Maybe We Can Turn Trump Lemons Into Twitter Lemonade

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A couple of days ago Ariana Lenarsky was on a flight from Austin to Los Angeles. As she was walking down the aisle of the airplane, a guy reached out and stroked her calf. She reported this to the flight attendants, who nodded knowingly because other women had already complained about the guy. After a bit of back and forth, the captain radioed ahead and police met the plane when it landed. No one wanted to press charges because it would have been more trouble than it was worth, which led to this:

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of calling out ordinary schmoes on big media platforms, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a silver lining to the odious and repugnant Trump campaign? Maybe this could be it: If someone gropes you, haul out your phone, take his picture, and post it on your social media platform of choice. We’d need a hashtag for this. Maybe if it catches on, men will finally start paying a big enough social penalty for this crap that they’ll stop doing it.

OK, OK, that won’t happen. But maybe they’ll do less of it. Baby steps.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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