 2022, they went much further, sending over $67,000 to Santos’ campaign and political committees backing Santos. Though Intrater made donations to over two dozen other Republican House and Senate campaigns that year, Santos, by far, received the most support. Intrater also donated $100,000 to Rise NY PAC, a New York state political committee connected to Santos. (Santos’ sister, Tiffany, was paid by this PAC.) Pentinen donated to no federal candidates other than Santos. Intrater and Pentinen each also donated $60,829 to then-Rep. Lee Zeldin, the GOP candidate for New York governor. 

And there’s more: Intrater had a significant financial connection to Santos. 

In 2020 and 2021, Santos worked as the New York representative for a Florida-based investment firm called Harbor City Capital. But on his financial disclosure forms covering those years he listed no income from the company. (Santos, though, did receive some form of payment this firm.)

Let’s hear it for the girls who are just like other girls. I still don’t entirely “get” Taylor Swift (although Anti-Hero still made my top five in Spotify Wrapped), but I have absolutely, undeniably fallen in love with Swifties. 

Swifties are punk rock. They couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour? Looks like Ticketmaster/ LiveNation could get a blank space in their little monopoly after fans filed a lawsuit alleging Ticketmaster’s violation of California antitrust and unfair competition laws. These baddies caused such chaos trying to buy presale tickets that the Justice Department opened its own antitrust investigation. I wasn’t there, but apparently it was like Woodstock ‘99 in the ticket queue—true, utter madness. 

Also, there was the time they streamed her album so aggressively that they fully made history by making her the first artist to hold all top ten songs on the Billboard Hot 100, meaning there were no male artists in the top ten for the first time ever!!! While that is of course another big record for Swift, we have to give cred to the girls, gays, and theys that put her there. (I will own my place in this contingent. Midnights really bangs.)

It was a great year for holding artists accountable for the impact they have on cultural dialogue, and in this I cannot give credit to Swifties alone. Fans and fat-positive activists called on Swift to change to a fatphobic scene in her “Anti-Hero” video. The video has been edited, but Swift has not apologized—unlike Beyoncé and Lizzo, who were called out by their fans for ableist language in songs they released earlier this year. Both Queen Bey and Lizzo fully took accountability. 

I’m still on the fence about Swift herself. Her music is fun. I also think she’s made a career of white-woman victimhood and is typically late to use her cultural influence to speak up on issues like Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights. 

When the Biden administration announced in late summer that they would be cancelling $10,000 of student debt per borrower, Americans had thoughts. Some cried tears of joy on TikTok, others went off online with assorted criticisms: The administration should cancel more debt, or less debt, or tighten relief eligibility, or loosen it, and also deal with the root cause of the problem—skyrocketing college tuition. There were plenty of smart points and some not-so-smart ones, but in politics, you really can’t please everyone.

But here’s what these critics did not do: set out to sink the entire program, which would improve the financial lives of more than 40 million people, over their personal criticisms.

Enter a small right-wing group in Texas, and the two people they drummed up to sue the Biden administration to stop student debt cancellation. In a federal lawsuit that will be heard by the US Supreme Court this winter, these two claim that relief for tens of millions of indebted Americans is unfair because they’re not included. The entitlement runneth over.

To understand their case, here is some background: The Biden administration devised the relief plan to target student debt cancellation towards borrowers who needed it the most. They limited the relief to borrowers making $125,000 or less, and then offered double the relief, $20,000, only to students from the lowest-income backgrounds, measured by whether they’d received Pell grants for college. (Pell grants are the federal grants expressly given to the poorest students; in 2020, the majority of recipients came from families with household incomes of $30,000 or less.)

One of the two plaintiffs—a Texas man named Alexander Taylor—does qualify for $10,000 in student debt relief. He earns less than $125,000 per year, and holds more than $35,000 in eligible federal loans. But he does not qualify for the extra $10,000 of cancellation because he didn’t get a Pell grant in college. So, over the perceived slight of having parents who were not poor, he has sued to deprive millions—and himself!—of any debt relief at all. If he wins, he will be $10,000 poorer. Give this man a medal.

Nearly two years after a pro-Trump mob unleashed a violent attack against the US Capitol, the House committee investigating the events of January 6th has released its final report documenting former president Donald Trump’s lead role in fomenting the mob, as well as his efforts to overthrow democracy. As my colleague David Corn wrote shortly after the panel hosted its final public meeting on Monday, the findings are at once obvious and nothing short of devastating for the former president, and will undoubtedly be pored over in the days to come. 

In the meantime, while our reporters unearth the most pressing details, you can read the full report below:

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who offered dramatic testimony at a January 6 Committee hearing in June, detailed her own lawyer’s efforts to keep her quiet in an explosive deposition made public Thursday. Now he’s taken a leave of absence from his law firm, in a swirl of controversy over ethics violations.

According to her deposition, attorney Stefan Passantino, who had previously worked as a White House attorney for Trump, told Hutchinson, who had been subpoenaed by the panel, to “downplay” her knowledge of the events leading to January 6 in her testimony and to also claim she could not recall other important details. Passantino offered to help her find work in what he referred to as “Trump world,” while making it clear he was considering the interests of the former president ahead of her own, she testified. The timing of the offers to “take care” of her financial needs, Hutchinson said, suggested they were linked to her offering testimony that did not hurt Trump or his allies. Passantino even warned her that Trump often read transcripts and bore grudges against witnesses who talked too much.

“We just want to focus on protecting the President,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her before her first interview with the panel. “We all know that you’re loyal.”

Passantino, who was, strikingly, formerly a top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, was paid by a Trump PAC called Save America, to represent Hutchinson. She didn’t know that at the time, because he refused to tell her who was paying him for the work, she said. She also said he shared details about her testimony with other lawyers working for Trump clients against her wishes.

Those actions represent gross violations of basic legal ethics and DC Bar rules governing conflicts of interest, ethics experts said. Those rules require lawyers from taking third-party payments that interfere with their “independent professional judgment,” and mandate that the attorneys obtain “informed consent from the client” for such arrangements. If Hutchinson is telling the truth that Passantino didn’t tell her who was paying him, she could not consent, noted Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies legal ethics. And Clark said that’s not the half of it.

Below is our list of heroes and monsters from 2022. For the last few years, we’ve taken inventory in this fashion—personal, idiosyncratic, and somehow when assembled a snapshot of yet another unsettled, strange, glorious 12 months. (You can read the full archive here.) At this point, it’s become something of a holiday tradition.

As always, our list is by no means exhaustive. Each entry reflects less the perfect distillation of the year than our personal obsessions. But if you take all of this together, we hope you have a pretty representative time capsule of 2022. If we missed one of your nightmares or loves, maybe we can pick that up next year.

We will be adding to this list over the holidays. And so if you do not immediately see some of the items it will feature—a German coup, a bot, Mike Davis, Eric Adams, cars, strikers, a flamingo—please, keep coming back. You may even discover a few more.

Top image credits: Plan B Entertainment/ZUMA; Tom Dorsey/Salina Journal/AP; Scott Garfitt/AP; Francois Nel/Getty

This year was filled with reactionary dorks. In Arizona, Blake Masters tried and failed to larp his way into the Senate by posting creepy videos of himself shooting his many guns. In Manhattan, a dozen-or-so people maybe turned a bit fascist and maybe a bit Catholic and writers tried to figure out why rich kids would do something like that. In cyberspace, the absolute monarchist blogger once known as Mencius Moldbug emerged on Substack under his own name, Curtis Yarvin, and got written up in Tablet and Vox.

All of these people had moments. But none of them really went it for like Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, the descendant of princes arrested earlier this month by German authorities, who stands accused of being the ringleader of a coup plot inspired by the ludicrous theory that Germany is not a sovereign state but a company set up by western powers following World War II.

It sounds like a Nathan Fielder episode of overthrow. The plan? To storm the Reichstag, execute Chancellor Olaf Schulz, and put Reuss in power.

From one angle, it was more than a bit unsettling. After fanning out across Germany, Austria, and Italy, three thousand law enforcement officials arrested 25 people and found weapons at more than 50 of the roughly 150 locations they raided. From another angle, it was a chance to laugh at perhaps the year’s most pompous man.

This is that version of the story. 

Nearly one year after Eric Adams was sworn in as New York’s 110th mayor, many of the same questions remain. How does Adams, against a plummeted approval rating and barely alleviated housing affordability crisis, still fit in all that partying? Is he sure about crypto? What’s the deal with those twin dudes?

The only general consensus that’s emerged seems to be bipartisan: Mayor Adams is a blabber. He’s all talk, few plans. But in the last quarter of 2022, Adams offered a proposal aimed at fixing one of the city’s most complex and enduring issues. And it has given us the first real window into what kind of mayor Adams aspires to be—and that’s a monstrous one.

That’s the only way to describe Adam’s headline-making plan to task police officers and emergency medical workers with removing people who appear mentally ill off the streets—even when a recent dangerous act has not been documented—against their will in order to enter a deeply broken, understaffed hospital pipeline, where doctors are overloaded and psychiatric beds are notoriously scant.

In his announcement last month, Adams appeared to be under the impression that the state’s commitment of 50 new beds for city hospitals would be enough to provide one for “everyone” who needed it. That, of course, is nothing short of a delusion; at least 60,000 people are homeless in New York, with thousands living unsheltered. A large majority of the unhoused suffer from mental illness. The number of respite care centers in the city—which offer alternatives to hospitalization by providing temporary shelters for the mentally ill—has been slashed in half in recent years. It’s unclear how a plan to make it easier for the homeless to be forcibly hospitalized—when the critical coordination between police officers and hospitals has yet to be determined—won’t lead to more bottlenecks for a system already at a breaking point.

What’s more certain is that the explosive directive will arm police officers with a dangerous expansion in latitude to detain people, leaving the city’s mentally ill population already in fear of police brutality and officers themselves blindsided by the chaotic order. 

Imagine you are the seventh of eight children born to poor, illiterate farmers in the countryside of northeast Brazil. You spend your early life in a house made of mud and sticks. When you’re seven years old your family sets off for the big city, and you find work as a shoe shiner. As a teenager, you become a metalworker. It’s a tough trade. You lose a finger in an accident when you’re 17. Your 18th birthday coincides with a United States-backed military coup, and a repressive dictatorship takes power. In response, you get involved in your union. As a labor leader, you lead the first mass strikes since the dictatorship took power. In fact, you lead general strikes that at their peak involve over twenty million workers. Your leadership helps bring democracy back to the country. Along the way, you are imprisoned. You lose your first wife and newborn baby to pregnancy complications.

You help found a political party hoping to bring dignity to the poor and working class. You spend the next twenty years leading this worker’s party. After many fits, starts—and perhaps one too many compromises—you finally win the presidency. During your administration, you implement some of the most successful social democratic reforms of the 21st century. You bring 40 million people out of poverty. The president of the United States calls you “the most popular politician on earth.” After two terms, you leave office with a staggering 87 percent approval rating. 

Then it all comes crashing down.

Your hand-picked successor is impeached. A nasty former Army captain and once-fringe politician nostalgic for the military dictatorship ascends. You announce a third attempt at the presidency, but you’re targeted by a massive corruption investigation that has enveloped the party you founded. You watch the neo-fascist win the presidency from a prison cell, where you’ve been sentenced to twelve years. The new president appoints the judge that convicted you as the country’s new justice minister. 

You learn, through leaked messages that the corruption investigation was a potential political hit-job to prevent you from running in 2018. The U.S Department of Justice was involved. Near the end of your second year behind bars, your conviction is reversed. You’re released to a country that’s been ravaged by an incompetent response to the pandemic. The far-right has grown stronger. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has accelerated.

In March 2020 the writer, scholar, and activist Mike Davis—who passed away earlier this year from complications from Esophageal cancer—addressed the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and what must be done to survive it, in an essay for Jacobin. It was titled “In a Plague Year.” As usual, he was prescient.

He predicted nursing homes as hot spots (they would be); he predicted workers would not want to endure such conditions and “stay home” (they did). Davis said that the coronavirus would enter as a “familiar monster,” even though the world felt radically new at the time. Within months, there would be analysis that followed Davis’s thoughts closely—of COVID as exposing cracks in our systems, like medical dye spreading in the body to find disease. But it was not “familiar” to most of us to think about a pandemic. It was to him because in 2006 Davis published The Monster at Our Door, a book-length warning about the threat of a global contagion stemming from zoonotic spillover, and how the lack of global public health infrastructure made the planet increasingly vulnerable to such a disaster. 

It has been typical of how many have mourned Davis this year to begin this way. After his passing, and during his time in hospice care—as pilgrimages were made to write profiles, conduct long interviews, and say goodbye—writers had to note that he was always ahead. Davis hated the “prophet” label that he was tagged with ever since his book City of Quartz was credited with predicting the 1992 Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles. But it followed him for a reason.

One example has stuck with me this year. Nested within that 2020 essay was another prediction. Though it was tucked in parentheses, and easy to miss. After writing about the need for progressives to unite to push Biden left at the 2020 DNC in Milwaukee, Davis addressed the role of ordinary people. (Emphasis mine.)

The rest of us have an equally important role in the streets, starting now with the fights against eviction, layoffs, and employers who refuse compensation to workers on leave. (Afraid of contagion? Stand six feet from the next protester, and it will only make a more powerful image on TV. But we need to reclaim the streets.)

Abortion is healthcare, and no law prohibiting it can eradicate its necessity. That hasn’t stopped Republican legislators from trying. Fifty-five abortion restrictions were enacted in 2022. Many of these laws target doctors and healthcare workers, threatening them with fines and jail time for providing necessary and wanted care. But while this year may have been unprecedented, for many abortion providers, it was, at least, anticipated.

“We’re not shocked by any of it,” Dr. Christina Bourne, the medical director at Trust Women, which has clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas, told me earlier this year. “[We’re] just trying to figure out strategies and next steps.”

To continue providing this care in a climate so hostile to abortion it actually becomes personally dangerous is, frankly, too much to ask of anyone. But over the last year, Mother Jones has heard from providers all over the country continuing on anyway. For Trust Women, this has meant fighting to stay open no matter what. “Our day-to-day existence is about keeping our doors open and our day-to-day conversations involve that,” said Bourne. “It truncates our ability to grow and blossom and refine and be slow and intentional in the work we do when it’s just like, you wake up every day to your fresh new hell.”

Like Bourne at Trust Women, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a physician who has spent the past 18 years providing abortion care in Texas, was dealing with the frustration of trying to practice under abortion restrictions even before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. Moayedi told my former colleague Becca Andrews about having to operate under the state’s Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after six weeks, but made broad exceptions for extreme medical emergencies: 

We are in a state that has a high maternal mortality rate, a high maternal morbidity rate, a high infant death rate [among vulnerable populations]. Being pregnant in a state like Texas is a dangerous baseline. Being forced to be pregnant in a state like Texas can be catastrophic. My colleagues and I are having to deal with this extremely broad law that is being individually interpreted at each hospital, at each clinic, at every practice. And it’s really just about personal and system risk mitigation. How much risk is a hospital system or clinic willing to take? How can we really prove that circumstances were, in fact, life-threatening?

First, it was Belgium. Then it was Spain. Today, it was Portugal. Morocco has defeated yet another European soccer powerhouse to become the first African and Arab nation to advance to the semifinals in World Cup history.

The final score was 1-0 with the only goal coming off a leaping header from Youssef En-Nesyri late in the first half.

What a moment

Morocco scores its first ever men's FIFA World Cup goal in the knockout stage pic.twitter.com/hGS7QoE3vV

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) December 10, 2022

The Justice Department announced on Friday that Nicholas Ochs, the founder of the Hawaii Proud Boys chapter, was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Nicholas DeCarlo, who was photographed at the Capitol with Ochs, was also sentenced to four years. Both men had previously pled guilty.

Members of Proud Boys, a far-right nationalist group comprised of self-described “Western chauvinists,” have helped promote the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, Proud Boys members from across the country have been sentenced to prison time for their actions during the January 6 insurrection, including one who received a four year and seven month sentence after joining a mob going after Capitol police and coming within seconds of Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In October, a North Carolina leader of the group pled guilty to seditious conspiracy related to his actions on January 6. A New Jersey leader pled guilty to “interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder” the same month.

Before entering the Capitol on January 6, Ochs and DeCarlo threw smoke bombs at police outside, according to the Justice Department. They were then photographed in front of a door inside the Capitol on which DeCarlo had written “Murder the Media,” the name of their social media channel on Telegram. DeCarlo also took plastic handcuffs from a Capitol Police duffel bag.

After leaving the building, Ochs apologized to his audience for not livestreaming the ordeal. “[S]orry we couldn’t go live when we stormed the f—-in’ U.S. Capitol and made Congress flee,” he said.

In a court filing, Ochs’ attorney Edward B. MacMahon said his client “recognizes the gravity of his involvement in the events at the Capitol on January 6.” He described his client as someone who grew up in a “warm and supportive family” before serving in the Marines, getting married, and becoming a father. MacMahon asked for a prison sentence of less than 18 months. 

Kari Lake is still trying to win the election she lost. Her latest move is a conspiratorial 70-page lawsuit filed in Arizona on Friday in which the former local news anchor asks that she be declared the victor of last month’s gubernatorial election because of unsupported allegations of voter fraud.

Lake’s lawsuit in state court argues that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who defeated Lake in November, and election officials in Maricopa County have “shattered” trust in the state’s elections. The results have already been certified by Hobbs, the state’s top elections official. There is no evidence the election was stolen. 

Nevertheless, Lake’s lawsuit demands an “order setting aside the certified result of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and declaring that Kari Lake is the winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.” If the court won’t grant her the victory automatically, Lake asks instead that it forces Maricopa County to “re-conduct the gubernatorial election” under the “direction of a special master.” 

The court is not expected to go along with either demand. Hobbs’ campaign manager called the case a “nuisance lawsuit” from someone who “needs attention like a fish needs water.

A statement from our campaign manager on Kari Lake’s latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.

On the evening of October 24, 2020, a guy who goes by the name Wenyang tweeted a picture of Hunter Biden. Hunter was facing a mirror in what looked like a hotel room, with his penis exposed.

Within an hour, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign asked Twitter to take down the post. We know this because journalist Matt Taibbi—using documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk provided to him—has been tweeting out internal communications between Twitter executives who, at the time, were discussing how to deal with material from Hunter’s laptop. Wenyang’s tweet is the third of five listed in a screenshot of an email from one Twitter staffer to another. “More to review from the the Biden team,” the email said. “Handled these,” a Twitter employee responded a few hours later.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

Taibbi did not explain what those five deleted tweets contained. But using the Internet Archive, you can see that three of them featured explicit images of Hunter Biden. One doesn’t work. Another is a video, which won’t play now, but probably showed sexual activity. All of those I was able to access violated Twitter’s rules.

Workers at an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in Ohio voted Friday to join the United Automobile Workers union, a milestone in the auto industry’s transition from producing gas to electric cars.

The vote at Ultium Cells—a joint venture between General Motors and a South Korean battery manufacturer—was 710 to 16, according to the union. The National Labor Relations Board is expected to certify the vote.

Labor experts told the Detroit Free Press that the election results were unsurprising given the location of the Ultium factory and the strong pro-union strain among GM workers. Still, it’s a major win in a larger battle: making sure that as workers transition to green jobs, they keep labor protections. (Tesla, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the US, is also the only large US auto-maker that’s not unionized.)

Electric vehicle manufacturing workers tend to be paid lower than their counterparts at other auto factories, the New York Times reports, and, without government subsidies, the transition to electric vehicles could cut auto industry jobs. While President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act does offer tax credits for electric vehicles produced entirely in the United States, it does not specifically incentivize the creation of union jobs in electric vehicle manufacturing.

“As the auto industry transitions to electric vehicles, new workers entering the auto sector at plants like Ultium are thinking about their value and worth,” UAW president Ray Curry said in a statement. “This vote shows that they want to be a part of maintaining the high standards and wages that UAW members have built in the auto industry.”

Kyrsten Sinema is back where she started. On Friday, the Arizona senator announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party, but would keep her committee appointments and not caucus with the Republicans. Twenty years after Sinema lost a race for state legislature as an independent, she is once again a party of one.

On a day to day basis, Sinema’s switch doesn’t necessarily change much. Democrats will still control the chamber, they’ll still need 60 votes to pass most legislation, and they’ll still be counting on one from the junior senator from Arizona. She will no longer be attending caucus lunches, but that’s really an issue for the catering staff. No one paying attention to Democratic politics or Capitol Hill would have characterized Sinema as a party loyalist over the last few years—or even the last decade, really—and she has gone out of her way to distance herself from the state and national Democratic parties time and again. In one sense, her announcement makes official a dynamic that has for a long time been frustratingly apparent to her critics.

The switch does change one big thing, though. Although she did not address this aspect of her future in an op-ed this morning in the Arizona Republic, nor in interviews with Politico and CNN, Sinema’s move upends what was already expected to be one of the 2024 cycle’s most competitive and expensive Senate races. Her popularity among Arizona Democrats has fallen through the floor over the last two years, due to Sinema’s opposition to changing Senate rules to push through key party priorities, like expanding voting access and preserving abortion rights. She was censured by the state party in January over her vote to preserve the filibuster. Activists have protested outside her office and even confronted her in a bathroom at Arizona State University. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego was reportedly gearing up for a primary challenge. His colleague, Rep. Greg Stanton, the former mayor of Phoenix, tweeted an internal poll that showed him beating Sinema in a primary 58 to 17.

In a statement on Friday, Arizona Democratic Party chair Raquel Terán acknowledged Sinema’s work on “several historic pieces of legislation” but accused her of falling “dramatically short” when it came to protecting voting rights and curbing corporate power:

As a party, we welcome Independent voters and their perspectives. Senator Sinema may now be registered as an Independent, but she has shown she answers to corporations and billionaires, not Arizonans. Senator Sinema’s party registration means nothing if she continues to not listen to her constituents.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent. Politico has the scoop, which you can decide is either unsurprising or something of a bombshell. The news comes shortly after two key moments for Democrats. This week, Sen. Raphael Warnock won re-election in Georgia, securing the party with a theoretically more powerful advantage in the upper chamber, and Sen. Chuck Schumer was chosen again as majority leader.

Speaking to Politico, Sinema attempted to downplay the “timing” of her announcement, claiming it was rooted in some recent soul-searching of how she could best champion her core values. 

“Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she added.

While it’s easy to scoff at Sinema’s reassurances here, in some ways,  they’re less mealy-mouthed than they seem. Because regardless of how you feel about her absolute refusal to end the filibuster (and in doing so, torpedo Democrats’ efforts to protect voting rights); her donations from venture capitalists while killing tax hikes for the Wall Street set; or even that heinous thumbs down, Sinema’s claim that her behavior will not change once she leaves the party would have to mean that she was working in lockstep with Democrats to begin with. Not really her thing.

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in his excellent profile of the Arizona senator, Sinema’s political career has been one giant metamorphosis. She’s gone from the Green Party roots to unlikely Dem powerbroker. She once claimed donations were a form of “bribery;” now she enjoys friendships with the private equity crowd.