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By chance I’ve gotten a couple of similar questions lately. Don’t I agree, asked a friend, that Democrats should give Brett Kavenaugh an honest chance at confirmation to the Supreme Court? We liberals believe in fair play, after all. This was followed by another friend suggesting that liberals shouldn’t actively defend Sarah Jeong’s mocking anti-white trollery on Twitter from a few year ago. That was some pretty illiberal stuff, she said.

Well, let’s talk about this. For many decades the Republican Party built its brand by appealing to white Southerners who had left the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Era. However, the GOP’s appeal to whites inevitably became more muted as times changed and overt racism became less and less acceptable. Finally, when Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the party wrote a post-mortem that admitted they’d taken things as far as they could. The white vote was tapped out, and if they wanted to get to 51 percent in the future they needed to dial back on the racial appeals and instead learn how to attract Asians and Hispanics who were natural constituencies for a fiscally conservative, church-friendly party.

I cheered. But only for a few days. A year earlier the party had fired its first black chairman, and in 2012 they tossed their post-mortem into the dustbin almost as soon as the ink was dry. Then it nominated Donald Trump for president on a platform so viciously racist and bigoted it was like watching an old Ken Burns documentary. The entire party quickly fell in line behind Trump, whose entire campaign was based on his disdain for (wink wink) “political correctness.” Two years later the GOP—including most of the original never-Trumpers—is even more solidly behind him: Mexicans are rapists; there are good people on both sides of Charlottesville; Obama was born in Kenya; Democrats love MS13; we need to prevent Muslims from entering the country; parents and children should be separated at the border; Southern secession was just like 1776; all’s fair in efforts to prevent blacks from voting; and white nationalists are to be coddled, not ridden out of town on a rail.

So this is where we are. The Republican Party can’t win using ordinary methods. On the process side, they can win only by inflating the white vote via gerrymandering, cracked-and-packed districts, and ruthless black voter suppression. On the policy side, they can win only with heavy dollops of strident and outright bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and anyone else who comes along. Even Canadians will do in a pinch.

Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.

Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

When that happens, I will change my mind about how we should fight the Republican Party. Until then, no, I don’t think Brett Kavanaugh deserves any help from Democrats and I don’t think liberals should waste any time tut-tutting over Twitter mockery from 2013 that all of us know perfectly well doesn’t represent any genuine anti-white sentiment.

That’s it. Whatever works best, I’m in.

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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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