December 5, 2022

The House of Windsor Is in Shambles. Yay.

There’ll be plenty to ridicule in the lead-up to Charles’ big ass party in May. Let me do that for you.

Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/AP

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Once adored for their pristine blowouts and dutiful silence in our age of the Kardashians, Kate Middleton and her husband, William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor, draw jeers these days. Loud, jumbotron-ed boos smack in the middle of their first stateside tour in nearly a decade, a three-day visit that barely registered with bored Americans.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph?” Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla responded, looking dead serious when asked whether he had met the royal couple during their attendance at a Celtics game. “Oh no, I did not. I’m only familiar with one royal family. I don’t know too much about that one.” 

The apparent yawns over Kate and William’s visit to Boston came amid more trouble for the royals, including the resignation of a woman called Lady Susan Hussey from Buckingham Palace after Hussey reportedly peppered a Black charity boss with repeated racist questions about where she was from. Then came the double-whammy. Two trailers for the upcoming Netflix doc, “Harry & Meghan,” dropped days apart from each other, prompting the ever-calm Daily Mail  to yell of a “DELIBERATE” effort to ding Kate and William’s tour.

Meanwhile, the latest season of “The Crown” was boring as hell, and left many wondering whether Charles himself was behind the bizarre choice of Dominic West, far too rugged and handsome for the Charles we know, to play the sympathetic role of a progressive young prince struggling under an old-fashioned monarchy.

Yeah, things are strange for the House of Windsor these days—and I’m happy to document the mounting mess. After all, the monarchy is an immoral institution that diverts untold millions from the British public while health workers are treated like shit; the notion of a King Charles in 2022 is nothing short of absurd; and as Meghan Markle detailed, is a racist hell hole.

Will my blogging finally kill off the monarchy? No. But it’ll keep me buzzing as I periodically mumble “down with the monarchy” to myself. There’ll be plenty to ridicule, especially in the lead-up to Charles’ big ass party in May, so watch this space for more.

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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.

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