639 Days Til The 2026 Midterms, Plus

Am I one to complain? Plus

It’s always darkest (credit Weldon Berger)

639 Days Til The 2026 Midterms

You know what they say: It’s always darkest 639 days before dawn.

I’ve been watching leading Democratic party lights on BlueSky, the one-day-perhaps-a-genuine-Twitter-competitor which I would encourage everybody who participates in that kind of thing to join. With no exceptions that I’ve seen, including the satisfyingly caustic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, every single post they’ve made has been describing what the paper president is doing—as if, broadly, we don’t know!—and declaring it to be outrageous and unacceptable.

All the things are of course outrageous but evidently not unacceptable, because they’re not actually doing anything about it. They’re just recapping the news, which pretty much anybody who bothers to interact with them even passively already knows, and insisting that this, for any given value of “this,” cannot stand.

What has finally dawned upon me is that they’re setting up for the midterms, which are 639 days away, which is 53 times the number of Presidents Musk and Trump days we’ve already experienced. Can anybody tell me with a straight face that we’re guaranteed or even likely to have our usual undemocratic democratic elections after 53 more stretches like this?

Why no: no you cannot.

Which is why it would seem incumbent upon Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and other putative leaders to not just do something themselves, at the very least trying to throw entire suitcases of wrenches into the legislative works, but to help you and me understand what we can do to throw our own individual wrenches into the gears.

But they’re not, with the partial exception of AOC, who is not even a party leader. She comes from an organizing background and she’s emphasizing the importance of citizen organizing against ICE and other instruments of state repression. Which is important! but not an explanation of what feckless Democrats are doing to put their own bodies upon the gears.

Jeffries had probably the worst take so far:

I mean, fuck OFF, man. This reeks of passive compliance. This is horrible. This is disheartening.

Can we get a “render unto Caesar” next?

We are living through a coup. Christofascists and technofascists and Fascist fascists and just good ol’ ultra-corrupt grifters and grafters and thieves (oh my!) are trying to dismantle the “democratic characteristics” part of our oligarchy-with-democratic-characteristics and although they’re not necessarily the smoothest operators, they’re doing a decent job—certainly much much better than last time. This is not the moment to focus on the midterms. Fucking fucks.

Wired Magazine editor Tim Marchman says that “in a very literal, not take-having sense, Elon Musk is the head of government while Donald Trump is the head of state.” Does anybody recall electing Elon Musk to anything? Do we have 639 days to make a course correction? No and absolutely fucking no.

Am I one to complain?

Obviously. I want to recommend some newsletters and alternative press outlets for you which offer some actual organizing tips in the first instance and one-sided news coverage in the second. Some of them you may have seen here before.

“Grim Kim” Kelly is a labor organizer and writer (and heavy metal music critic) who works at In These Times—to which subscribers to my newsletter have afforded me a subscription and to which you should consider the same—and other unvarnished publications, including

Teen Vogue, which I’ve also mentioned here and which is a valuable resource for anybody, not just teens or tweens, with organizing tips and good politics coverage.

Kelly Hayes is a writer and organizer (and an excellent photographer) I’ve mentioned before and who must be mentioned again. You can subscribe to her newsletter/website and read her wherever you can.

The Quakers are woke. You can check to see if there’s an immigrant protection/anti-ICE program near you.

404Media is another non-billionaire, non-corporate news source, with a specialty in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, although that may become a museum item if we continue on the current track. At $100/year for a basic subscription (they have limited-access free ones too), they’re too rich for my blood but some of you can probably swing it.

If you want to search for, say, anti-ICE organizations or organizers, DON’T USE GOOGLE SEARCH. In fact, don’t use it for anything ever, but in this particular instance you’ll just get links to commercials for ice makers and de-icers and pretty much anything but what you’re looking for. Google is counter-revolutionary. They suck. I’m now using DuckDuckGo as the search engine in all my browsers; among other benefits it won’t track your searches.

I’ll have more media and organizing stuff in future newsletters.

Nikola Jokić

I love basketball. I love Nikola Jokić, the greatest big man since Wilt Chamberlain (who would have been even greater had he not been so profligate with his precious bodily fluids). While Chamberlain was the embodiment of absurd athleticism and finesse, Jokić is simply absurd. Not that he isn’t athletic, with his chiseled body and an astounding 12” vertical leap that he unleashes at will, at least at home in Denver’s thin air, but just watch this five-eyed guy in action.

Music

65 Days of Static, Utopian Frequencies (“KMF”); Khruangbin, A La Sala, (“Live on Tiny Desk”).

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Take care; be well.