January 22, 2022

The Internet Can’t Stop Dunking on Mitch McConnell

#MitchPlease has been trending since Wednesday.

Mitch McConnell called the criticism of his comments "offensive and outrageous." Tom Williams/AP

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It has been an ugly week for Mitch McConnell.

Addressing reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday, the Senate Minority Leader made an offensive comment about Black voters. “If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he said, seeming to imply that Black Americans aren’t Americans. 

The internet wasn’t having it. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tweeted, “After centuries of building this nation, Republicans still don’t consider Black voters to be Americans…We cannot pretend that the days of Jim Crow are behind us.” Illinois Democrat Rep. Bobby Rush tweeted, “African Americans ARE Americans. #MitchPlease.” And Patriot Takes, a left-wing organization that posts unflattering videos of GOP political figures, resurfaced this video clip from 2015:

The hashtag #MitchPlease has continued to trend on Twitter since Wednesday.

On Friday, McConnell tried to walk the statement back, which only led to more confusion and outrage. In a news conference in Kentucky, he called the backlash to his statement “offensive and outrageous,” and said had misspoken on Wednesday by omitting the word “almost.” This was, apparently, another mistake, because shortly after consulting an aide, he returned to the microphone to clarify the word he should have included was “all.” (And beforehand, McConnell’s office had told CNN McConnell meant to say “other” Americans.)

“I was there for Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in the audience…I was actually there when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in the Capitol in 1965,” McConnell said Friday, in an attempt to defend his civil rights record. “I have had African American speech writers, schedulers, office managers over the years.”

The reactions to McConnell’s implosion keep rolling in. Here’s a sampling:

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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.

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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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