May 7, 2018

The Big Lie

AP Photo/Danny Johnston

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I imagine most of you already know this, but just in case:

This is basically the unanimous view on Fox News in prime time. If you watch Fox—or listen to Rush or read Breitbart—this is what you believe. Ignore the fact that the Attorney General, the deputy attorney general, the FBI director, and Mueller himself were all put in place by Donald Trump or his appointees. The developing party line is that once Democrats and their allies in the deep state finally realized that Trump was for real and the jig was up, they invented Mueller. His entire investigation is a monstrous, Democrat-fueled deception designed to bring down a president elected by working-class voters who were finally fed up with liberals destroying our country.

This is their story, and it’s spreading more and more widely in conservative ranks. All the conspiracy theories of the past few years; all the “deep state” nonsense; all the hysteria over Benghazi and Hillary’s emails and the war again Christianity: all of it has been spadework for this. Soon, we’re going to find out if Donald Trump really can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it because the American conservative movement has convinced its supporters that it wasn’t a gun, it wasn’t Trump, no one died, and it was all Photoshopped by Democrats anyway.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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