Editor’s Note: SPOILER WARNING.
I was unfamiliar with The Handmaid’s Tale until the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
Americans tend to live in separate realities these days. We don’t watch the same television shows as radical progressives. I first became aware of the show and the novel it was based on when Lacy MacAuley, a prominent DC based Antifa activist who has clashed with us for years, showed up at the Kavanaugh hearings dressed like a handmaid. I thought to myself this must be what it is like for a feminist to go to hell and made a mental note of it and didn’t think much more about it in the Trump years.
After the news broke in May that the Supreme Court was going to strike down Roe v. Wade, there was a big surge in chatter among progressives about how America was becoming Gilead. Feminists resumed LARPing as handmaids. Margaret Atwood, the author of the novel and creator of the Hulu show, wrote a big article in The Atlantic about how the Supreme Court was making Gilead a reality.
Naturally, I decided to play along with it and poke fun at the rising hysteria. The only constitutional right that was being taken away was the right of women to murder their own children. The reality of the situation was that abortion was only going to become illegal in a dozen or so states while being restricted in a dozen or so others. Abortion was probably going to become more accessible in Blue States. Most abortions don’t require surgery these days and abortion pills are already available and the supply of them would likely find some way to meet demand. The likely impact of the Dobbs decision on the actual number of abortions taking place in Red States was being exaggerated for political reasons.
From my perspective, the only thing that the Dobbs decision really accomplished was sanding off the roughest edges of Roe. Abortion could now be banned and regulated in states where it was always unpopular. We have states where marijuana has been legalized. We have states with different tax codes and regulatory environments. There were vast differences between the states in COVID restrictions. There are differences between the states in gun laws. A mature person would look at this as just another difference between the states, shrug his shoulders and concede that the people of the states should be allowed to govern themselves. We live in a federal republic which has always been too vast and too culturally diverse for top down decisions in Washington that try to settle polarizing cultural issues.
Liberals are incapable of looking at it this way. Every minor setback for the progressive agenda is a catastrophe. Every state in the country has to be remade by force in their image. Every country on earth has to become more like them. They have to control everything. Alabama has to have the same laws as Massachusetts. Self government is a threat to their authority. Progressives have a divine right to embed their values in the Constitution. We are here to follow their orders and adjust ourselves to their cultural preferences. They can’t sleep at night knowing there is any deviation anywhere from their norms.
America is becoming Gilead in exactly the same sense that Georgia is a “Jim Eagle” state where “Jim Crow on steroids” is practiced. This sort of overblown, hyperbolic language has become the norm among progressives. We are told by earnest progressives that Donald Trump is a “fascist.” The MAGA movement is nothing less than “fascism.” The term “white supremacy” is routinely used to describe the silliest things. There is hardly a day that goes by when we aren’t told that “democracy” is being murdered by the Right. The Dobbs decision, which returned abortion to the states, is the death knell of “democracy.” None of this is true, but this is earnestly felt by millions of deluded people who see the world this way.
LOL yeah, we’re literally living in Gilead now.
We shouldn’t underestimate the power of mass delusions though.
The War Between the States was caused by a mass delusion. After the Dred Scott decision which killed the Missouri Compromise, millions of Northerners became convinced that Southerners were going to successfully establish plantation slavery in the arid Western territories and joined the Republican Party to counter this nonexistent threat. The Cotton Kingdom would one day stretch from Alabama to Kansas to Montana. The Slave Power would eventually establish plantation slavery in the North too.
Fiction played a major role in fueling this mass delusion. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best selling novel of the 19th century. It created an enduring image of Southern slavery in the North where people had no contact with slavery as it actually existed. Southern masters didn’t take morbid pleasure in relentlessly whipping their slaves. The average slaveowner in the South was a middle class family that owned a few slaves. Some of the biggest planters were also Unionists.
There are some interesting parallels between Dobbs and Dred Scott and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Handmaid’s Tale.
- Both Dobbs and Dred Scott have been loudly denounced by people who say the Supreme Court is an illegitimate institution
- The issue of the abstract constitutional right of a Southern slave owner to bring a slave into the Western territories was wildly inflated beyond what should have been its true importance. The issue itself was less important than the polarization it generated. If the country had rolled its eyes, slavery would have never become entrenched in the Great Plains and Southwest anyway.
- Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Handmaid’s Tale are about slavery. Margaret Atwood has explicitly compared pregnancy to slavery. In the latter, fertile women are the sex slaves of the powerful men who run Gilead and are treated like livestock. Cattle prods are used instead of whips.
- There is an Underground Railroad of handmaids who escape from their masters to flee to Canada
- There are women who are like Uncle Toms who betray their sex
- Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Handmaid’s Tale are degradation porn
I watched the show in the expectation that it would be give me some insight into the fevered imagination of a delusional feminist who is crazy enough to believe that pregnancy is like slavery. I wasn’t disappointed. The show is pretty much exactly what I expected it to be.
June Osborne, a college educated Millennial White woman from Massachusetts, is the main protagonist of the show. The show opens with June and her black husband and their mixed race child crashing their car and fleeing on foot toward the Canadian border. June is captured and wakes up in Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the aftermath of Civil War 2 and the Day of the Rope in which traditionalist forces have emerged victorious and established control over the majority of the former United States. The Constitution has been suspended. Homosexuals and other “gender traitors” have been strung up and hung from lampposts. Catholic churches are being demolished. There are mass book burnings. There is a wall which is decorated with the bodies of traitors and various enemies of the new order.
The underlying cause of this is a severe fertility crisis caused by environmental damage from nuclear fallout or chemicals used in industrial agriculture – the cause of the Apocalypse isn’t exactly clear – which has made it nearly impossible for humans to reproduce. The few fertile women who are left are therefore a prized possession who the new elites seize for themselves. A fundamentalist group called the Sons of Jacob has bombed Congress and the White House and has somehow overthrown the government to restore “traditional values” and organic farming. The people in the show go around muttering religious phrases like “Under His Eye” and “Blessed be the Fruit,” but it appears no one goes to church.
Gilead, of course, is a totalitarian police state which is only held together by heavily armed men with guns and relentless surveillance. There is zero social capital. The underlying premise of the show is that social liberalism is so great for women that no one could ever prefer to live in a traditionalist social order rather than under a liberal modernist one. The elites are cruel perverts and hypocrites. Handmaids are raped by their largely sterile masters with their wives present in a pointless religious ritual called “The Ceremony.” There is a hierarchy of women with the Wives on top followed by Aunts and Marthas and Handmaids. Jezebels are infertile women who serve as prostitutes. Handmaids are assigned and reassigned to the Commanders who are their masters. In this way, June becomes Offred which is short for “Of Fred” Waterford and goes on to join The Resistance which is a group called Mayday.
As with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Handmaid’s Tale says more about the author and her perspective and the audience and their values than the caricature of a traditionalist social order that is Gilead. There are lots of steamy sex scenes, but no one reads the Bible or goes to church. Women are separated from their husbands. The handmaids who are capable of having children are feminists or lesbians or sluts. It is taken for granted that men are predators and female selfishness and self-actualization is the highest good. Insofar as the West is being plunged into a real crisis caused by aging populations and depopulation, it is almost entirely due to modernist values and putting the Self up on its current pedestal.
When the end of the current degenerate era comes that Atwood fears, the correction won’t be nearly so dramatic. These degenerate periods wax and wane across history. They usually follow in the wake of devastating wars. A culture which values purity like the Victorian era can be followed by one that prizes debauchery like the Modern era and vice versa. The circumstances which led to our present era, which launched liberalism into orbit after World War II, are fading from view. The culture is turning away from feminism like a battleship correcting its course. It has grown stale.
I’m not sure if I will continue watching the show. I think I have already seen the gist of it and where it is going. It is not anything like Alabama in the post-Roe era. The people who are stupid enough to believe this need to get off Twitter, go outside, take a breath of fresh air and come back to earth before it is too late.
What a weird mindset that author has about what traditional culture is like. My female relatives who have spent Thier lives in red state America, don’t know how bad they had it. My beloved mother died a month ago and was laid to rest next to my father. She was devout Christian southern lady who taught Bible school, and was a devoted wife and mother for 63 years. She couldn’t have children, so they adopted 3 children. This kind of person is very common in southern culture. Margaret Atwood, must live on another planet. Not the world I grew up in. You’re right Hunter, they and us, live in Vastly different worlds.
“”””….Every country on earth has to become more like them….”””
Lenin already taught that to persist, communism must win in the whole world. Until free countries remain, people have always bad examples. Why can’t we live like those in the Hungary ????
Because of that, none of the communist taboos shall not broken. When taboo is broken and nothing happens, then all other taboos will be also broken and entire judeocommunism goes down in flames.
Liberals know this and this is the real cause of abortion hysteria.
Not a bad explanation but I think labeling this as communism, or even judeocommunism, is too narrow. I think the best term is ultimately a religious one: The Church of Woke. It’s a total inversion of Christianity – an Anti-Church where the Anti-Christ is esteemed and the devil himself is ultimately worshipped. Good is evil, evil is good. Freedom is slavery, shit is gold, etc., etc. You’re right about the ruthless enforcement of taboos though. As someone below noted, the lunatics are running the asylum. They’re issuing these orders on behalf of their masters the cloud people (Satanic criminals) and its a contest among the PMCs to see who can be the most dogmatic. They scream about the recent decision as “outlawing abortion” while at the same time they seek to impose their own inverted view of morality by force.
“”‘”….best term is ultimately a religious one: The Church of Woke…..”””
Well, this “wokeness” is the ultimate real Lenin communism ?
People just do not know what Soviet Union was first 20 years where tens of millions were killed.
Real communism is not Cold War era Soviet dictatorship but Lenin style woke madness where homosexuals whoring on the streets and society looks exacly as Orwell described. Orwell actually got inspiration from pre 1937 Soviet Union.
Even Putin told in the Valdai economic forum that what happening right now in the West is exactly the same madness what Russia had 1917 and afterwards.
I haven’t seen the show nor have I read the book, I have no intention of doing either. What I have read about Margaret Atwood is that she is an atheist who hates Christianity and particularly the Catholic Church which accounts for her fantasy of every Catholic Church being destroyed and priests exiled or killed. The wish is father to the thought.
This seems a contradiction because if the protagonists of her show want to increase fertility the Catholic Church’s position is the one to adopt. The Church teaches that the use of birth control is sinful, the primary purpose (not the only purpose) of marriage is procreation and abortion is forbidden. This outlook leads to large families. Whether one agrees or not with the Church is not, not, not the point here.
The point is the irrational thinking of the Margaret Atwoods of the world which exemplifies the warped, hypocritical, ultimately irrational thinking of the Left in general. Their petty hatreds, irrational fears, general paranoia, detachment from reality and inability to tolerate the slightest dissension drive their madness which they try to inflict upon the world. These people are insane, intolerable and in charge, for now.
It’s hard to see a good outcome when lunatics are in charge of the asylum called the U.S.A.
> Catholic churches are being demolished.
At the time ‘Catholic ethnics’ were still an important part of the Democratic coalition so the idea was to isolate the ‘Evangelicals’ and Southerners by pretending the South is full of neo-Calvinists ready to expel the Papists like it is 1699 Maryland.
The anti-Irish troll here is exactly like one we had called TheZog.net that we nicknamed ‘McZOG’ because he was always trying to ‘defend’ Jews by making up absurd ‘antisemetic conspiracy theories’ and somehow rope the Irish in.
The E. Michael Jones types like to attack Protestants too, EMJ’s latest is about how Americans always sucked because they were always Protestants.
Jew writer Philip Roth did something similar in his anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American novel Plot Against America.
Obviously the real fault lines are not anything like in 1699, nor 1860, nor even 1968.
@Banned Hipster—-anti-Irish troll here. The purpose of the church is to protect and defend the weak and the innocent from the predator, from those who prey on the weak and the innocent. Uncle Ted, the Irish, are the wolves in sheep clothing and have used the church to prey on the weak and the innocent, the church is nothing without a reason for being. And if its reason for being is to prey on the innocent it is better for the Catholic Church to be dead and buried. Christ will live on but the institution that serves as a means for the Irish to prey on the innocent must be destroyed.
Roberta O’Browning,
Hi there! It’s so called Ladyboy, Christ killing Irish, Schmuck here. Just a heads up:- every time you try to offend me with labels(the sort of behaviour expected of a juvenile libtard), all you’re really doing is entertaining me. My skin is just too thick……like my arms.
So ease up, tiger. I agree with some of what you say, but your delivery is very belligerent.
@Goose—-you can’t see what others see, you are blind to your own faults, flaws and imperfections. Other like myself can and do see, and you and your kind, your blood will be compelled to answer for the harm you have done. Mark my words clown, a day of reckoning is going to be coming for the Irish. Have you been Hannotized schmuck, was it good?
@Father Browning,
Well thank you for that……..my daily dose of a Browning serving. I can now go to work with a smile on my face! 😉
The biggest problem with the Catholic Church is that celibacy deforms the quality of people that occupy its leadership. There was a recent scandal in Wisconsin when it was found out that a priest was a big Grinder user. And the press soft-stepped around the nastiness of this guy by saying he was on a “dating app” as if it were Dr. Neil Clark Warrens 29 levels of heterosexual compatibility or something.
The plot of Handmaid’s Tale sounds a bit like that of Cafe Flesh, one of the very few art hardcore pornography films ever made. Seriously, Cafe Flesh can be watched and appreciated by a normal person who doesn’t care for porn just to see the hateful MC of the club Cafe Flesh, a great acting performance. … I’ll show myself out.
You have a stronger stomach than I do, Brad, to sit through this stupid BS.
Anyway, I see they are wearing their obedience diapers in a movie that supposedly is against state power.
I have an interesting personal story about The handmaid’s Tale.
in 1993 I transferred from a community college in Ohio, to Ohio University to finish my BA in History. I designed my own History BA to include many courses in the humanities and social sciences. I took many courses in Sociology, Women’s Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, etc. Well, guess what?
The handmaid’s Tale was required reading in many of these classes. The two college book stories in town had ample supplies of the book for students because so many professors and their classes required it for credit and graduation. So, I bought my first copy for my first class and read it. To my utter shock and astonishment, I sided with “the bad guys” i.e. the Commander and his ruling patriarchs over the Republic of Gilead.
This was when I first began to suspect that I was a “fascist” and an “extremist” because it seemed logical to me that a society with plunging birth rates would (for their own survival) force women to bare children. Nothing evil about it, just simple survival of a race and culture. It is just logical; not emotional.
Of course, my Marxist professors were horrified at my views and openly (in class) insinuated that I was a closeted Nazi. I relished the outsider status they gave me and our verbal combat in class where I pulled no punches about my view of the novel or about race, women’s rights, and nationalism. My professors, both men and women (all White) worshiped Atwood, her novels, and her home nation of Canada. Atwood was a “Goddess” to them who was a “visionary” who could see a Nazi-like future of Christians running the US.
I loved the book because my heroes were the Christian men of character in the novel who took radical action to save what was left of America and build something better and more traditional like the old America. Atwood paints them as evil and corrupt, but enough truth about virtue and tradition survive her attempts to portray them as sordid.
By the way, I “recycled” my first 25-page essay on the book for my other classes at Ohio University that required it. All in all, with minor changes, I recycled the same essay for about 4 or 5 other classes. LOL.
” This sort of overblown, hyperbolic language has become the norm among progressives. ”
That is the principle psychological method they have used in moving the Overton window to the far left.
The fact that so many Whites fall for it, believe it, or otherwise can’t/won’t resist it and make themselves immune to it, shows how weak too much of our race is.
I don’t know if we were always this way, but we’re not going to survive and thrive if we keep getting conned and bullshitted every single time a more (((clever and manipulative race))) gets in charge of the institutions that rule us. We must become immune and impervious to propaganda. We must become a race of independent, rational, self-thinking Philosopher Kings (and Queens. lol). We cannot survive as lemmings.
Those white cowl things the women wear, they’re not modeled on oldtimey puritan womenswear. They look more like those things the veterinarians prescribe for dogs to keep them from biting their skin problems. Oh, yeah, I guess that was the producers’ point. Talk about hating women, and men. And dogs. What monsters those television people are.
>The show opens with June and her black husband …
Of course — one good thing about all the gratuitous Blacks in ads and entertainment these days, including the interracial pairings (especially white women with black men), is that no one could possibly believe that it isn’t orchestrated and deliberate.
The movie Schindler’s List is fiction but most people who see it probably think all the incidents depicted really happened, largely because they’ve been indoctrinated to believe the Nazis were murderously cruel — I heard it was filmed in black and white to make it look like a period documentary and enhance the believability of the scenes — I can imagine The Handmaid’s Tale having the same effect — sort of like a 21st century version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Amanda Gorman, the affirmative action black National Youth Poet Laureate, (in)famously tweeted about ‘The Handmade’s Tale’.
“most people who see it probably think all the incidents depicted really happened, ”
Only about 95%.
Beyond that, it has a powerful subliminal influence on all viewers minds, even the most skeptical.
E. Michael Jones is a Cuck who wants to import Nigerians…so was Thomas Fleming and the Paleotards over at chronicles…
“The Day of the Rope,” eh? Atwood must have been reading “The Turner Diaries.”
Women cannot even write dystopian feminist fiction without stealing ideas from white men…
It isn’t called that by name, but it is understood to have taken place
I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it first came out. There was a movie made then. I believe Robert Duvall played Fred. I thought Atwood wacky then, especially when she said the handmaid’s fate is woman’s fate throughout history; centuries and centuries of oppression. I also noted that the book began in Boston with mobs of men attacking women, and when June goes out to buy some cigarettes, she is attacked and taken away. The implications then were very strongly associated with Khomeini and Iran. The fundamentalist Christian aspect was obviously an attack on the religious right and, of course, Reagan. I’m surprised this show picked up so many years after this.
I also noticed how Atwood and her kind criticize and rail against Christian, white America, but doesn’t say jack about Muslim countries. Nothing. If she isn’t jewish (and, god, she looks like it), she is certainly an anti-goy fellow traveller. of course also, you can whack at a Christian country, but if you attack the Muslims in any way, there will likely be a reaction.
The irrationality of leftist thought and Jewish attacks (like Roth’s Plot Against America) show that they feel very smug and secure. They don’t have to play around anymore, can drop the “we just want to be fair. Don’t YOU want to be fair?” they’ve always used. Now that they have power, they can be honest. The hatred and dogma of leftist groups reminds us that communism is the institutionalization of paranoia.
@dargason
“If she isn’t jewish (and, god, she looks like it)”
I was thinking the same thing.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was very powerful, but has some positive moods in it. A good analysis is in Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson. He studies the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a lot of the neuroticism she had over the death of a child. It is interesting how in her book, the thing that really got northern women interested was the breaking up of black families.
Also noteworthy is that Simon Legree, the arch villain, is actually a New Englander. Then, Stowe’s black hero wishes to leave America and move to a free colony in Africa. There really wasn’t a lot of feeling for racial integration.
A counter reaction of wild fanaticism was John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. The South went crazy,
and many secessionists used Brown as an example of what was coming if they didn’t act.
As Paul Johnson wrote in his History of the American People, two states were responsible for the Civil War; Massachusetts and South Carolina.
I also noticed how Atwood and her kind criticize and rail against Christian, white America, but doesn’t say jack about Muslim countries.
Atwood and her type never do. Partly it’s because they know that there’s some chance a Muslim might experience “sudden jihad syndrome” in her vicinity and the last thing she’d hear is something like ‘Aloha snackbar’ before her noggin flew away from her scrawny buzzard-like neck.
The main reason of course is that the attack is not against patriarchy, oppression of wymyn, slavery or injustice of any kind. Atwood and her sisters are fine with violence, oppression and slavery. What they really want is to destroy Christianity and white marriages, families and children.
Say what you will about the Muslims but they actually will kill someone like the old witch – and the gaslight media would just explain it away with some lame-assed excuse. Muslims might well end up as our allies in the coming war against to Church of Woke.
There’s something we should all be aware of here: Every single one of our enemies – Jews, Modernists, Feminists, PMCs, Liberals, Atheists – sees us as like Fred Waterford and Serena Joy. They see Christian teachers as Aunt Lydia. They have every intention of subordinating us and reducing us to serfdom in order to contain us and punish us. Alt-MSNBC sees us the same way.
At a personal level, I internalized the leftist plea of “leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone” when I was like 17. I’m basically part of the infamous Libertarian to WN pipeline (although I was always against immigration and open borders). So then, how to balance my personal desire for freedom and autonomy with the self-evident necessity of crushing and subordinating the Enemy? I found this to be an interesting commentary:
This is a caricature, but in my own case, its not that far off the mark. Something I noticed from the Alt-MSNBC twitter accounts is how much they seethed with bitter resentment for “Bougie” White people – which is to say, normal, right wing White people. I learned that all these people were born either under class or upper class. There is a high-low alliance against the middle, against the “bougies,” against the “Chuds.”
Something I also learned is this: A White woman who was a whore in a previous life and who repented by utterly disavowing that former life, becoming a Christian wife and mother, holding Right Wing values, and appreciating the men in her life, is inherently better then a low body count or even virginal White women who seethes with resentment towards men, defends abortion, defends LGBT garbage, apologizes for the left at every turn, accuses conservatives of “hating” women, and wants to fuse Modernism with White Nationalism because she fears Gilead as much as Margaret Atwood herself.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs,(AB) which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”-Matthew 23
That quote is onto something. To be part of the lower orders is to unapologetically defend and apologize for everything that is destroying the White Race and ruining our civilization – which is to say, White, Middle Class, Right Wing, Bougie Civilization. As far as I’m concerned, we are the Masters of The Universe. The standard of humanity. White Middle Class values as depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings and 1950s ads is what all of humanity should be judged by. And our values should reign supreme over the Earth. Its the only way we’ll be safe. And its what God would want us to do.
“Your Kingdom Come. Your will be done. On Earth as it is in heaven.”
Norman Rockwell paintings are scary. Menace is depicted in every scene; faces, or things.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the power of mass delusions though.”
Yeah. The delusion of the Northern masses. As you’ve stated in this piece. They still hold the controlling majority in the federal government. However, many of us tend to forget this fact. It still matters how Minnesota and Illinois and Pennsylvania vote, but not much, at all, how we vote, or if we vote, in Dixie, or in the West outside of Mexifornia.
“Alabama has to have the same laws as Massachusetts.”
“Self government is a threat to their authority.”
This is why they had to crush Dixie in the middle Nineteenth Century, regardless of what Southrons did, or didn’t do. It’s also why they have worked tirelessly to abolish the Constitution, and what remains of the old, Jeffersonian republic.
“We live in a federal republic-”
Not since 1855. We live under the dictatorship of Massachusetts and her fifteen minion states, and their three Pacific Rim colonies. Every president after Andrew Johnson, with very few exceptions, has been from the deep North. That includes Joe Biden and “his” administration.
Abortion and Slavery were, and are, distractions and a smoke screen for a Yankee power grab, that’s been going on for nearly two hundred years.
We’d be better off, if the Puritans and Quakers
had been lost mid Atlantic, and New England had been settled by the same people who had settled New York and Pennsylvania. We wouldn’t be having these arguments, or dealing with the lunatics and morons currently infesting the federal government.
End Reconstruction. End the War.