May 21, 2019

Kris Kobach Needs a 24/7 Government Jet

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach on election night, conceding defeat to Democrat Laura Kelly, who crushed him in a state that Trump won by 21 points.Mark Reinstein/ZUMA

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Everyone’s favorite story from last night is about Kris Kobach’s set of demands before he’d accept a job as Donald Trump’s “immigration czar”:

24/7 access to a government jet! Just in case the czar needs to conduct an emergency visit to the border at 3 am.

But the best part is this bland sentence in the New York Times piece: “The list was described by three people familiar with it.” A lot of people must really have it in for Kobach, since leaking this list would obviously doom his appointment—assuming the demands themselves hadn’t already done it.

Like Ted Cruz, Kobach is truly an odious person who nobody likes. Even his fellow Kansans want nothing to do with him these days. Someone needs to give him a late night gig on Fox News and then the rest of us can forget he ever existed.

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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.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

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.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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