Victor Davis Hanson Exposes What Fascism Actually Looks Like

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Victor Davis Hanson: The fascists in this country are not going to be orange-colored and, you know, crude language and comb-over with a Queen’s accent. Sorry. They’re just not going to look like … and they’re not going to be eating Big Macs and going to mixed martial arts. They’re going to be suave. 

They’re going to be like [Zohran] Mamdani or [Barack] Obama. They’re going to talk like an NPR commentator, and they’re going to be empathetic, and they’re not going to say anything bad about anybody. And when they get in power, you saw what Obama did, you saw what [Joe] Biden did when he was just, as I said, an effigy. And then you see what Mamdani’s doing. 

They are mean people. And what they want to do when they get in, if you want to just—fascism is sort of dictatorship by the control of all aspects of the government. What was NPR and PBS? Did anybody see any conservatives on there? I didn’t. They used to have your mentor, William F. Buckley, and I like Margaret Hoover, but it’s not William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. 

No. They have taken every institution with an iota of conservatism and destroyed it. What is network news? What is the media? What is K-12? What is all—it’s all a liberal institution. It’s subsidized.

And when any tiny person revolts, if Bari Weiss says, You know, 60 Minutes was getting out of hand, or Paramount’s, you know, gosh, Stephen Colbert is costing us $40 million a year for him to spout all this hatred, then they go crazy. 

They control the institution. If you want to win an election and you’ve got an embarrassing laptop, then you call up the FBI and you say, I know you have it. I know it’s true, but don’t release it. And then you call Facebook and Twitter up and you say, Listen, our FBI guys are not going to let you run that story on any social media. That laptop is authentic. No way. 

And then Joe Biden, three days later, goes, Whoa, Donald Trump, I knew you would bring that up because it’s Russian, and I know it’s Russian disinformation because we had 51 experts that Antony Blinken rounded up, and [James] Clapper and [John] Brennan and Leon Panetta, they all swore that it was Russian, made in Russia, or they kind of gave a little out, you know, all the hallmarks of. 

That’s what fascism is. Fascism is you change the system when you get in power. I don’t mean you change policy. I mean you change the system. So when somebody tells you something on the Left, believe them. When James Carville screams and yells what he’s going to do, or Susan Rice screams and yells what they’re going to do, or Hakeem Jeffries screams and yells what he’s going to do, then they are going to do that if they can. 

And they don’t care about the law. If they can get rid of the Electoral College, they will, through this voting compact. Yes, it’s unconstitutional, but they will do it. If they are in the majority of the Senate after the midterm, they will get rid of the filibuster. They’ll find a way to do it. They promised to do it. 

If they get power, they will ignore the Constitution about the admittance of new states, and they will find a way to get D.C. and Puerto Rico in. That’s just what they plan to do. And if they get their way, there will be no more 169-year, nine-person Supreme Court. They don’t care about tradition. 

One hundred sixty-nine years—so what? Hawaii and Alaska, the last states, we now have the perfect 50-state union. We’ve done this since 1959. You know, we’re up to 60-some years.

They don’t care. Filibuster, probably 200 years, they don’t care. Electoral College with us from the beginning, 238 years ago in the Constitution, they don’t care. 

That is what fascism is. And if you have political enemies, they’re all mad that Donald Trump has a fund, which I kind of wish he didn’t, but he does, for the IRS owing him money because they broke the law and released his tax records to the public. And now he wants to reward people or compensate people who were hurt by the government. 

Okay, but what a fascist does is he takes the judiciary and he wages war against all of his opponents and destroys them so they can’t. So how would he do that? How would a fascist get rid of the political opposition?

Well, I think they would raid his home and sprinkle classified labels all over the ground and then take all the files out and spread them on the ground and take a picture and say there were 14,000 files at Donald Trump. 

And then say, Oh yeah, there was only 102 of 14,000 that were actually classified, and Donald Trump had the right to declassify as president, and Joe Biden took them out for 30 years as senator and vice president when he didn’t have the right, and he put them in insecure locations, and he didn’t come forward until he was afraid they’d call him a hypocrite because he had appointed a special prosecutor. 

That’s fascism. Or, Let’s take him off the ballot so the people can’t even vote. Let’s get 20, 25 almost Republican, Democratic, and purple states saying they wanted to take Trump off the ballot so you couldn’t vote for him. 

And then we had the E. Jean Carroll lawfare, and then we had the Letitia James lawfare, and we had the Alvin Bragg lawfare, then we had the Fani Willis lawfare, and we had Jack Smith, and they all had some things in common. 

Number one, none of those people will ever charge anybody again. Number two, they would have never charged even Donald Trump had he not announced he was going to run for a third term. And were they coordinated? Oh, Victor, that’s conspiracy theory, because you’re talking about a local county and Fani Willis in Fulton County, and then you’re talking about the state of New York with Letitia James, federal government, Jack Smith. 

How could they be coordinated? Donald Trump announced on Nov. 15, 2022, he was going to run for president. All hell broke loose. And what did these autocratic people—who we might want to call fascists—they moved. 

And in three days, what happened? On a Friday afternoon—well, on Nov. 18, 2022—Letitia James showed up at the White House. She’s in the logs. She said she was just visiting. 

Same day, Nathan Wade—has anybody heard of a Fulton County prosecutor going to the White House and meeting with a White House counsel? You think the Tulare County prosecutor, the Fresno County prosecutor, goes in and says, I want to spend the day at the White House with you? No. He was in there, Nathan Wade. He even charged them for it. That was shameless. 

Is that the end of it? No. You know what happened that day? They appointed Jack Smith special prosecutor. Well, that’s just a trifecta. 

Well, there was another one: Michael Colangelo, who had been the brains behind Letitia James and was rewarded for that real estate farce suit. So Merrick Garland said, We need you. We’ll make you number three in the DOJ. So that’s what he did. 

And then on that same day, people said, Oh my God, three days ago Donald Trump declared his candidacy. We’ve got Nathan down there with Letitia, with Fani, and we’ve got Jack Smith appointed, and Letitia’s over, but this Bragg guy’s another incompetent. He might blow it. 

Hey, Mr. Colangelo, we just appointed you this trophy for working with Letitia James. Can you step down and go work for Alvin Bragg? That all happened on the same day, three days after Trump said he was going to run for president. 

That wouldn’t have happened had he been a Democrat or if he had said, I’m not going to run for president. 

So that’s fascism. And if you think, well, that was—I don’t know. How about Barack Obama surveilling 20 associated journalists, grabbing their phone data? Yep, he did. And that is very weird. 

Or how about ordering the CIA director, the FBI director, and the director of national intelligence to ignore the intelligence and go after Hillary Clinton’s political opponent, and then when that failed, to destroy him in the White House? 

Or how about the FBI being told to have a lawyer forge a document so they could surveil Carter Page? You could go on and on with what they did. Lisa Page—remember her and Peter Strzok, their little text exchange?

Remember what Andy said, what Andy reviewed? That’s Andrew McCabe. It’s, There’s no way we’re going to let Donald Trump be president. It’s kind of like an insurance policy. That was Crossfire Hurricane. 

So yeah, that’s what fascism can be. 

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