October 7, 2020

Things Sure Do Feel Dystopian These Days!

A couple poses for a photo in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is obscured by wildfire smoke.Wu Xiaoling/Xinhua/Zuma

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I don’t know if it’s because I just moved to a new city, but I feel like my tether to reality is growing looser by the minute.

The last four years felt dystopian. The last six months, doubly so. And the last week? Hoo, boy.

Our president is infected with the deadly virus whose seriousness he has downplayed ever since the necessary shutdowns started tanking the economy on whose prosperousness his 2020 presidential campaign hinged. Now, we have no reliable source of information on Trump’s health. His untrustworthy physician claims that Trump has been “symptom-free” for 24 hours. Trump’s (by my count) more than 50 original tweets in the last 24 hours appear symptomatic of, well, something.

Is this what it feels like to live in a democracy sliding toward authoritarianism? If Biden is elected, what will Trump’s time as a lame duck look like? Could 2021 be even worse than 2020?

At least we can watch this video of Hamlet the mini pig going down the stairs to get oatmeal. As my colleague Molly Schwartz says, “Seeing that pig jump with unadulterated joy into that oatmeal never fails to make me smile.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist 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 need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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