On this day in 1951, the Disney film Alice in Wonderland premiered in London. But it is us, you and me, who live in the real wonderland, friend! Bizarre, through-the-looking-glass stuff going on in our lives! Up-is-down shit, you dig? Not only has it been raining cats and dogs all year, but also the cats and dogs are ghosts and they wear shoes on their heads and hats on their feet. 

Here is a headline from the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

Couple flaunt swastika face masks at southwestern Minnesota Walmart

I hear wedding bells! Anyway, this is obviously a deeply disturbing headline. But in the Trump era, Nazis and their various accoutrements seem to be a fairly regular subplot in the news, so unfortunately it’s a bit “dog bites man,” but—Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!—there is one sentence in this story that is very “man bites dog.”

“If you vote for Biden, you’re going to be living in Nazi Germany,” the woman with the swastika mask told Mueller, as her companion bagged up toilet paper and an enormous canister of cheeseballs. (emphasis mine—BD) The two were apparently using the masks to protest Minnesota’s mask mandate, which took effect Saturday.

I get that it takes a thief to catch a thief, but this is a bit much. 

(via @MattDelong)

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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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