When to Fear Dictatorship Coming to America, Part Five

Victor Davis Hanson

4) Does the government punish or spy on citizens and journalists as a form of political harassment or in an effort to suppress information in the private sphere on partisan grounds?

In 2012, the Obama Attorney General, Eric Holder, ordered taps on 20 phone lines of Associated Press reporters to monitor their call data to determine whether any were getting information from Obama administration officials.

In 2016, national security advisor designate Gen. Michael Flynn was “swept up” allegedly by Obama administration officials after Flynn held a legitimate call with a Russian leader in preparation for his work in the Trump administration. Several Obama operators strangely requested Flynn’s name be “unmasked” in a (successful) effort to smear him as a Russian asset.

In 2017, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith forged a court document to incriminate private citizen Carter Page, a then Trump campaign advisor. The FBI lied about it. He was given a slap on the wrist, no jail time, by left-wing district judge and Trump nemesis James Boasberg.

In 2016, Obama-era intelligence officials monitored the communications of high Trump campaign officials in order to prove “Russian collusion.” Surveillance of Trump Tower computers alleged (falsely) that the Russian Alfa Bank was communicating with the Trump campaign through electronic “pings.” And that false story was planted in the media by Obama-era officials such as Jake Sullivan and used by the Clinton campaign.

In 2020, the FBI partnered with private social media companies like Twitter and Facebook in order to suppress any pre-election news on their sites that the Hunter Biden laptop computer was authentic (the FBI knew at the time it was, since it was in its possession). The point was to use a government agency to aid the Biden campaign by suppressing accurate news reporting injurious to the Biden effort. And the plot worked perfectly as incriminating stories about the laptop, especially in the New York Post, were suppressed by social media companies on orders from the FBI.

In a trivial sense, in August 2013, a Missouri State Fair rodeo clown donned an Obama mask—he had traditionally worn the masks of past presidents. Under left-wing pressure, a rodeo official was banned for life as a rodeo clown, Tuffy Gessling. Note in contrast that almost daily, Hollywood stars and politicians, with impunity over the last nine years, have vowed to beat Trump up, shoot him, poison him, burn him up, club him, stab him, behead him, and throw him over a cliff.

And as a true sign of insurrectionary behavior and asymmetrical consequences, consider Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Trump hater (e.g., Trump was a “fascist to the core”), who later confessed that while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Trump, he had called his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army—twice—without notifying the commander-in-chief, although he claimed that the secretary of defense knew of his calls. Quite brazenly, on October 30, 2020, just four days before the election, Milley reassured the Chinese that he would contact their military command should he, Milley, diagnose any Trump order to be illegitimate and dangerous. Milley was never charged with any crime, despite promising to inform his enemy counterpart of any possible aggressive move by his own commander-in-chief.