March 13, 2017

Perhaps Obama Ordered Trump’s Microwave Oven to Spy On Him

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A few days ago, Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway talked to the Bergen Record about the possibility that Trump Tower had been wiretapped:

What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately. There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, through their — certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways, and microwaves that turn into cameras, etc., so we know that that is just a fact of modern life.

Conway repeated this claim yesterday on one of the Sunday chat shows, and she has a point. You can aim a concentrated beam of microwaves at a window and make out conversations on the other side.1 This is hardly science fic—wait. What?

She was talking about microwave ovens? For God’s sake. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: why does anyone talk to Conway? Seriously, what’s the point?

1Yeah, yeah, it’s actually a laser that you aim at a window. But maybe it’s a microwave laser?

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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.

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