Editor, The Beacon:

Well, it’s official and real: We have become a banana republic, taken over by the Trumpite MAGA Banana Republic Party. The country, after all, helped considerably to create the original banana republics in Central and South America, with the same ingredients: oligarchs, here and there, and their oligarchical corporations; coups d’etats (attempted here in 2021), and were generally successful in the previous two centuries, whenever the poor indigenous and the peasants threatened oligarchical power.

The only thing unique here is that, even after experiencing an attempted and violent coup (at least the cause of six deaths and 140 seriously injured police), a majority of the electorate, however minor, voted for the coup leader.

He proceeded to pardon more than 1,500 of his convicted seditionists and insurrectionists, and appointed the supreme oligarch, “richest man in the world” no less, to destroy the institutions of government, beginning with USAID, one most obviously practicing the Christian Gospel (Gospel of Matthew, cc. 5-7; c. 25, vv.31-46). The “supreme oligarch” is of the racist progeny of apartheid South African Boers, with a Nazi salute.

One of the principal authors of their 2025 playbook, and many of its professed supporters, claim to be Christian nationalists. This is an obvious contradiction in its very name, indeed a veritable heresy. Christianity is a world religion, not a nationalist one. The Greek word catholic, its oldest version, means universal.

What are the sane and responsible people going to do about all this, especially those in the supposedly “co-equal branches of government”?

Michael L. O’Neill
DeLand