January 8, 2016

How Much Do People Hate Ted Cruz? A Lot.

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I think that everyone—literally everyone—knows that Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen and thus eligible to become president. The whole issue is a complete crock. And yet, ever since Donald Trump brought it up, you can hardly swing a dead cat without running into someone jabbering about it. Even John McCain and Nancy Pelosi have gotten into the act. What’s going on? Here are some possibilities:

  • We are all bored. We are so bored that we’ll literally talk about anything. This is the true genius of Donald Trump: he recognizes how bored we all are and is willing to find stimulating topics for us to chatter about.
  • Everyone loathes Ted Cruz. They loathe him so much that they’re willing to discuss this ridiculous meme as a way of hurting him, even though they know perfectly well it’s ridiculous.
  • We can’t help ourselves. It’s the “someone is wrong on the internet” syndrome: when Trump suggests Cruz doesn’t qualify for president, we have to explicate it. We have to research it. We have to find constitutional experts who like being on TV to cite endless case law. In the end, we have to explain why it’s wrong. It’s what we do. This has lately earned the moniker “Voxsplaining,” which is a little unfair—it’s not as if Vox invented this phenomenon—but only a little.
  • We remain under the misguided notion that anything Donald Trump says is automatically newsworthy because he’s the Republican front-runner.

That’s all I could come up with. Are there other possible explanations?

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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.

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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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