On November 8 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I had been out of a mental institution for four days.
The next day, every liberal was going through it, but the staff of Mother Jones was especially shell-shocked. Having had a very public nervous breakdown and suicide attempt only 6 weeks earlier, I joked about this to my then-best friend, James West, the other senior editor in NY.
He said, “Weirdly, you’re the only person at this company I’m not worried about right now. You’ve just spent a month learning about coping mechanisms.”
This turned out to be true. Everyone else went a bit crazy and I had some distance.
The months that followed were characterized by grief, recrimination, and a fairly spectacular amount of internal finger-pointing. Some staffers felt the magazine had been too soft on Hillary Clinton during the primary and blamed it on us since “Bernie would have won.” etc… Some staffers felt the left had caused this by bitching about Hillary so much, etc…
Everyone was mad at everyone else, and the mood in the organization was, to put it charitably, not light.
One month before the events described in this document, the editor-in-chief —who was one of the people I was closest with—called me at midnight and told me to stop making jokes in my posts. “No one,” she said, “is in the mood for laughter.”
She was not wrong. But she was also, it turned out, not entirely right.
THE 2017 MOTHER JONES STAFF BOARD REP ELECTION
In March 2017, the staff board representative election came up. The staff board rep is exactly what it sounds like: a staff member who sits on the Mother Jones board and represents the staff’s interests. It is a position of modest importance. You essentially fly to the board meetings every few months and take notes, which you then relay to the staff. But it is a fun job and one that lets you network with rich people and senior staff (most of whom also usually attend).
It is not, under any normal circumstances, a position that would inspire a shadow campaign run by someone who had not spoken to the candidate, a secret electoral conspiracy, and reporters doing scoops on their own company.
But spring 2017 was not normal circumstances. We were people who had been told we weren’t allowed to laugh for four months, and someone had just left the door open.
So, a little over 9 years ago today, I decided to run a campaign on behalf of James West, who had lost a boring election two years earlier and was at the time on vacation in Australia. He was unaware of this. The offices came alive with the sound of electioneering
The thread is a time capsule.
(I have done my best to streamline this so you get the story via an epistolary narrative, but in reality, this involved more people and thousands more words. I have not edited the emails that are included beyond one spot where I acknowledge it. Don’t ignore the email headers because they’re key to understanding the story lol)
