The more I think about it, the more it eerily makes sense.
I've never read Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, nor have I seen a single episode of the recent television adaptation that became popular during the Trump years when third wave feminists convinced themselves (and way too many other people) that Vice President Mike Pence was a theonomist hellbent on subjugating women and regulating their menstrual cycles from his office in D.C.
So to understand the premise a little better, I turned to everyone's favorite editable source for online information, Wikipedia. Here's what I got:
After a staged attack that killed the President of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution. The United States Constitution is suspended, newspapers are censored, and what was formerly the United States of America is changed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime moves quickly to consolidate its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including traditional Christian denominations. In addition, the regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious fanaticism among its newly created social classes. Above all, the biggest change is the severe limitation of people's rights, especially those of women, who are not allowed to read, write, own property, or handle money. Most significantly, women are deprived of control over their own reproductive functions.
It's apparently around that last line that the modern TV series focuses. In an era where the one belief that energizes and galvanizes progressives more than any other is the right to dismember unborn children in the womb, imagining a society where that wasn't allowed is the stuff of dystopian nightmares to the left. If we can't crush the skulls of unwanted children, vacuum them from the womb, and discard them in dumpsters as medical waste, then we might as well just make all women wear red robes and white bonnets. Or something like that.
But it's the sentence and a half before that last line that intrigues me. That reference to the societal embrace of a "religious fanaticism" that distinguishes certain new "social classes." The description of people having their rights severely limited, where people are not allowed to read or write unless they are approved by the ruling class.
Why does it stand out at me, you ask? Well, that's what I was referencing earlier. I saw this and it clicked:
Commentator Erick Erickson was suspended by the social media titan Twitter for acknowledging scientific reality – that a biological man is a man. Scientific reality cannot be written these days because the new religious fanaticism that controls the elite class in charge of monitoring and approving our conversations deems it to be hateful. Are you picking up what I'm laying down? Are you seeing what Dana Loesch is talking about in her tweet?
Now, I know Erickson is a man (and he even identifies as one too), which is not the proper gender for a handmaid. But Allie Beth Stuckey is, and she met the same fate just a few days prior.
These are the ideas that cannot be spoken, these are the words that must not be written. So saith the thought-keepers.
Apparently all the handmaids in the TV series have a common phrase they use as both greetings and farewells; they say to one another, "under his eye." Having not seen the show, I'm not clear on whether the "his" is a reference to God, or their overseeing patriarchs, that small collection of men known as guardians who own their every move.
As American society moves increasingly online – from our conversations to our commerce – it's a nondebatable reality that we are all under the eye of our own online progressive guardians. They will decide who can talk and what can be said.
Who could have predicted that conservatives and non-progressives would end up being the handmaids when this dystopian fiction became real? I guess at least I can be thankful that when they put me in my red gown and bonnet, anybody who mocks me as a dude in a dress will get sent to Twitter jail for being hateful.
—
P.S. While you're here, treat yourself to our latest video ... you'll be happy you did 👌 👇
