I Can Relate to Tom Steyer Standing Awkwardly Between Sanders and Warren

Been there!

CNN

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Have you seen this clip? If you’re stuck at an airport, or watching CNN of your own free will at any point in the next 24 hours, you probably will! After a contentious exchange during Tuesday’s presidential debate, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren appeared to have…some sort of interaction afterward.

What did they say? I don’t know, I’m not a lip-reader or a body-language expert (which is kind of a scam, if we’re being honest). I think the fixation on this moment will end up embarrassing us all. But I can tell you exactly what the third member of this conversation, Tom Steyer, was thinking, because this is how I feel literally every time I am forced to mingle at a social event:

First thought: “Oh, I’ll just try to squeeze in here.”

Second thought: “Hmm, there’s no opening.”

Third thought: “Have I been standing here too long?”

Fourth thought: “Time to pretend to refill my drink!”

Steyer, for his part, says he has no idea what the two senators were talking about. Okay, man.

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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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