April 23, 2020

Evil Dex Update

The Evil Dex.Kevin Drum

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I’ll bet you’re tired of hearing about COVID-19, aren’t you? What you’d really like is to hear someone griping about some other disease. I’m here to help.

Back in 2014, when I went through my first round of chemo, part of the treatment was dexamethasone. The dose was 20 mg every Friday, and on Sunday I would crash as the dex wore off. This usually happened in the afternoon and lasted a couple of hours. I would fall hard asleep during the first quarter of some football game and then wake up in the fourth quarter.

Today, I still take dex. The dose is 4 mg every Friday and on Sunday I crash. For about eight hours. I fall asleep around 10 am and wake up a little before dinner time. Then on Monday I do the same for two or three hours.

Plus I take a second dose on Monday, so I crash for eight hours on Wednesday and another few hours on Thursday.

Altogether, then, I spend something like 20+ daytime hours in a deep dex stupor these days even though I’m taking a fraction of the dose I used to take. This is ridiculous. On the bright side, that’s 20 hours when I’m not tempted to leave the house. So there’s that.

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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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