We Are Outraged Over the Outrage About the Outrage

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I don’t know. No matter what we say, maybe we all like having a reality-TV president:

What’s this all about? Well, you remember the dumb video that Donald Trump posted on Sunday? The one where he’s body slamming a wrestler whose head has been replaced by the CNN logo? We all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 1.

Then we tracked down the origin of the video. It came from someone named HanAssholeSolo on the alt-right reddit sewer r/The_Donald. It turned out that Han had also posted some inane anti-semitic memes, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 2.

Then CNN tracked down the actual person behind HanAssholeSolo. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be some dude who had been acting out and was terrified at the prospect of becoming national news just because our president was stupid enough to retweet his stuff. So CNN decided not to publish his name “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”

However, CNN also said it “reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” This sounded like a threat, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 3.

Is there anything we won’t use as an excuse to get outraged? Trump’s tweet was puerile, but it was just a joke, not a call to violence. HanAssholeSolo is an idiot, but he’s just one of millions of individual idiots, not someone with any power or influence unless we give it to him. And under anything but the most hostile reading, CNN obviously wasn’t threatening anyone. They were just covering themselves: If it turned out that Han was playing them, they were under no obligation to maintain his anonymity.

Not that it matters. If CNN can track this guy down, so can someone else. He’ll be viral on Twitter before long no matter how abjectly he’s apologized.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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