Super Bowl LIII won’t exactly be remembered as a classic. After Gladys Knight’s stirring rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, we saw two underperforming offenses, an underwhelming halftime show, and some underhanded commercials designed to critique American values.

In particular, the Hulu ad for its popular series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on a 1980s novel by Margaret Atwood, was a cruel mockery of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” ad — a warm and powerful presidential campaign ad that offered a hopeful vision of the future made possible by the continuation of Reagan’s conservative policies.

By contrast, the ad for “The Handmaid’s Tale” offers a dystopian portrait of a future theocratic Christian America in which women are oppressed and relegated to an appalling life of giving birth to children for the state, stripped of their property and rights, and enslaved.

There’s only one problem: The very same free-market systems that have historically liberated and empowered women are rejected by socialists as a form of oppression. If anyone has held back women’s progress over the years, it’s the Left. Sure, thanks to “progressives,” women in New York and a few other states can now order their unborn babies killed all the way up to 40 weeks gestation. But it’s the Reagans and Trumps of the world who are helping women enter the workplace in greater numbers — to do and to live as they see best.

Tiana Lowe writes at The Washington Examiner, “The ‘80s boom of capitalism and cocaine is supposed to have been the beginning of the end of feminism and freedom. … If anything, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ continues to serve as an unintentional but powerful condemnation of bigger government.”

And that’s what makes the Hulu ad for “The Handmaid’s Tale” so ironic. If “Morning in America” ever ends, it’ll be at the hands of a socialist nightfall — one that seeks to curtail free speech, restrict gun rights, filter the flow of news and information, delegitimize Christianity, and trample all who dare resist.

Want to see who’s really going to bring “The Handmaid’s Tale” to your children’s future? Take a second look at President Trump’s recent State of the Union Address and watch in disbelief as uniformly dressed Democrat women refuse to acknowledge historically low unemployment for minorities and women, an ICE agent being recognized for saving 300 lives, and a host of other accomplishments.

As Alexa Moutevelis Coombs at NewsBusters notes, “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ tries to be an allegory of the horrors that could befall us at any time, but many of those who glom onto the Hulu series as a unique and timely warning about Trump’s America seem to forget that Margaret Atwood’s book the first season was based on was published in 1985 and meant to critique Reagan and the Christian Right. To liberals, we are always one step away from fascism and women being reduced to chattel when a Republican is in power.”

Our own Robin Smith wrote in 2017, “‘Progressives’ are already equating the Margaret Atwood novel-turned-series to the faith community and those with any degree of a moral compass whose values inform their votes, their entertainment, educational choices, etc. In other words, the Left has found another tool by which to inflict cultural criticism on those who refuse to consent to the unhinged Left’s demand for consensus of their Rainbow Mafia agenda and their destruction of the First Amendment to silence all critics. The novel rightly exposes the dangers of extremes of thought and indoctrination. That is its singular value. Otherwise, the parallels drawn are clearly meant to frame America as a nation on the verge of collapse to fundamentalist Christian theocrats.”

In a country where the Left has removed crosses from highways, banned prayer in graduation speeches, and tried to force Christians to bake cakes for same-sex couples, it’s ludicrous to say the Christian Right is an imminent threat to our country’s future.

By using popular culture to warn us about the Right, the Left tends to expose its own hypocrisy in the process. In reality, the very people trying to silence free speech, install atheism as the state religion, oppress the masses, and destroy Liberty are warning the rest of us about a dark future that only their policies will create.