Thread by @JoyAnnReid

Last night in Fort Worth after a long time posing for selfies and chatting with people (Fort Worth folks are truly some of the nicest people ever! Even had a lovely convo with a tatted, right wing union guy) a woman walked up to me as my producers and I were getting in our SUV…

She was very Texas: pretty, tall and blonde. Security was literally about to put us in our ride when she walked up and very politely asked if it was too late to take a selfie. I said let’s selfie! Then what she said next stopped me, my executive producer Tina and my AP Kam, cold.

She thanked us for coming to Fort Worth and added: “I feel like I live in Gilead.” Her voice was shaking and I thought she might cry. “I have daughters…” she said and her voice trailed off. I assured her it would be ok; that this awfulness can be fixed. But I was leaving Gilead.

We talked about her a lot on the ride back to our hotel. She was far from the only person, mostly women but also some men in Fort Worth and Dallas the day before who expressed concern or fear about the loss for American women of bodily autonomy. But she made it so plain.

When we first got to the restaurant where we were doing our show, the first person I chatted with and asked what issues she most cares about was a very young white woman in her 20s who immediately said “my body my choice. Roe.” Unfortunately she was not registered to vote…

…and she assumed “it’s too late. There’s nothing we can do now” to restore women’s freedom. I explained to her first how to register (too late though for this election) and that choosing who runs her state is even more important now since they make the rules for women’s bodies.

She actually went on vote.org to check it out right then and there. Hopefully she’ll register in time for the next election. She did say that if she was a voter she probably would be a Republican but not on this issue, and this was the only issue she mentioned.

One of the most potent tools autocracy has is learned helplessness. People begin to believe they simply can’t change the reality that has been imposed on them so they stop trying. They adjust. Only a few keep resisting and they pay a heavy price (Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea)

I’ve visited Cubs and that’s what struck me the most: the combination of adjustment, apathy, quiet complaint, mainly focused on even small economic gain or loss, and sporadic, brave resistance, which would need significant momentum and scale to change the system.

That’s what’s happening in Iran, right? Women and young people, even some grandparents, are accelerating their resistance to the religious extremist theocracy. It’s beautiful and inspiring but it took 43 years. (Here’s praying it succeeds!) Let’s let the women of Iran inspire us.

I’m on my way home to the DC area now and I swear I feel like one of those international delegates who visited Gilead in season one of @HandmaidsOnHulu — how they asked handmaids how their lives were, and felt so guilty that they could leave and not get anyone out.

But unlike Gilead, which was a fictional right wing Christian* theocracy that broke off from the U.S. after staging a violent insurrection 🤔 we can still stop this. It’s not too late. We don’t have to let insurrectionists, religious extremists and election deniers into office.

If you’re in a state like Texas where they’ve banned abortion as rape proliferates alongside gun massacres at Walmart or targeting little kids at school while fake pious men regulate women’s & girls’ bodies and hand out DNA kits to ID the bodies later—you can still vote them out.

And to those claiming these issues don’t really matter to women: that we’ll go quietly and contentedly into the dark night of state ownership because inflation, while extremists install a fascist theocracy where elections don’t matter: what I’ve seen is that women aren’t fooled.

Despite all the gaslighting, many of us know that no U.S. politician can fix the global price of oil or make Putin stop Hitlering in Ukraine and driving oil and food prices up even more. Best bet is to send Ukraine lots more money so they can keep whupping his raggedy army.

And Republicans’ cynical game of running on crime—an old strategy to try to whip up demographically panicked white voters, along with immigration—was always their election plan. It just got temporarily interrupted by Alito’s “defender of the MAGA faith” summer.

The second the election is over there will be no more talk about crime, except on local news, where it’s always the lede, and when national media covers the actual crime that’s rising: mass shootings. Because there will be more. Many of them in Texas if things stay as they are.

And we see you, corporate price gougers. If you wanted to charge less for the goods you won’t even pay decent wages to your workers to produce, you could. But you won’t because you’re”profit taking.” Maybe a Senate with more Democrats in it can pass a law making y’all pay taxes.

Bottom line: I have yet to talk to a woman of any age or race, on the road, back in the DMV, in New York, on the phone or anywhere, who’s not pissed off or terrified about these religious fanatics on the Supreme Court handing women and girls over to these state politicians.

The only question is: will enough women take the one action they can to prevent us from becoming Gilead—complete with the violent insurrection, Commander Lindsey Graham’s promised national abortion ban and democracy deniers controlling and essentially ending elections—by voting.

While we still can.