'Are we not supposed to wear masks now?' Internet dunks on former Clinton staffer fearmongering about Coney Barrett WEARING a mask

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign media director Zerlina Maxwell was ridiculed online for seemingly mixing metaphors, and trying to present conservative Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett's face mask as a “dystopian” symbol.

Maxwell, now an MSNBC contributor, tweeted a picture on Tuesday of Amy Coney Barrett wearing a medical mask at her Senate confirmation hearing on Monday. The commentator also added two screen grabs from the TV show ‘The Handmaid's Tale’, set in an oppressive Christian fundamentalist version of the US.

The images featured two titular handmaids wearing leather-looking masks, intended by the story's oppressors to prevent the female characters from speaking. “…This has been on my mind all day,” Maxwell wrote next to the juxtaposed pictures.

The notable differences between a Covid-19 prevention measure and an authoritarian silencing tool raised quite a few eyebrows online, as people were evidently confused by what Maxwell was trying to say. “Are we not supposed to wear masks now?” pondered New York Times’ Elizabeth Bruenig.

One Twitter jokester parodied the muddled message of Maxwell's comparison by putting Coney Barrett next to a picture of the anarchic masked villain Bane from the Batman movies.

Some users thought that Democrat Maxwell was being hypocritical, denouncing masks because a prominent conservative wore one, while US liberals have traditionally been on the pro-mask side. “So now masks are dystopian and creepy?” asked one commenter.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ series has become somewhat symbolic for American pro-abortion activists, who often dress up as the show's ‘handmaidens’, women forced to be surrogate mothers for rich and powerful families in the drama's dystopian world. Currently, since Coney Barrett is an anti-abortion judge, such costumed groups are protesting her confirmation hearings. Ironically, the Supreme Court hopeful herself served as a ‘handmaid’, a leadership position in her Christian group called ‘People of Praise’.

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