Three Signs We’re in a Banana Republic By J.B. Shurk
Satirist Sol Luckman defines “banana republic” in his irreverent glossary, The Angel’s Dictionary, as a “lawless society where the monkeys rule.”
Looking around the United States today, it’s hard to say we don’t fit his meaning. Nearly 80% of Americans believe we live under a two-tiered system of justice. Likewise, in Gallup’s recent survey of Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions, it notes, “This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress.” Of sixteen institutions tested, confidence in the U.S. Congress sits at the very bottom with a scant 7%! Even though there is now “record-low confidence across all institutions,” confidence in the Office of the Presidency suffered the largest year-over-year drop in 2022 — cratering 15%! In other words, not only do Americans believe the country is lawless, they’re also convinced that it is being run by a barrel of monkeys! Clearly, Americans “get” that we’re living in a “banana republic” today.
Just consider these three telltale signs:
(1) Manipulation of language and mandatory leftist religion:
The political Left’s most potent weapon is its penchant for undermining the meaning of words. For decades Democrats have branded anything antithetical to their worldview as “hateful” and banned “offending” viewpoints from civic culture altogether. When “authorities” deconstruct biological sex so preposterously that they can’t even tell the difference between boys and girls, though, they’ve lost the plot. One school board in Wisconsin is so fearful of the language police crashing through its doors that it has replaced all references to “girls” with sterilized language concerning a “person with a vulva.” When “teachers” are afraid to say “girl” out loud, it’s banana republic time!
Joe Biden and his communist brigades have tanked the economy and unleashed torrential inflation upon the country. In a less banana-y time, that would have huge political consequences. But now his regime enforcers and media propagandists simply redefine the meaning of an economic recession in order to proclaim — à la North Korea — that Americans have never been so well off!
In our topsy-turvy, upside-down world, where the government insists on establishing its own Ministry of Truth, words don’t mean squat! How can aborting a baby be called “reproductive healthcare” when it ends with at least one death? How can discrimination on the basis of a person’s skin color be defended as “equitable,” when it perpetuates racial inequality? Why do Leftists describe transgender body mutilation, illegal immigration, abortion, and even mRNA vaccination as “acts of love,” while regularly condemning Christians as “bigots” and “extremists”? Why do Democrats fret that “democracy” is under attack (when we don’t live in one) while saying nothing of attacks on Americans’ free speech, right to self-defense, and other individual rights (all supposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights)? Why is every ordinary weather event now dressed up as evidence for human-created “climate change”?
The answer is simple: manipulative language perverts rational discussion of ideas and short-circuits reasonable debate. Propaganda distorts reality until nothing can be known as truth at all — unless it is officially sanctioned and blessed by the State. When government destroys objective meaning, it makes itself a New Age god.
(2) Selective prosecution and political persecution:
The federal Leviathan has two standing orders today: (1) Get Trump!, and (2) protect the Establishment Uniparty and permanent bureaucratic Deep State at all costs. When the Intelligence Community isn’t busy framing President Trump as a Russian spy, the FBI and DOJ are committed to slapping him with imaginary process crimes they’d never dare try against a Clinton, Biden, Bush, or Obama. That’s one hell of a way to thank a president who took no salary, while using his time in office to increase middle class Americans’ wealth, security, and future prospects!
In the summer before the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey publicly articulated Hillary Clinton’s criminal culpability for storing classified emails on a private, unsecured server kept in a spare bathroom before declaring imperiously that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her. Obama’s IRS got caught targeting conservatives for their political beliefs, but the president assured the nation that the obvious scandal revealed “not even a smidgeon of corruption” within his administration. Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama’s self-anointed “wingman,” was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over documents relating to the Fast and Furious gun-running conspiracy, yet his Department of Justice unsurprisingly declined to pursue criminal charges.
In contrast, Americans have watched for six years as President Trump and his associates (including Steve Bannon, who was recently convicted for the same crime Eric Holder effortlessly eluded) have been hounded by an irredeemably corrupt DOJ and FBI, malicious state prosecutors, and a petty, Machiavellian Congress running shameless show trials devoid of due process, impartiality, or fairness. When Democrats routinely get a slap on the wrist (see Nancy Pelosi’s drunk-driving-get-
(3) Forced citizen compliance and increased government dependence:
Obedience + financial dependence = enslavement to the State.
This is the only math our Leviathan knows. Wealthy lawmakers don’t mind bankrupting America if it means their control over us increases. Racial provocateurs don’t mind burning cities to the ground if Antifa and Black Lives Matter shock troops can intimidate Americans into docility. Medical mercenaries don’t mind issuing unscientific orders arbitrarily enforcing experimental “vaccine,” mask, and travel restrictions if their perceived “authority” over Americans is permanently established. The religious zealots who worship “climate change” as a false idol do not mind if their aberrant worldview requires Americans to relinquish free will, pray to false gods, and descend into the depths of both physical and spiritual poverty. The more Americans feel impoverished, the more they become dependent on handouts from the State. Welfare is hardly “fair” because it always takes more from the soul than it gives.
“Because I said so” is not a reasonable governing policy for any nation purporting to be free, but it does seem to encapsulate the Biden administration’s obsessions with illegal mandates and policing thoughts and language. Between the government’s COVID-1984 authoritarianism, its attacks on speech it dislikes as “misinformation” deserving of censorship, and its farcical “climate change” alarmism unleashing sk
The World Economic Forum notoriously declared that Westerners would “own nothing and be happy.” Democrats’ embrace of those wicked oligarchs’ “build back better” buffoonery in the guises of tax and spend “climate change” legislation, Marxist redistribution of wealth, and a militarized IRS takes the WEF’s plan for widespread indentured servitude to heart.
When things fall apart, as they always do when communism is recycled into a “progressive,” trendy, “we’re all in this together” new form, the D.C. despots will watch their intentional destruction of society unfold without feeling the slightest remorse. Their bureaucratic unaccountability, after all, is fueled by rampant narcissism. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will never apologize for their Russia hoax. High Priest Fauci will never apologize for nationwide mandates that destroyed livelihoods and took lives. That’s just not who they are.
So, remember this: when the feds give you a banana republic, make banana daiquiris. Never miss an opportunity to point out how corrupt, vindictive, and illegitimate Washington, D.C.’s monkey class has become. Republicans, Democrats — I say a pox on both their houses! I think Lord Fauci and his medical mandators might even have a vaccine for that!
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