June 5, 2020

Shining a Light on Shady, Menacing, Unbadged Armed Forces

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If driving the news cycle and the broader media conversation about national security weren’t high-impact enough, you’ll be inspired to know that Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman did both and much more last week, when his exclusive front-line dispatches and chilling photographs from the protests broke a defining story across America. Shady armed forces, without any badges or name tags, stood menacing watch over protesters in the nation’s capital. Asked who they’re with, they told Friedman opaquely “the Department of Justice” and “the federal government.”

Citing Friedman’s images and alert eye, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut announced, “We cannot tolerate an American secret police.” (COINTELPRO, anyone?) Murphy pledged to introduce legislation that requires “uniformed federal officers…to clearly identify what military branch or agency they represent.” Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon boosted Friedman’s work strongly: “This picture really troubles me. Armed forces in the nation’s capital, appearing to have been stripped of all badges and name tags—making them totally unaccountable to the people—is something I’d expect to see from a dictatorship, not a democracy.”

Newsrooms everywhere shined a collective light on Friedman’s essential work, giving all of us at Mother Jones added indication of the strength across not only our newsroom, but national media, in the search for transparency and truth. I’ll take my Recharge where I can. For those of you who can join me, consider supporting consequential reporting like Friedman’s, and enter the week on a high note.

And an even higher note, once you feast your eyes on Tilda Swinton’s doppelganger in kitten form. H/T to my colleague Nina Liss-Schultz for making Tilda happen.

Note that I linked COINTELPRO above to Nat Hentoff’s searing, definitive Village Voice essay “J. Edgar Bloomberg: COINTELPRO in NY,” from 2007, eerily echoing today. Read and share. And Friday was National Doughnut Day, which, to this copy editor, raises a timeless one: “doughnut” or “donut”? I’m pro-dough. Weigh in at recharge@motherjones.com.

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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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