Joy Behar, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” compared former President Donald Trump to 20th-century fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini Wednesday in a bizarre rant in which she also advocated for limitations on free speech.
When discussing the much-anticipated decision by Facebook’s Oversight Board, or so-called “supreme court,” to keep in place a ban of Trump from the platform Wednesday morning, Behar lurched into familiar territory: unhinged and nonsensical rambling — as did the show’s other personalities, minus Meghan McCain.
Not only did Behar blast the First Amendment as not being absolute, but she also actually minimized the countless deaths caused by the former fascist Italian regime under Mussolini when she connected Trump to the man behind so many of them.
“Well, you know, I think the First and Second Amendments both have limits. Even though I, you know, I love the First Amendment like everybody else does,” Behar claimed. “But I think that [Trump] is too much of a danger to have such a big platform.”
“Let him go on [Fox News]. He needs to be marginalized. And let him speak to the choir over there who appreciate him and agree with everything he says. He doesn’t need to contaminate the airwaves all over the world with Facebook,” the anti-free speech Behar chirped.
“I think about, you know, if this was in the 1940s in Italy would we want Mussolini on the radio? No, we would not.”
The people on “The View” are not well, and the irony of their statements is of course always lost on them.
Trump was summarily de-platformed online in the second week of January following the incursion of the Capitol in which no deaths are now attributed to the actions of neither peaceful protesters nor rioters. The incursion was shameful, yes, but people who traveled to Washington to support election transparency and integrity were actually encouraged by Trump to make their voices heard peacefully.
As adults possessing free will, some if them acted as if they were children, ignoring calls from Trump for a peaceful demonstration. The same can’t be said for violent leftist groups who were incited by Democrats and the leftist media all of last year. They were encouraged, even as they burned their way through cities.
Still, Big Tech, Democrats and the mainstream media, after months of rioting in major cities, used the Capitol incursion as justification for what they so longed for — an end to Trump. His exile from the privately owned public discourse resulted in the most potent political force in the country, and the chief threat to their bad ideas, being forced to address the country via email and now a private platform.
The “anti-fascists” certainly seem to embrace fascist tactics when dealing with threats to the status quo.
Even third-rate talk show co-hosts have proved themselves to be against basic civil liberties, so long as those being denied them are adversaries. Surely Behar would find herself in the pro-First Amendment camp if Silicon Valley were run by conservatives, and those conservatives were suppressing the voices of air-headed talk show hosts.
Rather than challenge ideas with which they disagree through a public dialogue, American leftists, such as Behar, have embraced the persecution of their enemies, and they would silence us all if they could. They also continue to twist and rewrite history to compare Trump’s multi-ethnic America-first movement to historical atrocities and those who committed them.
Behar neglected to tell her program’s low-information audience about Mussolini’s past when making the comparison. Chiefly, she ignored the fact Italy’s former fascist dictator was radicalized as a socialist prior to eventually seizing power in his country and arming up millions of Italian young men for quests to conquer Africa and other areas in the region beginning in 1935, according to History.
Following the bloody Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Italy of course aligned itself with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the Second World War. That alliance resulted in death and destruction across multiple continents — and those behind the killings were mostly race fanatics, which sounds familiar.
Before The Guardian lost its credibility like the rest of the leftist mainstream media, the paper summarized Italy’s involvement in World War II quite succinctly.
“In reality Benito Mussolini’s invading soldiers murdered many thousands of civilians, bombed the Red Cross, dropped poison gas, starved infants in concentration camps and tried to annihilate cultures deemed inferior,” the outlet reported in a 2001 article.
Twenty years later on Thursday afternoon, The Guardian’s top story includes a graphic of Hillary Clinton attached to a headline that reads: “There has to be a global reckoning with disinformation.”
Trump, the subject of much of that story, has thus far been relegated a voiceless victim of that “reckoning,” which doesn’t square up the logic and rhetoric used by people such as Behar. Mussolini used every means he could devise to violently smash all those who stood in his way. That included routine murder and war crimes as a means to an end.
Suppressing the speech of his enemies was child’s play.
Trump’s perceived “crimes” were of course that while in office, he stirred the pot both with policy and with challenging the left’s stranglehold on American life and culture by going on the offensive.
Mussolini starved children where Trump liberated minds from the grip of leftist narratives and liberated people from the chains of unemployment. As an imperfect messenger, Trump exposed corruption in both media and government, and he lifted people out of poverty and despair — especially those in minority communities.
Behar naturally doesn’t care about black unemployment in the U.S. in the same way she doesn’t care about the thousands of black Ethiopians who were murdered by Mussolini’s brutality during the last century.
Her point was to connect Trump to fascism, while counting on her uninformed viewers to receive the message that POTUS 45 is literally Mussolini, now that the leftist “Trump is literally Hitler” rallying cry has been overused.
Fascists, unlike Trump and his diverse coalition of voters and the conservative movement at large, believe in a one-party, totalitarian government. Fascists want complete control of a country, its people, its economy and its media and information.
Fascists rely on lies, misdirection and crushing their enemies’ ability to debate in the arena of ideas to achieve an end. There was one fascista in the equation drawn up Wednesday by Behar, and she couldn’t see herself in the mirror before she entered the stage on “The View.”