Welcome to the Banana Republic of America
American Thinker
Brian C Joondeph, MD
America has officially descended from Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon the hill” to a banana republic on par with Cuba, Venezuela, or the former Soviet Union.
Elected officials from both parties have no interest in slowing America’s decline and most are cheering it on.
Just this week, any semblance of fairness, justice, equal protection under the law, and a host of other principles which allowed America to thrive for almost 250 years were thrown out the window. America’s demise didn’t begin this week and can be traced to the days of FDR and then the liberal big-government explosion of the 1960s.
There were several checks and balances along the way, tapping on the brakes of America hurdling toward the abyss, specifically Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Other Republican presidents merely took the foot off the accelerator, allowing America to coast closer to calamity while Democrat presidents floored the gas pedal, speeding up the decline.
The Biden administration, not content with pedal to the metal acceleration, added a supercharger to the engine and filled the tank with high octane gasoline, turning a fast car into a race car. This past week illustrated the precarious state of America as a beacon of freedom and liberty.
Start with the indictment of former President Donald Trump. A Manhattan district attorney turned a misdemeanor, long past the statute of limitations, into a federal crime which his Manhattan D.A. predecessor, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the former New York Attorney General, and the Federal Election Commission deemed to not be a crime and declined to prosecute.
Principal players including Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, in written statements, made clear that even the misdemeanor didn’t happen. Yet here we are with the Democrat party and its weaponized judicial system choosing to indict their political opponent who will be the likely Republican presidential candidate next year.
This does not and never has happened in America, the government in power using such might to destroy their political opponents. Yet here we are.
This same week, independent journalist Matt Taibbi, was visited by the IRS. Taibbi had the gall to publish some of the Twitter Files, documenting collusion between U.S. federal 3-letter agencies including the FBI, CIA, DOJ, DHS, CDC, and FDA and big tech behemoths in order to control the free flow of news and information, censoring anyone they disagreed with, in flagrant violation of the First Amendment.
The same day Taibbi was testifying before Congress about his investigations, the IRS came to his New Jersey home, unannounced, to inform him of upcoming investigations into his taxes. Quite the coincidence of timing.
Remember Lois Lerner of the IRS harrassing conservative groups and leaking sensitive information to the media? Despite some limited huffing and puffing from Republicans in Congress, there has been no reckoning or accountability.
This is but one of many examples of a weaponized executive branch of government targeting political opponents well outside the intentions and words of our Founding Fathers.
When the IRS got away with targeting political opponents without consequence, the FBI said “hold my beer” and went after candidate and then President Trump, knowingly using Clinton campaign paid-for fabricated opposition research to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his associates and administration. They parlayed this investigation into a year’s long special counsel witch hunt into every aspect of Donald Trump’s life, without justification, hamstringing his presidency.
Yet after years of a microscopic examination into every aspect of Trump’s life, all they could come up with was some “supposed” hush money paid to a porn actress. Trump has to be the cleanest human being alive. [If they really wanted to go after Trump he could be prosecuted for his role in the genocidal covid vaccine.]
The same agencies turned a blind eye to the Biden Crime Family including Hunter’s laptop, applying a very selective form of justice. This led to two nonsensical impeachments, unprecedented, and for which once decent politicians, journalists, and other thought leaders either turned a blind eye or cheered along like a gaggle of clapping seals.
Then there was COVID, a bad flu virus [flu renamed] weaponized by the government health authorities to shut down the economy and entire country, impose draconian mandates and restrictions based not on science but on political expediency, to kneecap the existing president and usher in new election rules making it easier to cheat and subvert the will of the voters.
Mail-in ballots, lack of chain of custody, ballot harvesting, no signature verification, ballot counting stopped in late evening only to see a dramatic reversal by morning in who was leading, lead to a presidential “selection” rather than an election, again with no reckoning or accountability.
When “we the people” exercised their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble, they were entrapped and unjustly prosecuted without due process or any sense of fairness, again to cripple the outgoing president and hamper any attempt for him to run for election in 2024.
When that failed, then came Trump’s indictment, based on fairy dust law that even liberal legal scholars have decried.
It’s not only Trump facing legal lawfare but also his associates. Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Mike Lindell’s cellphones were seized by the DOJ. Roger Stone and Peter Navarro were arrested. Trump’s Mar a Lago home was raided by the FBI who rifled through Melania’s underwear. The same FBI apparently has yet to look at Hunter Biden or Anthony Weiner’s laptops.
The last telling event this week was a transgender terrorist slaughtering 6 individuals, including 3 young children, at a Christian school. Predictably the Biden administration, singing in harmony with the corporate media, is worried about the backlash against the trans community, “celebrating their resilience” while basically ignoring the 6 dead human beings and their devastated families and friends. As always, they blame the gun, not the transgender shooter likely pumped full of hormones and mental health medications, who deliberately pulled the trigger.
In all of this, where are the Republicans? Or even a few principled Democrats if any exist? If a fraction of these travesties were visited on former President Obama, Democrats would be screeching like banshees, holding press conferences, circling the wagons with sharped fangs defending their party leader. Most Republicans remain silent. Hopefully Trump is taking names.
Our ruling class has made a conscious decision to spend money we don’t have, provoking needless wars, opening our borders, condoning and encouraging crime, destroying the economy along with the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans, all in an attempt to transform America into some multicultural, uber-woke hellhole, reminiscent of the Hunger Games.
So where does that leave America? In 2023, the formerly Judeo-Christian nation has walked away from her moral roots, acknowledging our God-given rights and privileges in favor of selfish and evil ideologies, destroying children, families, and the will of the American people.
We have a weaponized government where those in power make the rules to suit their whims and political needs, destroying all who stand in their way. Several hundred years ago our ancestors fought to rid themselves of a king and here we are with a ruling class filed with kings. America has fought wars against totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, yet ironically our government is emulating many of their dictatorial attributes.
I am sad for my children and grandchildren. They will be the first generation that will most likely have fewer opportunities and a less prosperous life than their parents had. They say empires last not more than 250 years and America’s 250-year anniversary is in 3 short years.
What will be left in 3 years? Will we be in World War 3 against Russia, China, and Iran, with a ruined economy and hyperinflation, living in a police state, ruled by tyrants willing to use whatever means necessary to stomp out any opposition or resistance? Where are American leaders, men and women of principle and conscience? Will it be left to mob rule or civil war to change course?
Welcome to the Banana Republic of America.
Image: Gorrellart.com
Note: Comments placed in [ ] are added by Truth11.com editor. For example; [Flu]
Original Article: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/welcome_to_the_banana_republic_of_america.html
Banana Time for the Rule of Law
LewRockwell.com
Roger Kimball | American Greatness
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera published The Joke, his first novel, in 1967. It traces the fortunes of Ludvik, a young student, after his politically correct girlfriend shows the Communist authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.” As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party, the university, and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines.
That’s the way things are in totalitarian societies. No jokes allowed, especially not jokes told at the expense of the regime.
Thus it is that North Korea banned sarcasm and irony.
Poor Ludvik suffered for his joke. But he got off easy compared to Douglass Mackey, a social media “influencer” who wrote under the pen name “Ricky Vaughn.”
During the 2016 election cycle, Mackey/Vaughn posted a funny meme urging Hillary voters to “avoid the line and vote from home” by texting “Hillary” to a certain number.
Who would be stupid enough to fall for such a joke? No one. But his satire was effective enough to get him banned from the pre-Elon Musk era Twitter. And the feds thought—or said they thought—that it was part of a “plot to disenfranchise black and women voters.” I guess that shows you what they think of black and women voters.
It sounds stupid. It is stupid. But Mackey was charged with a felony and on Friday was convicted in the Eastern District of New York. He faces up to 10 years in jail for (as an official announcement crows) “his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
Yes, that’s right. A Trump supporter posts a silly (but amusing) meme that mocks Hillary voters and he is tried and convicted of a felony. In the course of that official announcement, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District called Breon Peace continues with this stomach churning bit of agitprop:
Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election. . . . Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.
In fact, that verdict proved nothing of the sort. It merely confirmed the corruption and politicization of our judicial system. The real moral of this sorry episode is this: Make a joke, go to jail.
This is Soviet-style intimidation. It has, or had, no place in America. It is the kind of thing that, once upon a time, we would hear about and deplore in distant lands ruled by communist despots. Now we emulate what we once deplored. Increasingly, alas, such totalitarian expedients are business-as-usual in an American regime that is staffed by apparatchiks of both parties who are drunk on power and care not a whit for free speech, individual liberty, or the impartial enforcement of the law. What they care about is the consolidation and perpetuation of their own power, period, full stop.
Tucker Carlson was right to call the verdict against Mackey “the most shocking attack on freedom of speech in our lifetimes.” There is absolutely no evidence, Carlson pointed out, that anyone’s “sacred right” to vote was impinged by Mackey’s meme.
But the same cannot be said of the thousands of people who were essentially disenfranchised by the Democratic machine in 2016, 2020, and 2022. The entire “Russia collusion” hoax, for example, was cooked up and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and put into action by a coalition of the willing in the media, the Justice Department, and the intelligence services of the United States. Its initial aim was to suppress the vote of Trump supporters and, when that didn’t work, to drive Trump from office and make him radioactive to voters forever after.
The bogus, almost surreal indictment of Trump by the George Soros-funded D.A. Alvin Bragg is part of that same anti-Trump campaign. Nancy Pelosi let her botoxed mask slip when, gleefully commenting on the former president’s indictment, she tweeted “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.”
As I noted elsewhere, former speaker of the House Pelosi got it exactly backwards. In America, it used to be the case that the burden of proof fell upon the state. It was not up to an accused to “prove innocence”—often an impossible task. Rather, it was up to the state to prove that an accused was guilty of certain specified crimes.
It has been amusing, in a macabre sort of way, to see how the phrase “no one is above the law” has flooded the zone from the Left. Tucker Carlson, in the clip linked to above, provides a sampling of its deployment by the ditto-heads.
What makes that mendacious exercise infuriating as well as amusing, of course, is the fact that many, many people are “above the law,” such names as Hunter Biden, Sam Bankman-Fried, Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, and Kevin Clinesmith remind us.
But don’t try this if you are a supporter of Donald Trump or his populist agenda, or even if you are just not sufficiently hostile to it. Then you can expect dawn raids from the FBI or personal visits from the IRS, as the journalist Matt Taibbi just experienced to his surprise.
The melancholy truth is that the United States has become a banana republic (but without, as some wag put, any bananas).
In such corrupt regimes, the ruling party intimidates, persecutes, and prosecutes rival parties and anyone who challenges its prerogatives. This is a truth that Nayib Bukele, the robust president of El Salvador, underscored in his response to a chortling piece in the New York Times.
Embracing the news of Trump’s indictment, the Times speculated joyfully about what was going to happen to the former president during his arraignment: “He will be fingerprinted. He will be photographed. He may even be handcuffed.” “Imagine,” Bukele tweeted, “if this happened to a leading opposition presidential candidate here in El Salvador.”
But let’s return to the idea that “no one is above the law.” I mentioned several people who clearly are above the law as enforced by the Biden Administration and the permanent government in Washington. But since Douglass Mackey, a Trump supporter, has been convicted of a felony for making a joke, what about Kristina Wong? She did the same thing that Mackey did in the 2016 election, only her meme supported Hillary. “Hey Trump supporters,” she tweeted, “skip poll lines and text in your vote.”
Where is that wretched U.S. attorney who was just pontificating about “the sacred right to vote,” “subvert[ing] the ballot box,” etc.? Where is sh? Where is the slimy, fake-news media? True, Wong suppressed no more votes than Mackey did. But Mackey faces a decade in the slammer while Wong is serving as an elected official on a neighborhood council in Los Angeles and acting as a “performance artist.”
When agents of the deep state hector you about “the rule of law,” etc., laugh in their faces. Then remind them of what the next president of the United States said about retribution.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/
Original Article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/04/no_author/banana-time-for-the-rule-of-law/