Author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza talked about his new book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“There’s a deep fascist streak in politics now. Ironically, the fascism of today marches under the banner of anti-fascism, and it claims the moral credibility of anti-fascism,” D’Souza said. “In other words, it tries to take all the odor of fascism – stained as it is with the Holocaust, Auschwitz – and project it onto Trump and on the right.”
“This is a massive historical deception. That’s the Big Lie at its core,” he said. “If the premise is true that fascism has now crept deeply into the bowels of the left, we can’t pretend like that hasn’t happened and continue with politics as usual.”
“The Republicans that I watch on TV think it’s the 1980s,” he complained. “This is Reagan vs. Tip O’Neill. It’s a gentleman’s fight. They can both go out to a bar and have a beer afterwards. That’s not the America we live in now.”
D’Souza saw the election of former President Barack Obama as the tipping point for left-wing fascism.
“It wasn’t even Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton was largely living in the aftermath of Reganism. He was, largely, in policy terms, pulled by the Reagan tide. Remember, he signed welfare reform, for example,” D’Souza recalled.
“When Obama came in with his sort of Alinskyite sensibility, and Hillary, of course, having the same, a kind of gangsterism came into American politics.” he continued, “a gangsterism that said things like, ‘Let’s deploy the IRS against our opposition. Let’s wiretap using the FBI. Let’s try to put our opponents in prison.’ This is sort of fascist behavior, and this is the kind of thing that I don’t think – I mean, Jimmy Carter would not have dreamed of it. Neither would JFK or Truman.”
D’Souza said the left was driven to embrace these tactics by “the glimpse of being able to establish exactly what the fascists always wanted: a complete centralized state.”
“Remember, for example, that with the NSA today there are surveillance technologies that were completely unavailable to Mussolini in the 20s or Hitler in the 30s,” he pointed out. “So in a sense, true fascism, full-scale fascism, is more possible today than it was in the twentieth century.”
“This is sort of the leftist objective. Now, they thought that they were almost there – and then, out of nowhere, comes this bizarre guy Trump, and he sort of turns the tables. He takes over, and they’ve suddenly lost all three branches of government, and they can’t believe it. This is the fury out of which they’re striking back,” he said.
D’Souza cited National Review writer Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism as another effort to track the evolution of fascist thought into modern left-wing politics, although he thought Goldberg was too reluctant to draw a solid link between today’s Democrats and the tyrants of the previous century.
“Now, I’m not comparing the left to the Nazis of Auschwitz,” he added. “But I am comparing them to the early Nazis, and, in fact, I would insist that the history of the Democratic Party – look at its 150-year history of racism, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan. This history is actually more reminiscent of Nazism than of, say, Mussolini-style fascism.”
“Mussolini didn’t actually have concentration camps,” he elaborated. “He didn’t persecute the Jews in the systematic fashion Hitler did. He didn’t have segregation. Mussolini’s fascism, in a sense, was much less racist. So if you want to compare racism, you’ve got to compare the Democratic Party with the Nazis – both those groups imbued, over most of their history, with deep racism.”
Kassam proposed that much of this truth has been hidden by rebranding left-wing heroes of the past, such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s transformation from eugenicist to “women’s health” pioneer.
“Margaret Sanger’s basic premise was eugenics,” D’Souza agreed. “More children from the fit and less from the unfit. She was in support of fairly extreme measures, including segregation and then, notoriously, forced sterilization in order to deprive lower-class and uneducated women of the chance to reproduce. She was very explicit about that.”
“Now, when the Nazis did it in 1933, Margaret Sanger gave speeches praising it. She said, ‘Look, the Nazis, the Germans, are ahead of us. We’ve got to catch up to them.’ This is the actual Margaret Sanger, but it’s not the Margaret Sanger you’ll find in Planned Parenthood brochures,” he said.
Kassam asked what conservatives, Republicans, and non-political average Americans can do to combat false allegations of fascism and extremism leveled against them by the left.
“Number one, I notice that the Republicans very rarely answer the accusations that are made against them,” D’Souza replied. “For example, all Trump needs to say is something like, ‘Hey, guys, it’s very interesting you call me a fascist. First of all, you guys slay me on every existing platform. I turn on the TV, comedians are ridiculing me. The media is blasting me. Hollywood people are railing. If I was really a fascist, do you think I would allow that to happen? Do you think Mussolini would allow the radio in Rome to be blasting him? No, he’d send some people over. They’d shut down the radio station. That would be the end of that.’”
“Real fascism doesn’t tolerate that kind of dissent,” he noted. “The pervasiveness of it is clear proof that Trump is not an authoritarian; he’s not a fascist.”
“The reason that the left makes the headway that they do is that they’ve actually redefined things, and this is an intellectual task of some time. It began in academia; it’s been promoted by Hollywood and the media,” he said. “For example, a lot of ordinary educated people think right now that fascism equals nationalism. By that definition, Trump would seem to be closer to fascism than, let’s say, Bernie Sanders. But the truth of it is that nationalism is not a key defining feature of fascism at all.”
“I was born in India. Gandhi was a nationalist. Mandela was a nationalist. All the anti-colonial leaders were nationalists. Churchill was a nationalist. The American Founders were nationalists,” he pointed out.
“Obviously, all these people weren’t fascists, so clearly nationalism, although descriptive of Hitler and Mussolini, doesn’t actually get to the core of what fascism means. We need to do the intellectual work to understand these things and then get them out,” D’Souza advised.
D’Souza said his book uncovers “parallels between things that were happening in America and things that were happening in Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany.”
“In reality, I found causal relationships. The guys, for example, who wrote the Nuremberg laws, the senior Nazi officials, are literally standing there and debating these laws holding in their hand the blueprints of Democratic laws of the Jim Crow South. And they’re basically saying, ‘All we need to do, in effect, is cross out the word black and write in the word Jew, and we’re home free.’ Literally, the Nuremberg laws were not parallel to, they were based upon – they were directly derived from – Democratic laws formed in America, in the South,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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