Who are the Real Dictators? By Charles Taylor (Florida)

The Left loves to scream "dictatorship" at Trump, accusing him of shredding democracy and the rule of law. But Victor Davis Hanson's 2025 piece, Who Really Are the Lawless and the Dictatorial? flips the script: it's the Left, not Trump, who wield courts, agencies, and media to bend laws, crush dissent, and push their agenda while cloaking it in democratic rhetoric. Their tactics, selective law enforcement, judicial activism, and narrative control, smack of modern fascism, where power is centralised, opposition is vilified, and propaganda rules. This pattern isn't unique to the U.S.; it's a global playbook, from Australia's Covid scare campaigns to South Korea's technocratic overreach, Poland's demographic flops, and Europe's migration debates, all discussed at the blog today.

In the U.S., the Left cheers as some 300-400 liberal district judges issue nationwide injunctions to block Trump's executive orders, from immigration to university funding. Trump complies, filing appeals, while these judges, picked for ideology over principle, exert unprecedented control over the nation. Hanson contrasts this with Obama's administration, which bullied universities with "Dear Colleague" letters, threatening to cut federal funds unless they ditched due process for campus sexual harassment cases, adopting a flimsy "preponderance of evidence" standard. No cries of "tyranny" then. Nor when Biden's DOJ coordinated with prosecutors like Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and Matthew Colangelo to hit Trump with shaky legal cases, timed with his 2024 re-election bid. Willis was fined for ethics violations, James faces fraud probes, and Smith skirted conflict-of-interest rules, yet the Left calls Trump lawless.

This hypocrisy plays out globally, as we discuss today at the blog. In Australia, health elites push the NB.1.8.1 Covid variant as a "highly contagious" threat, despite flat hospitalisations and zero ICU cases in Western Australia. They hype cases, 40% in Victoria, 25% in New South Wales and Western Australia, and beg for boosters, but only 6.6% of adults comply, and 75% of Murdoch poll readers don't care. X users mock the lies, calling it a "booster merry-go-round" driven by mRNA contracts, not health needs. Experts admit vaccines falter against mutating viruses, yet sceptics are smeared as "anti-science," just like Trump critics are labelled "tyrants." It's control through fear, a fascist tactic dressed as public health.

South Korea's technocrats mirror this, pushing immigration to fix a 0.7 fertility rate while dismissing cultural concerns as backward. The 2024 martial law attempt by President Yoon Suk Yeol, bypassing democratic norms, echoes the U.S. Left's judicial overreach, only he came unstuck. X posts show South Korean youth raging against "losing our identity," similar to Americans resisting "racist" labels for questioning migration. Poland's 1.099 fertility rate and failed "800+" policy reflect the same elite disconnect, ignoring housing and job woes while over half of Gen Z rejects parenthood. The Left's moral pleas, diversity, humanitarian duty, mirror their U.S. tactics, where dissent is painted as immoral to protect elite agendas.

The media's complicity is key. In the U.S., CBS's Scott Pelley rants against Trump's "tyranny" without evidence, editing transcripts to favour the Left. In Australia, media hypes Covid for clicks, ignoring flat stats. South Korea's chaebol-controlled media downplays immigration backlash, and Europe's outlets push migration as atonement, dismissing public fears. This isn't journalism; it's propaganda, a fascist tool to control narratives. Hanson's examples, Biden's DOJ ignoring Hunter's laptop, Soros's insider trading conviction versus Musk's "oligarch" label, show how media and agencies shield allies while targeting foes, a double standard straight out of authoritarian playbooks.

Trust is collapsing worldwide. Americans see through the Left's lawfare against Trump, Australians laugh off Covid scares, South Koreans (60% of young men) reject immigration, and Poles shun elite-driven demographic fixes. Elites cling to failing narratives, war, migration, health, risking chaos as publics push back. The Left's sanctimonious "dictatorship" cries mask their own lawlessness, weaponising courts, agencies, and media to silence dissent while waving democracy's flag. That's not just hypocrisy; it's the centralised, narrative-driven control of modern technocratic fascism!

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/02/who-really-are-the-lawless-and-the-dictatorial/

"The left cries "dictatorship" while wielding the courts, agencies, and media to undermine laws, crush dissent, and call it democracy. The left is in its usual sanctimonious but schizophrenic mood.

The media claims daily that the Trump administration has usurped power. It is supposedly destroying democracy. It tramples on the rule of law and thus has created a virtual dictatorship.

Yet at the same time, Democrats high-five the most recent district court judge who has put a stop to the current Trump executive orders—which the Trump administration abides by as it files appeals.

There are two clear conclusions from the flurry of the lower-court liberal justices' orders: 1) Trump has obeyed their record number of interventions as the appeals go forward; and 2) rarely in the history of the republic has a pool of some 300-400 left-wing district judges exercised such nationwide control over the executive branch and indeed the entire nation.

Yet consider the array of double standards.

Donald Trump is accused of improperly dictating to private elite universities who choose to apply for and receive federal funds. At least, lower court cherry-picked justices predictably rule so.

But please spare us the district courts' sermons on truth, justice, and the American way, given their lodestar is often ideology, not principled adherence to the law.

After all, Trump is only following the precedents of the Obama administration. With legal impunity, it had threatened fines and worse to public and private universities that did not fully implement Title 9 to Obama's subjective standards.

Indeed, the Obama Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, in an unconstitutional fashion, habitually threatened colleges and universities ("Dear Colleague…") with a cutoff of federal funds if they did not comply with its weird version of addressing charges of campus sexual harassment. For the "constitutional lawyer" Obama, gone was the American creed that Americans accused on campus were innocent unless proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt."

For the Harvard Law graduate Obama, gone were even past administrative rules that required "clear and convincing evidence" to convict the accused.

Instead, it ordered campuses to adopt its new Orwellian standard that a mere "preponderance of the evidence" might find the targeted guilty—or risk losing federal funds.

Hillsdale College long ago declined federal subsidies and grants, only to be a target of petty, even spiteful, federal harassment from both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Imagine what would be our current district court judges' attitude toward an administration's "interference" in denying federal funds to a campus that allowed black students to be serially harassed and assaulted on campuses—and their attackers honored by the university, in the manner that Jewish students and their assailants are today at Harvard. Would a judge really forbid the federal government from attaching conditions to its optional funding, requiring campuses to follow the law and protect at-risk students?

Imagine what district judges would say should visiting white South African students, here on student visas, trash the libraries of their hosts and rough up minority janitors or surround a library to threaten students of color trapped inside—and do so with assumed campus impunity?

Would our principled district judges really forbid a Democratic administration from holding back federal funds to force sanctimonious college presidents to stop such racially inspired campus violence?

Would the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rule that universities had violated the corpus of civil rights legislation and the 2022 Supreme Court decision if they ever allowed segregated "European-American" auxiliary graduations or de facto segregated Euro-dorms ("theme houses")?

What if African-American students with higher test scores and GPAs on average than their white counterparts were systematically discriminated against in admissions to ensure that the incoming admitted class was composed of roughly no more than two percent black males —perhaps in the manner of the last few years when about 9 percent of the incoming Stanford classes were apparently designated white males (who make up 33-35 percent of the population)?

Would the lower courts stop a Democratic administration that forced such a racially discriminating university to follow prior civil rights court decisions and federal laws—or else?

Would our lower courts rebuke a Democratic administration that had warned a campus to abide by protections of the First Amendment if they wished continuance of federal funds—and thus, say, stop white male frat students from shouting down, disrupting, harassing, and threatening a speech of a transgendered visiting federal judge—as one of its own right-wing male administrators hijacked and prematurely ended the guest's lecture?

When CBS's Scott Pelley hijacked a graduation address to deliver a Bruce Springsteen-like rant against Trump, the purported tyrant, did he specify how the elected president has trampled the Constitution? Does Trump's press secretary selectively edit her transcripts, as CBS does, to show the president in a more favorable light?

Has Trump followed any of the precedents established during the prior four years of the Biden administration?

Did he, Mr. Pelley, coordinate local, state, and federal prosecutors to warp the law and try to imprison his 2020 and 2024 political opponent?

The left talks of Elon Musk as a Trump oligarch threatening democracy. Has Musk been convicted of a felony charge of insider trading in the manner that billionaire and donor George Soros was in France? Is he now in prison like left-wing mega-donor and disgraced oligarch Sam Bankman-Fried?

Note well that in the days after Trump's 2022 announcement to seek reelection, the Biden DOJ appointed Jack Smith as a federal prosecutor to prosecute Trump.

At roughly the same time, Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor for Fani Willis's Georgia prosecution of Trump, mysteriously showed up in Washington to meet with the White House counsel. Why?

Stranger still, Matthew Colangelo—formerly the DOJ's third-ranking prosecutor and a key figure in Letitia James's ridiculous New York case—left the department once again to rejoin the legal campaign against Trump by leading Alvin Bragg's municipal prosecution of Trump.

Note also that Smith left his billet under a cloud of ethics conflicts after receiving free legal services and not initially reporting such gifted conflict-of-interest income. Fani Willis was forced off her prosecutions for numerous ethical violations and indeed fined for not turning over subpoenaed documents. Letitia James is currently facing federal investigations ranging from mortgage, mail, and banking fraud to falsification of documents.

So far, Trump has not sent the FBI to raid the multiple Biden residences to search for more classified documents, given Biden's serial history of improper possession of such materials.

Did Jack Smith, in Robert Hur fashion, ever claim that Trump was not feasibly prosecutable because he had a poor memory, perhaps citing the illustrious work of fired Yale psychiatrist professor and left-wing heartthrob Dr. Bandi Lee, who had earlier tele-diagnosed Trump as demented?

Are any red states currently coordinating to take the 2028 Democratic nominee off their state ballots following the lead of democratic Democrats?

Trump was certainly not nominated by Republican Party insider fiat in 2024. Instead, he ran as a maverick disruptor and won the nomination in open primaries. Kamala Harris was selected by Democrat insiders—despite never having won a single delegate or primary vote in her two nomination bids.

Joe Biden, whose prior 2020 nomination was fixed by party insiders, won the 2024 nomination by winning 14 million primary votes. But he was kicked off the ticket by the same party insiders and donors who had orchestrated his prior nomination. Is that the new Democrat-style of democracy of nullifying the wishes of 14 million voters?

The left talks endlessly of the "rule of law." But they have crafted a funny sort of selective and self-interested jurisprudence. If a local or state entity decides it does not find federal immigration convenient, it simply defies federal orders to turn over those who have entered and resided in the country illegally, even or especially in the case of the detained who have committed crimes.

In the ancient days, Americans called that defiance "nullification." Indeed, it was always associated with "states' rights," and a long history of insurrectionary illegality from the Confederacy to George Wallace standing in the door of the University of Alabama.

But the left now calls those entities that nullify federal laws "sanctuary cities"—although it would go ballistic should a red country similarly declare the federal Endangered Species Act or gun registration laws nullified in their "sanctuary" jurisdictions. Indeed, a Democrat administration would likely apply a January 6-like preventative detention and indefinite incarceration to any such nullifying "insurrectionaries."

Are the Trump White House and the Republican majority Senate now maneuvering to end the filibuster as the Democrats once threatened? Are they trying to pack the Supreme Court to ensure more appointments before 2029, in the fashion that Democrat presidential candidates used to promise? Or are they threatening to end the Electoral College as Democrats habitually bluster?

I do not remember, during the current Trump tenure, the FBI suppressing knowledge of evidence in the manner of its Biden-era smothering of Hunter's authenticated laptop to influence an election. Are Trump's FBI lawyers doctoring evidence to frame their targets à la Kevin Clinesmith?

In Trump's first 120 days, I don't recall FBI Director Kash Patel leaking confidential presidential conversations to the New York Times, or ordering the FBI to collect dirt on Democratic candidates, or hiring a fraudulent ex-British spy to compile a lurid dossier on AOC or Bernie Sanders. Has Patel lied four times to federal investigators following the prompt of Andrew McCabe?

Nor has Patel ordered his agents to work with Facebook and Twitter to suppress embarrassing press coverage about the Trump family.

The Trump Secret Service is not a private retrieval service that hunts down his children's missing, lurid diaries or incriminating lost laptops or illegally acquired lost handguns.

Is there now a White House-conservative media cabal covering up a Trump cancer diagnosis or demonstrable senility?

So far, the Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, have not repeatedly lied under oath to Congress, following the precedents of the Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper.

So please, spare us the sanctimonious lectures on "tyranny" and "dictatorship" from the very ideologues who have done and are doing more to wreck the Constitution and destroy the confidence of the American people in the rule of law than any generation in modern memory."