Mumbly Joe to Dissidents of Autocracy: "Resistance is Futile!"

Clipped from my upcoming review of the Cohen brothers’ 1991 dark comedy, Barton Fink, starring John Turturro and John Goodman. Keep your bananas peeled.

You don’t need your guns to protect yourself from the government, you stupid crop-dusting peasant. You see, if you ever tried to overthrow the government because it betrayed its constitutional duty to uphold your rights, it would simply crush you with the might of its bottomless fleets of F-15s and stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
But oh no, what’s this? A handful of buffoons have set fire to the Reichstag—whoops, I mean stormed the capital building, of course—and came this close to forcing those honest, loveable, beacons of virtue and integrity we all adore and value so much—our members of congress—from actually having to be within the general vicinity of those penniless helots they extort for wealth and power? So, you see, that’s why we need to suspend democracy indefinitely; weaponize our intelligence agencies as a means to silence dissidents, political opponents, and other threats to our autocracy; and monopolize the dissemination of information by threatening social media platforms with fines, slander, and subpoenas for allowing the free exchange of ideas and civil discourse in general between their patrons.