In Iowa, It’s All About Terrorists and Welfare Bums

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New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel spent all of 2015 in Iowa. He recently returned to the small town of Monticello to see how folks felt now that Donald Trump had been elected:

The Iowans I interviewed largely went about their lives outside the political hothouse social media….Many were hazy on specific policy details….These voters feared an outbreak of European-style terrorist attacks by Muslims in the United States, maybe in their own communities. And overwhelmingly, Trump supporters did not want their hard-earned money redistributed to people they regarded as undeserving.

There you go. Muslim terrorists and lazy black welfare recipients from the big city. Jobs matter too, but it’s not clear if that was really a big motivator compared to terrorists and welfare bums.

It’s worth adding that there’s nothing new about this, and Trump doesn’t seem to have appealed to this sentiment any more than previous Republicans. There’s plainly a racial component to voting for Republicans vs. Democrats, but it was no bigger in 2016 than in other years.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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