I know an election is coming up soon because the media has started appealing to various groups through scare tactics and righteous indignation. Like a person with divining rods trying to locate water underground, the leftist media is feeling out what kind of outrage will work best to consolidate the vote.
Given the fact that women came out in large numbers for Democrats like New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, the left seems to have chosen its target for the midterm elections. The fearmongering has begun with 60 Minutes leading the charge.
The investigative reporters of 60 Minutes decided to make a report about Margaret Atwood, the author of every AWFL's favorite book, The Handmaid's Tale. It even starts with a huge attention grabber; Atwood herself takes a blowtorch to The Handmaid's Tale to show off the unburnable book technology, which is obviously meant as a symbol for the book's resilience in the face of would-be destruction.
I'll spare you the details of the report, because most of it doesn't actually matter. The important part is that 60 Minutes uses the term "banned" quite a bit and ties this censorship to the Christian right.
"Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian," said 60 Minutes.
Margaret Atwood, author of 64 books including “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has seen her work banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, and anti-Christian. https://t.co/nBbi6le8WX pic.twitter.com/nT8Vlk0BbV
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 10, 2025
Of course, as you get further into the report, you discover that the "banning" happening is actually just the book being removed from shelves in schools, which is an entirely different context than the one you're supposed to assume right off the bat, which is that the pesky Christian right has banned it on the government level.
There are a lot of moving parts here. Firstly, The Handmaid's Tale is a book that women on the left hold up as a literary mirror to our society because they think the world of the Tale is just like the real world, or at the very least, undoubtedly headed that way. They don handmaid costumes and march around silently to "raise awareness" about the ongoing oppression of women that isn't actually happening at all.
You can't tell them that, though, because they've been convinced by professors, media, activists, and female social structures that they are. If you were to get one or two of them alone and ask them what rights they don't have, they'll either go completely silent or say "abortion," which was never a right, but its legal status is a state-level issue that differs from state to state.
That detail doesn't actually need to register. The narrative that women are losing their rights is all that matters here.
Then there's the book itself. It's not banned, it's just not allowed in various schools because the book does contain content that isn't suitable for children. According to Screen Rant, A Court of Roses and Thorns has also been in quite a few schools. Even The Lord of the Rings has schools where it's not allowed. If a school board deems the content not suitable for young readers, then it's not, and when it comes to The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure young girls should be reading about how the wives of rich men assist in impregnating other women.
So you have the author pretending she's oppressed to a bunch of her fans who think they're oppressed when neither party actually is.
What's the point?
The midterm elections are just over a year away, and the seeds of feminist outrage must be planted now if they're to bear fruit in time for November 2026. If I were the Democrats, I'd have watched these recent elections where women turned out in droves to put Democrats in, and my thought would be, "I could really manipulate the holy hell out of them and gain some power back."
It's not going to work for every woman, obviously, but if you can galvanize the ones already leaning your way and attract the ignorant with fearmongering, then you've got yourself a pretty deep pool of votes.
The Democrats have always been pretty talented when it comes to manipulating women, and it doesn't really help that the GOP doesn't bother to learn to speak to women in ways that appeal to them.
Read: Women Turned Out in Large Numbers for Democrats, Proving the GOP Still Has a Communication Problem
Still, the question of how well this strategy will work is in the air. A lot of these victories were relegated to predominantly blue areas. Regardless, Republicans should find a counter-strategy.
