DAILY REMINDER OF WHAT IS AT STAKE IN THE 2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS.....

 

This is "christian" sharia brought to you by the apostasy of "christian" nationalism, dominionist, theobros, new apostolic reformationist, communion of reformed evangelical churches (crec), fascist heritage foundation & the gop / guardians of pedophiles & sexual predators-republican party. We can save our democratic republic by voting for Democratic candidates in the 2026 Midterm elections on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3RD, 2026. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT, PLEASE VOTE!!!

Here is Trump’s blueprint to rig the 2026 midterms 8SEP26

2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, we've got to finish the job!!! 3SEP26

The ACLU's most ambitious election protection program EVER & Judge Once Again Bars Postal Service From Restricting Mail-In Vote & Texas Has Suspended More Than 1 Million Voters Ahead of Senate Race 1SEP&27AUG26

ENLIGHTENING FACTS: MARGARET ATWOOD, A MODERN PROPHET

 

WE were warned in 1985 and in 2017 and we are being warned again in 2026. THE 2026 Midterm elections can be the beginning of restoring our democratic Republic. Please go to Rock the Vote to confirm you are registered to vote and all the information is correct and then please vote on 3 November 2026.

She was sitting in a walled city, surrounded by the sound of deliberate sonic booms, reading the newspaper and taking notes.

It was the spring of 1984, and Margaret Atwood had rented a typewriter in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall encircled the city on all sides. Every Sunday, the East German Air Force sent jets screaming overhead — not for any military purpose, but as a reminder. The Soviet Empire was watching. It was always watching. Elderly women who had survived the Second World War walked the streets without speaking much. Young men hid in the city to avoid military conscription elsewhere. West Berlin was a small island of the West sitting inside a totalitarian sea, and you could feel the pressure of that arrangement in the air.

Margaret Atwood was writing about a future in which women lost everything.

She had given herself one rule before she began, and she intended to keep it without exception: nothing would go into the book that had not already happened somewhere, at some time, to real people. No invented horrors. No atrocities she had imagined from nothing. Every single dark thing in her dystopia had to have a precedent in documented human history.

So she began collecting.

She cut newspaper articles and filed them in binders. Pieces about infant mortality rates. Reports from Romania, where the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had banned abortion and contraception and ordered women to produce children in service of the state. Stories about Soviet women losing ground in the workforce as the political climate shifted. News from American states where abortion access was being restricted. Headlines about baby stealing, forced surrogacy, missing children, women losing property rights they had only recently gained.

She did not call it research. She was, she would later say, just reading the news.

The novel had begun as a question she could not put down: if someone wanted to reverse every right women had gained — property ownership, employment, bank accounts, bodily autonomy — how would it be done? What would the mechanism look like?

The answer, she found, was not complicated. You would reverse the steps that had produced the freedom, one by one, in the right order. You would justify each reversal with safety, or morality, or the protection of family. You would make each step seem reasonable before the next one began.

In her dystopia, women were sorted by function and color-coded by clothing — a system with direct precedents in Renaissance sumptuary laws and Calvinist dress codes. Women who could bear children became handmaids, their bodies the legal property of the state. The handmaid system itself was drawn from the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany, where SS officers maintained biological wives to produce what the regime considered racially desirable children. The public executions in the novel came from the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. The stolen children given to commanders' families came from Argentina's Dirty War, in which military officers took infants from political dissidents they had murdered. The surveillance, the careful speech, the way people changed the subject when someone who might be listening came too close — Margaret was living all of that in West Berlin in 1984, in a city that understood what it meant to exist under eyes that never closed.

She finished the manuscript in early 1985, moving between Berlin and Canada and Alabama to complete it. She titled it The Handmaid's Tale.

When it was published in August of that year, critics called it a feminist 1984. Some praised the imagination behind it. Others dismissed it as paranoid, as overwrought, as the kind of book that mistakes anxiety for prophecy. One of the common refrains was that nothing like this could happen in modern America.

Margaret kept her newspaper clippings.

The book became a bestseller and won awards and was taught in schools and then banned from schools, sometimes the same schools that had assigned it. Parents objected to the sexual content, the treatment of religion, the political argument beneath the story. The objections themselves were a kind of evidence she had not been looking for but could not ignore.

For decades the novel lived in that particular category of books that are considered important warnings about somewhere else, some other time, some other kind of society — not here, not now, not us.

Then 2016 arrived and something shifted.

Hulu announced a television adaptation. The series premiered in April 2017, three months after a new administration took office in Washington with explicit intentions to reshape the country, the same month that states began passing laws restricting abortion access, the same month that women in many places felt, in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore, that something was moving in a direction that had a name.

The show became a cultural phenomenon. But it was what happened outside of the screen that no one had anticipated.

Women began appearing at political protests dressed in the handmaids' red robes and white bonnets. They stood in silence, in rows, outside the Texas Capitol while lawmakers debated abortion restrictions inside. They appeared at Senate confirmation hearings. They marched in Washington and Buenos Aires and London. The costume from a novel that critics had once called paranoid became the uniform of real political resistance in multiple countries simultaneously.

A warning dressed as fiction had become a language that real people used to describe what they felt was actually happening.

In June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional protection for abortion access that had stood for nearly fifty years, search traffic for The Handmaid's Tale rose by six thousand percent. The book, written in 1984, became the number one bestseller again — thirty-seven years after its original publication. Women who had never read it, or who had read it and filed it away as a period piece, were suddenly searching to understand whether it was a prediction.

Margaret Atwood, by then in her eighties, gave the same answer she had been giving since 1985.

She had not made anything up. It had already happened. She had simply remembered.

The newspaper clippings from 1984 and 1985 are stored in boxes at the University of Toronto archives. Researchers who examine them report a consistent and unsettling experience: the headlines feel current. The stories about reproductive rights, about women losing economic standing, about children separated from parents — the dates say 1985. The content reads like this week.

In 2019 she published The Testaments, a sequel that won the Booker Prize. By then she had stopped needing to defend the plausibility of her fictional world. She was watching pieces of it arrive.

What Margaret Atwood understood in that walled city in 1984, sitting with her binders of newspaper clippings, was something that most people find genuinely difficult to hold in their minds: dystopia does not announce itself. It does not arrive with villains explaining their intentions. It moves slowly, through restrictions framed as protections, through curtailments framed as safety measures, through the patient reversal of freedoms one at a time until the reversals feel normal.

And it is never new. It is always a return to something that already happened, somewhere, to people who also believed it could not happen to them.

She was forty-four years old in 1984 when she wrote a warning and disguised it as a novel, following a rule that nothing in it could be invented — that every horror had to be borrowed from history because history had already provided more than enough.

The terrifying part, she has said more than once, was never that she predicted the future.

It was that she never had to.

For those who believe that the most important warnings are the ones we dismiss as exaggerated until we suddenly cannot — what piece of history do you think the present moment most urgently needs to remember?

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MOTHER JONES DAILY Navigating the public health zombie apocalypse: Fauci, RFK Jr., and the Latest in American Health, What does "Woke 1" even mean?, Trump admin releases final rule attacking healthcare for low-income trans kids, Pete Hegseth dreams of holy war. Meet his spiritual adviser., A DSA candidate lost a messy race for Wisconsin governor, The Great Inflammation Panic 12AUG26

 

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August 12, 2026 Whenever I feel like the zombie apocalypse is approaching–which, to be honest, has been happening a lot more lately–I know I can turn to epidemiologist and health communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera. For me, she’s a light that can penetrate the sometimes murky atmosphere of all things health-related, especially when it feels like we have so much conflicting information coming at us from sources that we used to think of as reliable. Just think about the public health news we’ve been living through lately. Lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. Cruise ship passengers contracting a deadly form of hantavirus. Legionnaires’ disease (yet again) in big cities. RFK Jr. refusing any responsibility for measles outbreaks. That’s just a brief list from this summer and I haven’t even mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci being held in contempt of Congress during a hostile Congressional hearing over the Covid-19 pandemic. So, this week we’re bringing Jessica back to help us make sense of what’s happening with our food, our health, and how the Trump administration is (or in many cases is not) responding. It’s a great conversation like always and I hope you check it out. — Al Letson, host of Reveal and More To The Story

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What does "Woke 1" even mean? BY ALEX NGUYEN Trump admin releases final rule attacking healthcare for low-income trans kids BY MADISON PAULY Pete Hegseth dreams of holy war. Meet his spiritual adviser. BY KIERA BUTLER A DSA candidate lost a messy race for Wisconsin governor BY ALEX NGUYEN

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I love Ms Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian!!!

 

FROM SEN BERNIE SANDERS I-VT; Four great candidates I am asking you to support today 21MAI26

 

SEN Sanders has been traveling the country, often with Rep ( AOC ) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY endorsing progressive candidates in local, state and national elections and engaging with voters who are committed to saving our democratic Republic from the fascist heritage foundation's project 2025, the authoritarian theocratic oligarchy they expect the corrupt drumpf / trump-vance administration and the congressional gop / greed over people-republican party to impose on America. Here is his latest e mail, check it out and if you can make a donation of whatever you can afford to support these candidates ( I did ). And feel free to send this e mail to family, friends, coworkers, all you think may want or need to see it. AND PLEASE check your voter registration status to make sure you are still registered to vote or how to register to vote if you are not!!! WE NEED EVERY ELIGIBLE VOTER WHO LOVES OUR COUNTRY TO VOTE TO SHOW DRUMPF / TRUMP-VANCE AND THE GOP / GREED OVER PEOPLE-REPUBLICAN PARTY WE ARE WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!!!

Dear friends,

Over the last year and a half, I have traveled all over this country. We've held more than 40 events, in 26 states, and talked to almost half a million people. Just a few weeks ago I was in Ohio, Minnesota and Michigan with our great candidates - all of whom are running campaigns that I believe are going to lead to victory.

And what I can tell you without any fear of contradiction is that the American people do not want an oligarchic form of government, they do not want an authoritarian form of government, they do not want to live under a kleptocracy where a president gets rich by being president. They sure as hell are sick and tired of the arrogance and greed of the billionaire class, and they want an end to these horrific and unconstitutional wars that Trump is waging.

Most importantly, they are prepared to fight back.

Sisters and brothers -- we find ourselves living in an unprecedented moment in American history.

We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and, yet, we are asked to accept as “normal” the reality that tens of millions of Americans struggle every day to afford the basic necessities of life: food, housing, health care or education. And, while 60% live paycheck to paycheck, the Oligarchs have never had it so good.

We live in a “democracy,” but we are told that it is legal and proper for one man, the wealthiest person on earth, to spend $270 million in campaign contributions to help elect a president who then provides huge tax breaks and other benefits to the very rich.

We live in a nation whose Declaration of Independence in 1776 boldly proclaimed “that all men are created equal” while, today, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever and the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%.

And not to scare you, but nothing less than the very future of our country, our planet and our democracy depends on what we do next.

Next week, the Fight Oligarchy Tour is going back on the road -- returning to Maine for a pair of events after our last visit 8 months ago.

A lot has happened since then.

Graham Platner, who was virtually unknown and taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment in his race for U.S. Senate, is now the presumptive nominee in the campaign to defeat Senator Susan Collins.

And Troy Jackson, running for Governor of Maine, who started as a significant underdog in his race now finds himself in a competitive campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Before I get to Maine, I am hoping you can split a contribution between Troy Jackson's campaign and two other candidates who are worthy of our support:

The first is Will Lawrence who is running for Congress in a competitive Democratic primary in Michigan. He is an accomplished organizer who co-founded the youth-led Sunrise Movement. In Congress, he will champion Medicare for All, protect Social Security, and demand real accountability for big tech and AI companies.

Trey Martin is running for Congress in Oklahoma. He is an Ironworker, union president, and eighth-generation Oklahoman who knows Oklahoma and the people who make it work. He’s building a movement strong enough to take on the powerful interests making life harder for working families and refocus our politics on the issues that matter most.

Claire Valdez is a union organizer who worked minimum-wage fast food jobs and understands firsthand how this economy fails working people. In my view, Congress needs more voices who come from America's working class. Claire has the experience and vision we need to take on the oligarchy and fight for unions, Medicare for All, and affordable housing. I’m proud to endorse her campaign for Congress.

Needless to say, given our corrupt campaign finance system, our strong progressive candidates are taking on powerful special interests and their super-PACs. They need our help. So I am asking you today - please split a contribution of $27 or whatever you can afford between Will Lawrence, Trey Martin's and Claire Valdez’s campaigns for Congress, and Troy Jackson’s campaign for governor. Please do it before I get to Maine for a rally this weekend. All four are great progressives who will need our help if they are going to win.

If you've stored your info with ActBlue, we'll process your split contribution instantly:

CONTRIBUTE $27   CONTRIBUTE OTHER

When we act collectively we have the ability not only to create a dynamic progressive movement, but we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.

That’s the goal. Let’s do it.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

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