October 12, 2016

President Obama Sniffs His Hand at a Campaign Rally to Prove He’s Not Demonically Possessed

But did he smell sulfur? Ask Alex Jones.

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/30192882505/">The White House</a>/Flickr

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On Monday, conspiracy radio host Alex Jones made a major announcement: White House sources had informed him that Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama are “abject, psychopathic” demons “from Hell.”

Jones has hosted Donald Trump on his radio show, InfoWars, and quickly emerged as one of the Republican nominee’s leading boosters in conservative media. So at a rally Tuesday in Greensboro, North Carolina, Obama decided to respond. “I was reading the other day, there’s a guy on the radio who apparently, Trump’s on his show frequently, he said me and Hillary are demons. Said we smell like sulfur. Ain’t that something!”

Obama then paused to smell his own hand.

“Now, I mean, come on, people!” he said.

Trump only appeared on Jones’ show once, but both men have close relationships with conservative dirty trickster Roger Stone, a Nixon campaign vet who serves as an informal Trump adviser and a frequent InfoWars guest.

Jones, in case you’re unfamiiar with him, is a 9/11 Truther who claims the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. He has been critical of past Republican candidates, but he can’t get enough of The Donald. Jones also helped to popularize the “Hillary for Prison” t-shirts that are now ubiquitous at conservative rallies, and his show is an incubator for some of Trump’s wildest accusations—including the claim that the November election will be “rigged.”

“It is surreal,” Jones commented on his program in August, “to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”

But maybe Jones had a point. If Obama’s not the devil, how does the president explain this?

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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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