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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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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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.

payment methods

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