Have liberals been living under a rock? Sometimes, it really seems like they have.
This weekend on “Saturday Night Live,” co-host Colin Jost thought it would be a great idea to mock former President Donald Trump, now the leading candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, over his use of a term that conservatives have become all too familiar with in recent years.
“Trump did have a slight stumble this week while talking about banks, and he introduced an interesting new term called ‘debank,’” Jost said on “Saturday Night Live.”
He ran a clip of Trump discussing the issue, cut in order to make Trump seem foolish to those who were unfamilar with the term “debank.”
“We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you,” Trump says in the clip. “They want to debank you and we’re going to debank…”
“I don’t know what the hell debank means, but he may have to take ‘de ambulance’ to see ‘de doctor,’” Jost quipped, as if Trump’s use of the term suggested he was going senile.
Yet Jost’s “joke” here is a massive self-own.
The SNL host apparently had never heard about politically-motivated debanking, and his inability to understand this important issue reveals far more about him than it does about Trump.
I have long enjoyed watching Jost’s SNL segment, “Weekend Update,” a brief summary of the news reframed for maximum comedy. It often mocks both the Right and the Left and can be quite savvy, at times.
Yet Jost apparently lacks a basic understanding of just how polarized American society has become. Conservatives increasingly feel ostracized and demonized, and not without reason.
Much to their consternation, many conservatives have found themselves cut off from financial institutions, in part thanks to smear factories like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For example, the social conservative nonprofit The Ruth Institute found itself unable to receive credit card donations because its credit card processor refused to do business with an organization the SPLC smeared as an “anti-LGBT hate group.” The SPLC, which maintains a “hate map” suggesting mainstream conservatives are somehow hateful and equivalent to the KKK, pressures the charity sector to blacklist conservative nonprofits, and succeeded in getting Amazon to blacklist conservatives for years.
In May 2022, Chase Bank closed an account for the National Committee for Religious Freedom, an organization founded by Sam Brownback, a former Kansas governor and Trump’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.
Brownback, along with conservative organizations, suggested that Chase closed the account for religious or political reasons, which Chase denied. The bank said it closed the account because it needed more information about donors and recipients than the nonprofit provided.
Chase also closed accounts associated with the Arkansas Family Council and Defense of Liberty in 2021.
At least 20 state attorneys general have drawn attention to the threat of politically-motivated debanking, and Alliance Defending Freedom launched its Viewpoint Diversity Score’s Business Index in part to address the issue. The index measures companies’ respect for free speech and religious freedom, following the methods of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which companies such as Chase highly value.
So many of America’s institutions appear to have swallowed the Left’s narrative that conservatives aren’t patriotic or peaceful, but hateful domestic terrorists waiting to be unleashed.
Many conservatives live in fear that their friends or colleagues will learn that they voted for Trump, or that they actually agree with some of his policies. The commanding heights of American society, from Big Tech to the legacy media to Hollywood and corporate America, have swallowed the poison of critical race theory, thinking of America as institutionally racist and embracing the deceptive movement for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that teaches people to discriminate on the basis of skin color in the name of leveling the scales of “oppression.”
While this ideology may be in a kind of tactical retreat after the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University and as companies begin to move away from DEI, it retains a core foothold over America’s institutions, and it prevents conservatives from getting a word in edgewise by excluding them at the outset.
That’s why I emphasize the corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which I see as a threat to America’s free speech culture and the tip of the spear of the Left’s effort to demonize those who dare question its increasingly stifling orthodoxy.
If you disagree with the Left’s narrative on pumping kids with experimental gender drugs that will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile, you’re an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” If you disagree with the Left’s narrative on open borders and unfettered immigration, you’re an “anti-immigrant hate group,” and probably a racist. If you disagree with the Left’s narrative that Muslims are an oppressed minority and that any warnings about the ideology of radical Islam are therefore unjustified “Islamophobia,” you’re an “anti-Muslim hate group.” If you dare stand for parental rights, you’re an “anti-inclusion antigovernment extremist.”
Many on the Left don’t seem to realize these attacks are baseless, because they live in a bubble similar to the one Jost occupies.
Somehow, the higher-ups in President Joe Biden’s administration don’t know that the SPLC had a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019 that led it to fire its co-founder. They don’t know that a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam,” or that critics on the Left have long noted that the SPLC lacks any moral credibility.
They seem not to know that the SPLC’s “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, or that an SPLC attorney was arrested on domestic terrorism charges last year.
It seems the Biden administration has been living under a rock on the SPLC. Otherwise, why would the White House host SPLC leaders and staff 11 times? Why would a high-ranking Department of Education official meet with the SPLC’s expert on “hate” one year before the SPLC added parental rights groups to the “hate map”? Why would Biden agencies reach out to the SPLC, soliciting advice from this far-left group on combating “domestic terrorism”?
Perhaps the Biden administration does know all of this, but simply doesn’t care. Why? Because the left-leaning legacy media won’t cover these issues, and that lack of coverage will leave people like Colin Jost in the dark about the threat of debanking.
It’s only those pesky conservatives who complain—and they’re domestic terrorists, anyway.
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