I just finished watching the last episode of the final season of The Handmaid's Tale. It capped a wonderful story spanning six seasons of resistance by June Osborne (masterfully played by Elisabeth Moss) and many others against the dictatorial regime of Gilead -- a religious autocracy that forces women into becoming breeding machines impregnated by rapists who are Commanders of the regime.
It was a difficult series for me to watch. I came to it late, after the first five seasons had concluded. Sometimes I wanted to give up on the Handmaid's Tale. Often, or usually, it was bleak, dark, disturbing. Just when things seemed to be getting better for June and her fellow Handmaids, there would be a backslide into a fresh horror.
Which sums up how I and so many other Americans feel about Trump's second term.
Just as the malevolent rulers of Gilead took over most of the United States, aside from Alaska and Hawaii, instituting their un-American brand of authoritarianism, Trump and his cronies are seeking to take away our freedoms in favor of a MAGA autocracy in which truth is whatever Dear Leader says it is, and if you disagree, you'll be punished for that thought crime.
That's why it was so pleasing to have the final episodes of The Handmaid's Tale be about a rebellion against Gilead. Sure, a central theme of the entire series has been rebellion and resistance. But those efforts didn't meet with widespread success until the last part of Season 6.
In the ninth episode that aired last week, June was in desperate circumstances with a noose around her neck. Echoing a somewhat similar scene in Braveheart where "Freedom!" is screamed by a man about to be executed, June yells "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" That was a recurring message in The Handmaid's Tale.
It may seem like hyperbole to equate Gilead with the Trump administration. But really it isn't. Our country is facing a clear and present danger. Not from a foreign enemy. From the enemy of freedom, justice, and our Constitution who currently resides in the White House.
Things are going to get worse before they get better. There will be moments, many moments, when it seems hopeless to resist Trump. After all, he has the power of the presidency behind him, along with Republican control of both houses of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court that often supports his authoritarianism.
Like June and the other resistance fighters against Gilead, we have to keep on combatting the Trump administration in any way possible. This will vary for different people, depending on our unique circumstances. What's most important isn't the specifics of our acts of resistance, but the determination to keep fighting no matter what, just as June did.
Today The Atlantic had a great piece by Adam Serwer, "The New Dark Age: The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself." Here's how it starts out. The parallels with the Handmaid's Tale, where books were burned by Gilead and women were forbidden to read, are striking.
The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack.
Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Your view of what damage one side will do is the opposite of mine where I see the left as more apt to take away our liberties unless we toe their line. It makes sense for you considering the benefit you still have for having been a government employee and retiring when you did, and for that matter for me being farm bred and raised.
Posted by: Rain Trueax | June 02, 2025 at 05:54 AM