Alfred Hitchcock: ‘A Cure for Fascism’?

An August 2018 meme purportedly quoting Alfred Hitchcock on a “cure for fascism” (archived here) remains popular on Facebook.

A description that often appears with the meme suggests that Hitchcock’s “fascism” message occurred “back when celebrities didn’t give a shit about what people thought.” Three images of Hitchcock handling bullets and a gun are captioned:

I’ve just come into possession of a cure for fascism.

They come in capsule form. For best results, they must be taken internally.

Here is the handy applicator.

Searching for “Alfred Hitchcock” and “a cure for fascism” quickly led to original footage of the captioned sequence. However, Hitchcock is discussing insomnia, not fascism:

The segment shown here was part of a January 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, titled “A Bullet for Baldwin”:

When an office worker is fired from his job, he shoots his boss to death, but when he returns to the office his boss is alive, and has no recollection of the incident.

Facebook in August 2018 was not the “cure for fascism” meme’s first appearance. An identical version was shared to Reddit’s r/MURICA in September 2017, also appearing on Imgur:

Although the Alfred Hitchcock “a cure for fascism” quote was based on a genuine segment featuring the filmmaker, Hitchcock originally said “insomnia” where “fascism” appeared.

Incidentally, Hitchcock did produce anti-fascist material during his career as part of an anti-Nazi propaganda effort during World War II, but that material was deemed too subversive and did not see the light of day until the 1990s — a decade and a half after his death in 1980.