A Handmaid’s Tale About the Coronavirus: Why (Some) White People Want to Be Oppressed So Badly

I will never understand why some white people (notice I didn’t say “all white people,” so please don’t email me explaining how you don’t own a gun and how your name isn’t Karen) want to be oppressed to the point of taking up arms.

Yet, here we are in 2020, the most underbidding Spades hand of all the years, (seriously, fuck this year) and some white men are ready to take up arms to get their freedom back from the oppression of—wait, surely I’m reading this wrong—saving their lives.

Yep, they’re acting just like the (wait, what do you call a group of white men with firearms storming the state capital without masks during a pandemic? Bubbas? Trumps? Cletuses, or is the plural of Cletus, Cletusi?) Cletusi who stormed the Michigan statehouse to be able to freely contract the coronavirus and possibly die.

Well, the husband of a Reopen N.C. movement leader has gone to the white supremacist website—or rather, Facebook—to say that he’s ready to kill people to protect the country (see, economy) from something he’s calling the New World Order.

OK, now I’m completely confused, as I thought the leaders of the New World Order were Jay-Z, Versace prints and Hollywood Hulk Hogan. This feels like The Handmaid’s Tale all over again—you know, the fictional story about the enslavement of white women that some white people (notice I didn’t say all, again) believe is real so they dress up in real spaces looking like this. Imagine, if only there were a group of real women whose bodies were violated and ultimately destroyed by white men; women whose children were stolen and sold into slavery; women whose bodies were owned by white men, some women that feminists could champion instead of taking up the mantle of those fictionally oppressed.

Anyway, Adam Smith recorded the video and posted it to Facebook, noting that he wants children to look back on this time and see that the U.S. “resisted what he called the ‘New World Order,’ a reference to the stay-at-home orders in North Carolina and most states,” WFAE reports.

“And America said, ‘No,’” Smith, a Marine Corps veteran said. “We’re taking up arms. It’s time for us to fight against this. We’re not going to stop. If you want to go to the full force time, we have the forces to retaliate. And that’s really at the end of the day the only thing that’s going to secure our freedom is our willingness to step up and fight. Do we want to pick up arms? Do we want to kill anybody? Of course not. Nobody wants to take lives.

“We don’t want to kill anybody. But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay our lives down? We have to say yes,” Smith continued. “Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No. It’s not terrorism. I’m not trying to strike fear in the hearts of people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m going to say: If you bring force—We’re going to bring force. If you bring guns, we’re going to bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’ll be armed with this.”

Bitch, who are you fighting? Who? There is no coronavirus army. There is no armed militia with masks. These whoteps are worse than actual hoteps. And you know what all of this tough-guy talk sounds like to me? A temper tantrum. From white women being told to leash their wild jackals to white folks protesting stay-at-home orders, the response is looking a lot like when I tell my 2-year-old son that he’s had enough Popsicles for the day.

Because some white people are jealous of people of color’s actual oppression and seasonings, Ashley Smith, the lesser of the dumb Smiths, was arrested Tuesday for protesting outside “the governor’s mansion in Raleigh during the third Reopen N.C. protest on April 28.”

Wait, I may have spoken too soon. Turns out both of the Smiths are dumb; after His Eye Smith posted the video to Facebook and it was taken down, Under His Eye Smith reposted it Sunday.

“She complained that he is under attack by the ‘liberal media’ and said she is releasing the video in full because ‘maybe you agree with him and maybe you don’t but we have nothing to hide. This group is built on the constitution and that includes free speech and the Second Amendment,’” WFAE reports.

She continued: “Could he have said it better? Maybe, but that’s not for anyone to decide how a free person should speak their mind. Our founding fathers would not be pleased that we gave up so much for so little. Look how hard we are having to fight to get our freedom back!”

This is the equivalent of my 2-year-old son staging a walkout of nursery school because he doesn’t believe they should ever have to be indoors. It’s embarrassing the levels to which some white people will go just to fight for a cause, even if that cause might be saving their lives.