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.)

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.

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. 

Former President Donald Trump has given many denials to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that he cornered her and raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He’s called Carroll’s story “all fiction,” “a con job,” and “a big fat hoax.”

“I know nothing about this woman,” Trump insisted in 2019, when Carroll first made her allegation public in a New York magazine article. “She’s a liar and a sick person,” he repeated recently. “She made it up probably to sell a book or for her own ego.”

Yet perhaps the most quoted of all Trump’s defenses is his insulting insistence that Carroll is “not my type,” as he told the Hill in an Oval Office interview shortly after Carroll’s story went public. The New York Times, USA Today, and many other outlets promptly ran his insult in their headlines. The Atlantic broke down the quote’s inherent misogyny: how it reduces an “unruly woman” to a sexual commodity, then dismisses her. Carroll, meanwhile, filed a defamation lawsuit over Trump’s denials, including the “not my type” quote, saying the president smeared her when he called her a liar. 

But a newly unsealed deposition from that lawsuit has thrown Trump’s “not my type” defense into question. According to the deposition transcript, when Trump was shown a picture of himself with his then-wife, Ivana Trump, talking to Carroll, Trump misidentified Carroll as his second wife, Marla Maples. 

“It’s Marla,” Trump responded when Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan presented the photo, as he pointed to Carroll.

In the summer of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a closed-door caucus meeting, the California Republican cut the lights to screen a clip from the heist movie The Town, where Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner plot a violent act of revenge.

“I need your help,” Affleck’s character says. “I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

When the lights flicked on, Allen West, a first-term Florida congressman who had become a conservative hero after firing a gun past an Iraqi detainee’s head, rose to offer a version of Renner’s response.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West said. 

For McCarthy, his political ambitions have always come with a catch: To get where he wanted to go, he first had to hand over the keys. His elevation to speaker of the House in January on the 15th ballot was the culmination of his life’s work and a demonstration of his powers. In nailing down a belligerent caucus, McCarthy leaned on relationships cultivated over a decade-and-half on the campaign trail, at the Capitol, and on the fundraising circuit. But it was also a reminder of the compromises he made to get there. McCarthy won the gavel, but not the authority it traditionally brings, by ceding control to the insurrectionists and austerity-obsessed hard-liners who blocked his nomination 14 times. His victory was in many ways the story not just of his own career, but of the trio of Republican “Young Guns” with whom he rose through the ranks. McCarthy is the last one of them standing, because he already surrendered long ago.

Donald Trump is not afraid to file a lawsuit, and he certainly no stranger to being sued himself. Once in court, Trump and his attorneys are prodigious filers of complaints, appeals, and protests. In fact, his legal strategy is often “more is better.” But that strategy is suddenly hitting a wall—a federal judge in Florida ruled on Thursday that Trump and one of his attorneys, Alina Habba, are on the hook for $937,000, as punishment for a lawsuit Trump brought against a host of perceived enemies, including his 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump filed the lawsuit—which named a total of 31 people and alleged racketeering and a conspiracy to hurt his candidacy by falsely accusing him of colluding with Russia—last March. It was dismissed in September, but the defendants asked to be reimbursed for their costs in having to fight it.

It’s the second time in as many weeks that Trump and Habba have been rebuked by a judge for their litigation tactics. On Janunary 9, a New York judge rejected Trump’s request that a $250 million civil fraud lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, be dismissed. That judge went beyond simply denying the request and said Trump and Habba had engaged in “frivolous litigation.” In that case, however, the judge ruled that he didn’t need to punish Trump or his lawyers because they had learned their lesson. 

In the Clinton case, the judge was not so forgiving.

“This case should never have been brought,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in his order on Thursday. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”

Middlebrooks wrote that there were many, many problems with the lawsuit Trump filed against Clinton and her supposed co-conspirators. For starters, it was poorly written—repetitive, vague, and meandering—Middlebrooks wrote. When Middlebrooks ordered Habba to clean up her argument, what he got back was basically fiction, the judge said.

On Friday, for the 50th year in a row, tens of thousands of anti-abortion proponents gathered in Washington, DC, to demonstrate their commitment to “protecting the lives of the unborn.” Originally created to protest Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion, the March For Life has long included prominent conservatives, local activists, and busloads of school children from Catholic schools, all determined to end legal abortion.

But because the Supreme Court overturned Roe in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, relegating the power to legislate abortions to individual states, Friday’s march—occurring just two days before what would have been the 50th anniversary of the landmark ruling—was unlike those that came before it. “While the march began as a response to Roe, we don’t end as a response to Roe being overturned,” Jeanne Mancini, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told the crowd. “We will continue to march until abortion is unthinkable.”

With the landmark Supreme Court battle behind them, anti-abortion activists now must decide what to do next, navigating the many competing objectives among the broader movement. Are emergency contraceptives considered abortifacients or not? What about contraceptives generally? Should abortion be permitted in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the health of a mother?

Marie Miller, a protestor from Texas, tells me she won’t be satisfied until there is a national abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. Her sign says “Save the innocent baby! Slaughter the rapist.”

— Abby Vesoulis (@abbyvesoulis) January 20, 2023

When he ran for president in 2008, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced the views of Texas evangelical minister John Hagee as “crazy and unacceptable” and rejected his endorsement for the GOP nomination. But tomorrow, former Vice President Mike Pence, who has presidential aspirations for 2024, will engage in a fireside chat with Hagee at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, where Pence is scheduled to appear as part of his book tour for his memoir So Help Me God.

Hagee, now 82, had been popular with Republicans in the George W. Bush administration, but by the time McCain ran, the minister’s toxic rhetoric had become too much even for most Republicans. As I wrote a couple years ago:

Among other things, he has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed” Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to Israel. 

Hagee’s influence waned after the 2008 rejection by McCain, but he came back in full force with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In person and through his organization, Christians United for Israel, Hagee pushed the new administration to go to war with Iran, which was part of his apocalyptic vision for the End Times and the restoration of Jesus Christ. Pence made a show of support by appearing at his events.

As I noted:

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is a former cop and a MAGA-leaning conservative. We were arguing about politics as usual, when he went on a rant about “President Ron Klain.” White House chiefs of staff generally aren’t household names, so I was impressed with his level of knowledge about the inner workings of the Biden White House. But then I realized that the familiarity was the result of the long running conservative attack on Biden’s mental fitness, a narrative that suggests Klain is the real wizard behind the curtain, running the show for a senile, geezer Democratic president. Thanks to Fox News and Republicans in Congress who regularly refer to him as “Prime Minister Klain,” Ron Klain has become a household name for a lot of ordinary Americans. 

In fact, in 2021 Fox News host Sean Hannity went on a tear about Klain, claiming that the “puppeteer” behind the “cognitively impaired” president didn’t understand ordinary people. “Shadow President and master puppeteer—so kind, so thoughtful and loving—Ron Klain…believes we smelly Walmart shoppers of America, that cling to God, guns, Bibles, and religion don’t need to worry about inflation,” Hannity said.

But Hannity and the Republicans may not have Klain to kick around much longer. The New York Times reported Saturday that the chief of staff is planning to step down in the coming weeks:

Mr. Klain has been telling colleagues privately since the November midterm elections that after a grueling, nonstop stretch at Mr. Biden’s side going back to the 2020 campaign, he is ready to move on, according to senior administration officials, and a search for a replacement has been underway.

The officials, who discussed internal matters on condition of anonymity, would not say whether a successor has already been picked or when the decision would be announced, but indicated that it would come at some point after the president outlined his agenda for the coming year in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7. Mr. Klain likely would stay around for a transition period to help the next chief settle into the corner office that has been his command post for many crises and legislative battles.

One of the little-noticed moves by President Biden in his first days in office was an executive order that required federal agencies to examine their policies and programs to identify whether and how they perpetuate barriers to equal opportunity. It was a stab at addressing structural inequality in the wake of the national protests over the death of George Floyd. At least some of that work seems to be coming to fruition. 

This week, the Treasury Department released a study looking at racial disparities in the benefits that come through the tax code—like special lower tax rates for capital gains or deductions for employer-provided health insurance. In theory, these policies are color-blind. But the Treasury report shows that they are anything but. 

Tax expenditures have become a popular tool in Congress to provide benefits to families that otherwise would be bigger targets for budget cutters. They don’t show up as program expenses the way anti-poverty programs like food stamps or TANF benefits do. But the differences are staggering. Consider TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, otherwise known as welfare. Congress has refused to increase the block grant for the program since its inception in 1996, so it’s been stuck at $16.5 billion, with its real value falling by 40 percent thanks to inflation. In many states, the maximum monthly TANF benefit to a poor family with a single parent and two kids is a pittance, particularly in states where many Black people live below the poverty line. In Alabama, for instance, the maximum benefit for a family of three is just $215, a figure that hasn’t budged since 2005.

Compare the TANF budget to the loss of revenue to the government caused by the special treatment of capital gains, investment income that’s taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary wages. In 2023, Treasury researchers estimate that tax break will cost the country $146 billion, or nine times more than the entire annual TANF budget. And who are the major beneficiaries of those tax breaks? White families, who make up 67 percent of the population but claim 92 percent of the benefits. And these aren’t just white families. They’re rich white families. The Treasury report doesn’t mention it, but 75 percent of all long-term capital gains were reported by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in 2019. (For a good explanation of how this works, read this piece by Mother Jones editor Mike Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super Rich Really Live and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.)

By far the biggest tax expenditure is the exemption for employer-provided health insurance, which will cost the country $225 billion this year. Eighty-two percent of those benefits will accrue to white people. See a pattern? You don’t have to be a woke SJW to see the injustice here. 

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?

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.)

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.

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. 

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. 

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

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.

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:

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.

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.