May 17, 2017

The I-Word Suddenly Becomes Respectable

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Dan Drezner is in town hawking his new book, so I went up to UCLA on Tuesday afternoon to have lunch with him. We’ve “known” each other for 15 years, and it seemed high time we actually met each other. Our lunch conversation was exactly what you’d expect: a dozen or so variations of open-mouthed amazement at the first hundred days of the Donald Trump shitshow. You’ve heard it all before.

Anyway, I took the rest of the day off and puttered around LA. When I finally got home, I ate a few quick bites and then did a brief check-in to see if anything had happened.

And…it turns out that after a meeting with Trump in February, James Comey wrote a memo saying that Trump had explicitly asked him to kill the investigation into Mike Flynn’s ties to Russia. Suddenly impeachment isn’t just some wackadoodle idea from the fever swamps. This is the real deal. We have a president who makes wild accusations of wiretapping against his predecessor; blabs top secret information to the Russians; asks the FBI director to kill an investigation involving his friends; and is pretty clearly deteriorating mentally before our eyes. This is a time bomb that we really can’t afford to ignore any longer. It’s time for Republicans to step up.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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