October 23, 2018

Here’s How to Make Your “Old White Republican Senator on the Judiciary Committee” Name

Bonus points if you come up with a backstory.

Tom Williams

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Have you ever wondered what your name would be if you were white, old, and among the many men on the GOP’s Senate Judiciary Committee? Using a simple formula, thanks to Twitter user Shower Cap, you can now create your new identity so that you, too, can fight to limit the rights of others.

Here’s how: your freshman college dorm serves as your first name (or if you didn’t have a college dorm, we suggest using the name of your school’s auditorium), and you can choose your last name from the list of men who were nominated—and lost—Best Supporting Actor the year you were born. For example, we at Mother Jones put together our own GOP Judiciary Committee, and boy oh boy are we ready to bypass years and years of precedent to stack the court based on our own interests.  

We have Rubin Dafoe (Inae Oh, news and engagement editor), Ware Stapleton (Beth Eisenstaedt, regional development director), Hillhead Andrews (James West, senior digital editor), Hayden Palminteri (Kari Sonde, editorial fellow), Cliff Loggia (Ben Dreyfuss, senior editor of growth and engagement), and our swing vote, Dinky Holloway (Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones CEO). 

For maximum enjoyment, give your senator a backstory. Myself, Anderson Thurman, represents the great state of Iowa and grew up shucking corn for pennies while his dad worked in the fields. Now, he’s a six-figure earning GOP senator who advocates for tax breaks on the rich, is against gay marriage (although he went through an experimental phase in college), and thinks evolution is a liberal scam.

But enough about my alter ego; here are some of the best responses.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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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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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.

payment methods

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