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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—Monika Bauerlein, CEO, and Brian Hiatt, Online Membership Director

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON MOTHER JONES' FINANCES

We need to start being more upfront about how hard it is keeping a newsroom like Mother Jones afloat these days.

Because it is, and because we're fresh off finishing a fiscal year, on June 30, that came up a bit short of where we needed to be. And this next one simply has to be a year of growth—particularly for donations from online readers to help counter the brutal economics of journalism right now.

Straight up: We need this pitch, what you're reading right now, to start earning significantly more donations than normal. We need people who care enough about Mother Jones’ journalism to be reading a blurb like this to decide to pitch in and support it if you can right now.

Urgent, for sure. But it's not all doom and gloom!

Because over the challenging last year, and thanks to feedback from readers, we've started to see a better way to go about asking you to support our work: Level-headedly communicating the urgency of hitting our fundraising goals, being transparent about our finances, challenges, and opportunities, and explaining how being funded primarily by donations big and small, from ordinary (and extraordinary!) people like you, is the thing that lets us do the type of journalism you look to Mother Jones for—that is so very much needed right now.

And it's really been resonating with folks! Thankfully. Because corporations, powerful people with deep pockets, and market forces will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. Only people like you will.

There's more about our finances in "News Never Pays," or "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," and we'll have details about the year ahead for you soon. But we already know this: The fundraising for our next deadline, $350,000 by the time September 30 rolls around, has to start now, and it has to be stronger than normal so that we don't fall behind and risk coming up short again.

Please consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

—Monika Bauerlein, CEO, and Brian Hiatt, Online Membership Director

payment methods

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