Know Your Right Wing Conspiracy Memes, Part 376

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I was chatting with a friend the other day about the different universes that liberals and conservatives inhabit these days. It’s not just that partisans become constantly obsessed with new shiny objects, but that their shiny objects are so wildly different. And very often, folks on one side have no idea that the shiny objects on the other side even exist.

Take today, for example. Here’s the home page at Drudge:

Spoiler alert: He’s the lead Secret Service agent on Hillary Clinton’s detail. The Secret Service confirmed this a month ago during yet another shiny object hunt, when they wearily explained that an object seen in his hand was a flashlight, not a diazepam injector in case Clinton had a seizure.1 Now, though, we’ve apparently moved on: the Drudge story—from the same lunatic who peddled the diazepam idiocy—suggests that the guy isn’t even a Secret Service agent. “Do you think the media will ever ask the campaign about this guy?” he asks in boldface, knowing they never will because they all know perfectly well who he is.

And just as Sean Hannity gleefully picked up the fake diazepam story, Drudge is now picking up the fake “not a Secret Service agent” story. It is this week’s conservative shiny object, and most people will never even know it’s making the rounds. But it is. This is your conservative media at work.

1This was—and still is—part of the crank conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton having some mysterious disease that she’s hiding from the public, presumably to ensure that Tim Kaine becomes president when she keels over and dies.

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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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