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.

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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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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.

payment methods

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