Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series based on LN’s exclusive interview with author and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza about his new book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. You can read the first part here on Liberty Nation.
Outrageous accusations hurled by significant figures in the political and policy arena are almost universally met with strong resistance. Call someone a communist (not so fashionable these days) or a fascist (definitely fashionable), and you can expect a swift, decisive and bitter retort.
That is why the deafening silence on the left about the exhaustively researched conclusions by Dinesh D’Souza in his latest book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, is so noteworthy.
In his exclusive interview on Liberty Nation Radio, D’Souza discusses how he relied on multiple leftist sources in reaching his conclusions, thus defusing potential attacks from the left. And the left has, understandably, refused to respond to him setting the record straight.
Down The Rabbit Hole
LN: Dinesh, you quote a number of progressive historians or scholars in your book, meaning that those who take issue with the book have to answer to historians with a seemingly vested interest in advancing the usual narrative of Nazis being a product of the far-right. Describe to me some of the most notable reaction to this explosive book from the left.
Mr. D’Souza: Well first of all, as you say, I rely heavily on the greatest living scholars of fascism. Some of these are European scholars, like Renzo De Felice of Italy, the scholar at Berkeley, A. James Gregor, Stanley Payne of the University of Wisconsin. I also rely on progressives who are on the left, people like James Whitman of Yale, or Timothy Snyder who’s also at Yale. Now, what’s interesting is at no point do I quote right-wing sources or right-wing historians, and yet there’s a deadly silence about the arguments from the folks from the Left. In fact, to me it’s quite amusing because I’ve been listening to people like Bill Maher, Van Jones, Rachel Maddow, bloviating about fascism ever since Trump’s election, and now finally here’s a book that discusses all this in some exhaustive detail, and they’ve all gone running down the rabbit hole, not a word from them. They won’t have me on their shows. I guess they don’t want me to make them look like fools.
Playing The Fascist Card
LN: You also produced an important movie during the 2016 election campaign entitled Hillary’s America, which is all about not just Hillary Clinton but the racist roots of the Democratic Party, revealing to those who weren’t already aware that the Democrats were the party of slavery and the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation and Bull Connor and water hoses and dogs set on black people. Is their attempt to whitewash their own history of racism comparable to their effort to lay off Nazism on the Right?
Mr. D’Souza: That’s beautifully put. That is exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been playing the race card to great effect. I mean, to such great effect that our side was buying into the big lie. This fellow Ken Mehlman, the former head of the RNC, the Republican National Committee, was going around to black churches apologizing for the Republican Party’s racist history. The poor fool obviously didn’t realize that there is no racist history to apologize for, but he has been suckered into buying into the progressive big lie. Now the Left has moved from racism to fascism, and they’re playing the fascist card against Trump, and that is an equally fraudulent card.
I show that Hitler literally got some of his most vicious genocidal schemes directly from American progressives or from the American Democratic Party. The Nuremberg Laws, for example, the notorious laws that turned Jews into second-class citizens and resulted in the confiscation of Jewish property, these were essentially built directly from blueprints supplied by American Democrats – they were just like the Jim Crow laws of the American South. These aren’t similarities; they’re direct causal connections. And yet there’s a stuttering silence about it across this whole swath of the American Left in response to the book.
The Attack On Nationalists
LN: Well, the most obvious evidence of your book hitting the mark might be in the actual name of the Nazi Party itself, the National Socialist German Workers’ party, correct?
Mr. D’Souza: Yes, this was part of the ingenuity of the big lie, that the Left, after World War II, they sort of got the socialism out of national socialism. They define Nazism in such a way, in such a vague way, that they can now say things like, “Well, you know, Trump is a nationalist because he’s an authoritarian.” Wait a minute. We’ve had authoritarians from the beginning of time going back to perhaps Julius Caesar, and they weren’t obviously all fascists. Or, “Trump is a fascist because he’s a nationalist.” Wait a minute, you know, Gandhi was a nationalist, Mandela was a nationalist in South Africa, all the anti-colonial leaders were nationalists. Obviously, again, those people weren’t fascists. What’s happened is the Left has created a fake fascism so that they can pin the fascist tail on the Republican elephant, whereas what I show is it belongs squarely on the Democratic donkey.
