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Aug. 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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3792 Leftist Fascism | Dinesh D'Souza and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
We are back with Dinesh D'Souza.
He is the author of the number one New York Times bestsellers, Hillary's America and America Imagine a World Without Her.
His other bestselling books include Obama's America, The Roots of Obama's Rage, What's So Great About America, What's So Great About Christianity, Life After Death, Thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure. Good to be on the show.
So it's a challenging paradigm, and I remember this when I was a kid first starting to learn about politics.
What a brain-bending Mobius strip it seemed to be when they said, well, you see, on the far left, you have communism, and on the far right, you have Nazism or fascism, whereas it seems to me these things kind of curved around and met in the rear of sort of collectivism, tyranny, big government interference in the free market and so on.
So I wonder if you could help people shatter some of that paradigm, because I think it's that kind of thinking that That has seesawed us into this ever-escalating state power situation.
Well, the notion that communism is on the left and fascism on the right was given a certain kind of visual corroboration when in World War II you had the Soviet Union, the communists on one side, you had the fascists, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy on the other side.
So this kind of convinced people looking at it that they must be ideological opposites.
Now, historically, we know that ideologies that are actually very similar, that differ sometimes on very fine points of doctrine, nevertheless go to war.
And they go to war not just over fine points of doctrine, but they go to war over competition for power, for followers, for territory, and so on.
Think of the Shia and the Sunni.
They're both inside the House of Islam.
They've been fighting for centuries.
So communism and fascism are both forms of collectivism.
They actually differ on a fairly minor point.
Communism is always purported to be international.
Fascism is essentially National Socialism.
That was actually the name of Hitler's party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
So yes, if you drew a spectrum I would put on the left side of it, communism, fascism, progressivism, socialism.
On the right side of the spectrum, I would put people who believe in individual rights, limited government.
So if you think of a, quote, right-wing extremist, that would be someone who is so extreme in their commitment to individual liberty that they want the government to be so small as to be virtually non-existent.
I envision a guy running up and down the street uprooting stop signs.
He doesn't want the government to do even that.
That's a real right-wing extremist.
Right. Now, let's talk about some of the roots of fascism.
And I want to talk about this before we get into the definition, because I think understanding that fascism was a root of Marxism.
And as you point out in the book, Mussolini, in watching Italy's invasion to get some resources from Libya, recognized that the people in Italy responded much more to nationalistic fervor than they did to sort of this internationalist class fervor.
And that's one of the reasons why, and Stalin did this later on, of course, he began to root his collectivism more in the nation state rather than in the class.
But I wonder if you can help people understand just how deep the roots into Marxism, the supposed fascist movement goes.
Well, the reason this is very important, because this is a part of the origin of fascism that the left has suppressed.
The progressives in academia have tried to make sure that this story does not get into the textbooks, because fascism is an outgrowth.
Of Marxism and of socialism.
At the end of the 19th century, a lot of intelligent Marxists were scratching their head because the prophecies of Marx weren't coming true.
Marx had predicted the outbreak of communist revolutions in countries like England and Germany.
And this just wasn't happening.
So the smart Marxists said, something is wrong with Marx.
We need to modify Marx.
We need a kind of new Marxism, if you will, for the 20th century.
And out of that came two offshoots, Leninist Bolshevism, itself a revision of Marxism, and Mussolini's fascism.
Mussolini was, in fact, a Marxist, the most famous Marxist in Italy, along with Gramsci.
And Mussolini was the editor of the Socialist Party magazine, so that when Mussolini became a fascist, it was seen as a leftist move.
Shortly after Mussolini's march on Rome, establishing the first fascist regime in the world, Lenin sent a telegram of congratulations.
Why? He recognized Mussolini as a fellow revolutionary of the left.
the relationships between all of the tyrants.
It's to me sort of like the relationships between mafia bosses or sort of criminal syndicate bosses.
Sometimes they'll be an alliance, sometimes they'll be viciously opposed, but they fundamentally share the same worldview and also share the common enemy, which is the police.
And I wonder if you can help people understand the sort of interweaving of positive feelings and relationships between people like FDR and Mussolini and Hitler and so on, because that is one of the great blows to the historical narrative that shows up in your book.
Yes, most of this historical narrative, it should be emphasized, is not known in America, even by educated people.
Why? Because the progressives coming to power in academia and the media after the war, this is after World War II, once fascism had been permanently discredited With the reputation of Holocaust, these progressives go all this history that we know.
We don't want young people to know.
If they did, progressivism would suffer a blow from which it would never recover.
So we've got to make sure that this stuff is left out of the textbooks.
Now, what we're talking about here is the deep and intimate connections between the Democratic Party and the progressive left on the one hand, and fascist Italy and early Nazi Germany on the other.
These connections, before I started this book, I thought that they were mainly in the form of analogies.
So, for example, in America, we had the Ku Klux Klan, three to five million members in the 20s.
The Nazi brown shirts over in Germany, they have three to five million members.
Both are paramilitary organizations.
Both are majorly into costumes.
Both practice racial terrorism.
Both have a kind of vulnerable minority to pick on.
Blacks in the case of the Klan, Jews in the case of the Nazis.
Both are the extension of an actual political party.
The brown shirts are an extension of the Nazi party.
The Klan is the extension of the Democratic Party.
So I saw these analogies, but what I didn't realize is that there were actually more intimate connections.
The Nazis are actually drawing on the American Democratic Party and American progressives to implement some of their most destructive and genocidal schemes.
Oh, let's talk about that, because that's a fascinating part in the book, how the Nazis, when looking to draw up their racial purification laws, looked at the Democrats in the United States, but they said, well, they go too far.
Let's pull it back.
I mean, this is something that, again, would blow the narrative right out of the water, more widely known, which of course is why you wrote the book and why we're having this conversation.
Well, I have to credit the Yale historian James Whitman for discovering this, but Whitman is himself a leftist, and he tries to cover up the significance of his own findings by not blaming the Democrats, but just by blaming America.
America is to blame.
Now here's what he's talking about.
He's talking about 1935 when the Nazis, the senior Nazi officials, the head of the Justice Department and so on, who are drafting up the Nuremberg Laws, which would turn Jews into second-class citizens.
These are laws that would segregate Jews into ghettos, forbid intermarriage between Jews and other Germans, confiscate later the property of Jews.
So these Nuremberg laws, it turns out, were directly based on the blueprint of the Democratic Party laws in the Jim Crow South.
It should be remembered that every segregation law in the South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor, enforced by Democratic officials.
This is why Whitman ultimately is part of the big lie.
He's trying to put the blame generically on America when it falls squarely on the Democratic Party.
But yes, the Nazis basically take the word, they take the Democratic laws, they cross out the word black, they write in the word Jew, and they're almost home free.
But then what you alluded to, one of the Nazis raises a very interesting question, who is a Jew?
He points out that there's been intermarriage over the centuries between Jews and other Christians.
So how do you decide if somebody who's a quarter or half or three-quarter Jewish, do they qualify and count as Jews?
So the Nazis then once again turn and say, well, how do the Democrats solve that problem in America?
And they discover that in America, the Democrats have the one-drop rule.
The one-drop rule is basically if you have any discernible trace of Black ancestry, even one drop theoretically, you're Black.
And the Nazis look at each other and they decide, they go, that's too much.
In other words, you're the Nazis saying the Democrats are too racist even for us.
We can't go. We can't say that if you have one drop of Jewish blood, you're Jewish.
So in the end, the Nuremberg Law is required in order to be Jewish, you have to have three We're good to go.
Yeah, I think that's quite fascinating as well.
And there also is a very strong attempt to, of course, separate these two ideologies and place them in opposition as a way of, I guess, obscuring their common roots.
And we can see, of course, this going through Wilson, and as you point out, FDR and some of the other American presidents on the left or from the Democrats, and how much they seem to follow the fascist model of controlling business while still allowing for nominal private ownership.
Yeah, some of the people, you know, watching this program might say, well, Dinesh, this is very damning information indeed, but we're arguing about history.
And I think for young people, ancient history is...
What does this matter today?
And I would say, listen, first of all, the ideology of the Democratic Party now, its economic ideology, is essentially indistinguishable from fascism.
It's actually closer to fascism than it is to, say, Marxian socialism.
Consider this. Socialist countries like to nationalize private industry.
In my native country of India, the socialist governments since the 1940s would take over the banks.
They would try to take over the energy sector.
They'd try to own the airlines and so on.
Now, in America, we don't have that.
Even under Obama. Look at Obamacare.
We have private hospitals.
We have private health insurance companies.
But the government tells them what to do.
The government sets the prices.
The government decides who's eligible.
So we have state-directed capitalism.
We've seen that in the banking sector, in investment houses.
We've seen it in the energy sector.
So this state-directed capitalism much more closely approximates classical fascism than it does classical socialism.
Well, one of the things it does is it provides a wonderful scapegoat.
You know, the problem, one of the problems with communism among its many moral problems is the problem that if the state owns the means of productions, then of course the state is terrible at producing things.
And the state then gets blamed.
But if you have this sort of A category of people who nominally own the businesses, when the businesses fail to produce, the government can say, well, you know, it's these terrible businessmen, they're to blame, and so on.
So it actually creates a scapegoat for the inefficiencies of state control that serves the powers that be quite a bit.
That, and to look at it another way, Mussolini recognized that the state doesn't know how to do these things.
So essentially he said, listen, we'll let the private sector make stuff, but then we've got to make sure that private industry, just like private individuals, that their lives are at the service of the state.
I mean, Mussolini is a very interesting figure because he's the founder of modern fascism, much more so than Hitler.
Hitler rarely called himself a fascist.
You can read Mein Kampf and the word fascist almost never appears.
Mussolini established the first fascist regime in the world more than a decade or a decade before Hitler came to power.
So Mussolini says fascism is everything is in the state and nothing is outside the state.
You can almost look at the state as a kind of living organism, a living creature.
And each individual is a cell within the organism.
So our lives and our rights don't matter except to the degree that we serve the state.
Well, hey, does that sound like the platform of the Republican Party or the platform of the Democratic Party?
Quite right.
Now, let's talk about Wilson, because this is something that you go into in the book.
He's considered to be quite a hero by people who love to read speeches rather than look at what actually happened, you know, national self-determination and global democracy.
This is what he talked about.
And then they imposed this brutal peace on Germany after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, which, you know, I think is a very strong case to be made, led directly to World War II.
But what people don't understand is how he revived the KKK and he also segregated since the end of the Civil War.
The federal government had been desegregated.
He resegregated it.
And people have a tough time.
Well, there was this odd quirk in his personality that he just happened to be a seemingly virulent racist, but it's all over whatever he does.
And again, the scrub from history.
You know, I love the way that these progressive historians tweet this material.
They'll say, oh... You know, they're scratching their heads over why Wilson would screen a pro Ku Klux Klan movie in the White House.
The historian Ira Katznelson of Columbia writes a whole book called Fear Itself.
He goes, it's extremely puzzling that FDR cut a deal with the Democratic racists to block anti-lynching legislation and exclude blacks from New Deal programs.
You know, recently it's come out that young JFK went to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, comes back effusive with praise of Hitler.
Even as late as 1945, JFK is calling Hitler, quote, a legend.
You know, we're very puzzled that the sainted JFK would say this.
And so this sort of cognitive dissonance is intended to distance these people and their horrendous actions that they got involved in.
Look, Roosevelt tries to pack the court.
He wants to add unilaterally six new members to the Supreme Court to completely ruin the independence of the judiciary.
And so the historians kind of wittily have described this as the switch in time that saved nine, as if this little funny proverb disguises the fact that the Supreme Court essentially declared its non-independence, essentially put itself into subservience to FDR to avoid the court packing scheme,
an absolute fascist move by FDR, but covered up by progressive historians as though it was a little funny little move by FDR that happily brought the court Well, it's a funny thing, too, because that's becoming so lost in time, Dinesh, that I don't think people remember that there was a time in America where your right to property was considered as sacred as your right to free speech or your right to own a weapon and so on.
And I really think, as you make this very strong case, it was in the 1930s that that really fell apart.
I think it's interesting that we keep hearing now how the two parties supposedly switched places.
That the Republican Party, in a sense, became the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party became the Republican Party.
And this is complete nonsense.
And what I mean by that is that the core idea of the Republican Party now is identical with what it was in 1860.
Let me put it this way.
In defining slavery, Abraham Lincoln said that the essence of slavery was represented in the phrase, you work, I eat.
For him, the essence of slavery is stealing another man's labor.
You make him work for you, in a sense, for free.
You take the fruit of his labor.
So Lincoln defined the Democratic Party as the party that steals other people's labor.
And he defined the Republican Party as the party where you get to keep your own stuff, the fruit of your earnings.
As Lincoln puts it, the hand that makes the corn gets the right to put the corn into its own mouth.
Now, I ask you, is not the platform of the Republican Party today, essentially, the hand that makes the corn should put the corn into its own mouth, and is not the platform of the Democratic Party today, you work, I eat?
Number of slave owners who were Republicans by the time of the Civil War, what was that number?
That number was, in fact, zero.
All right, let's just take a pause.
I want that goose egg to roll around in people's brains for a little bit.
Number of Republicans who owned slaves, zero.
Number of Democrats? So on the eve of the Civil War, there were, in fact, four million slaves in America, and every one of those was owned by a Democrat.
The reason I got into this, by the way, is, you know, the left was saying to me, well, Dinesh, you're talking about history, the Republican Party, the anti-slavery party, the Democrat.
But there was a lot of blame to go around, wasn't there?
And I said, no, actually, no.
The slavery debate was straight out between the pro-slavery Democratic Party, by the way, in the North and the South.
And the anti-slavery Republican Party.
The reason this is significant is that after the war, the Democrats launched a massive campaign, which progressives have sort of continued to today, to shift the blame from the Democratic Party to the South.
Because by shifting it to the South, by making it a regional culpability, now they get to go from city to city, pulling down Confederate monuments and so on.
The South has to take the blame, but the blame more squarely belongs to the Democratic Party.
Most Southerners did not own slaves.
Most Confederates did not own slaves.
Robert E. Lee is an ambiguous figure, a lot of good things about him, a few bad things about him.
He was not half a bad guy as most of the Democratic presidents of the last 200 years.
All right.
So to move forward, we're going to do a little bit of a time jump, though, so everyone grab onto your helmets.
But looking at what happened in Charlottesville just a few days ago, a lot of people see this violence erupting out of nowhere, it seems like.
Where are all these people? Why are they so angry?
Why are they pulling down statues?
Why are they pelting people with bricks who are trying to exercise their right of free speech?
Why are permits... What if you can help people understand the mindset that is driving this resistance to free speech in America at the moment and around the West?
Well, this is a very important issue because there's no ideology on the right.
There's no ideology on the Republican side that justifies violence of any kind.
And moreover, there's no presence on the right of any kind of extremism of this sort.
I've I've been speaking at GOP, Lincoln dinners, Reagan dinners since my first book was published in 1991.
My wife asked me the other day, have you ever seen a Klansman or a skinhead or a neo-Nazi at any of these events?
And I said, it was pretty ridiculous.
It's never happened. These people are not a presence in the Republican Party.
So when the left tries to portray the neo-Nazis and so on as mainstream Republicans, they're creating an alternative universe of pure fiction.
So that's the first point to note.
The other thing is that on the left, Herbert Marcuse, whom you mentioned, was a refugee from Nazism.
He came to America, taught, I believe, at the University of California in San Diego.
He became a guru of the new left.
And he began a very ingenious mode of argument, which he published in an essay called Repressive Tolerance.
Think of the Orwellian significance, repressive tolerance.
Basically, what Marcuse goes is he says, we on the left, we are the tolerant people.
But, but, very big but, he goes, we don't have to be tolerant of the intolerant.
So if we can classify our opponents as intolerant, Then we don't have to respect their civil rights or their First Amendment rights.
We get to shut them down, shout them out, run them over, beat them up, kill them if we have to, because repressing these people is a moral and social good.
The phrase that became associated with Marcuse, I don't think he invented it, but it epitomizes his writing, no free speech for fascists.
And so you can literally call Marcuse the philosophical guru of the Antifa movement on the left today.
Well, and they believe, I think, very strenuously and sometimes violently, they believe, of course, that the disasters of Nazism arose from the public dissemination of particular ideas, and therefore it is a matter of elemental self-defense to prevent the spread of those ideas by any means necessary, because they are a toxicity that, you know, causes the deaths of millions and represses and concentration camps and Holocaust and so on.
And I mean, I guess it's kind of seductive if you're not very good at debating back.
I guess you want to pick up a brick instead.
Well, this is why the charge of fascism that is made against Trump and the right is not a mere insult.
Some people say, well, it's just rhetorical excess.
These people don't understand what they're saying.
But the purpose served by this accusation is to justify a whole bunch of extreme and kind of unusual measures taken by the left that would otherwise be completely inexcusable.
I mean, trying to pressure electors to change their commitments.
Mainstream Democrats refusing to attend the inauguration, disrupting the inauguration and breaking up the festivities, sending masked thugs to campuses to drive rare conservatives to show up, preventing them from speaking.
Now, you know, if we did this to Obama, the result would be absolute apoplexy, but it's considered to be warranted in the case of Trump.
Why? Because the meta story is that, well, Trump is sort of like Hitler in 1933, and if we had to do some crazy stuff to get rid of that guy, think of all the carnage that would have been prevented later.
So the fascism meme, if you will, is not innocent.
It's serving the purpose of covering up A lot of excess extremism and Shia thuggery on the left.
Let's talk a little bit about Martin Heidegger, who's one of the – I mean, when I was studying this stuff in college, I read some Heidegger and so on.
And then it came somewhat of a shock to me somewhat later when I found out that he was significantly pro-Nazi.
Now, that's not the kind of thing you think would just get swept under the rug.
Yet, because of his involvement in developing some of this philosophy, again, he seems to have been whitewashed from any of these associations.
It really is quite astounding.
Yeah, now Heidegger is a genuinely profound and important thinker.
Some people consider him the leading philosopher of the 20th century.
I don't mean in what I'm about to say to diminish the importance of his philosophical work, but here's the important point.
Heidegger has become a hero on the left.
Why? Because he is an enemy of technological capitalism.
He hated America.
He was an apostle of a kind of deep environmentalism that saw the earth in a sense as having its own claims.
He was an anti-humanist, if I can put it that way.
And so the left loves Heidegger.
And so when the revelations came out that not only was Heidegger a member of the Nazi party, he tried to implement Nazi intolerance through the universities.
But he was also a lifelong anti-Semite.
He remained an anti-Semite long after World War II. The left has tried to cover up for Heidegger.
Basically, what they've said is that, well, he might have been that way, but that does not contaminate His political ideology and we should continue to be able to draw on it.
This stuff is really important because we see how the anti-fascist party today, the left, itself has fascist roots.
Another good example of this, besides Heidegger, George Soros.
George Soros, who purports to be an anti-fascist, funds a bunch of these anti-fascist groups, calls his society, his philanthropic group, the Open Society Foundation.
When Soros was a young man in Hungary, Hitler-controlled Hungary, he and a bunch of other guys were going through Jewish neighborhoods, confiscating Jewish property and turning it over to the Nazi-run regime.
Soros was confronted about this by Steve Croft of CBS News a few years ago.
And not only did he admit it, but he said he had no regrets.
He didn't feel an ounce of guilt about it.
And he goes, well, that stuff was happening anyway.
So if I took advantage of it, it's no different than me taking advantage of market opportunities today.
So this is the deep amoralism that drives people like Soros.
Behind their anti-Nazism is, well, a streak of Nazism.
You also, I think, unpack something that I've noticed.
I think everybody who debates in the world these issues has noticed, which is this really annoying tendency that the left has to psychologize people rather than address their arguments.
You know, it's like, oh, well, you know, white people are...
It's a white lash. They're just angry that they're losing power and they're lashing out.
Or, you know, if you criticize feminism, it's because you can't get laid.
Like, it's all just really goofy stuff and very much not an argument.
But... You sort of point out this Adorno's F-scale, or this idea of how you can explain how somebody might become a tyrant, and it has zero political considerations whatsoever, but really delves into sort of deep, dark, Freudian, unprovable base of the brain stuff.
I want to even help people unpack how the left ended up with this magic wand of psychologizing to make arguments go away.
Well, Adorno was a member, a leading member of the group called the Frankfurt School.
And the Frankfurt School, many of them refugees from Nazism, many of them Jewish, and many of them also Marxist.
So two of the leading members of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, whom we've mentioned earlier, And Theodor Adorno come to the United States.
And they're trying to market their standard variety of Marxism, but nobody really is interested.
It's the era after World War II. And then these two guys get a sort of a brainwave.
They go, we've just come from Nazi Germany, so we can pass ourselves off as the world's experts on fascism.
Whatever we say fascism is, most people are going to believe that's what it is because there was a lot of confusion in America about the true ideological content of fascism and what would make, for example, Germany stick with Hitler for so long.
What explained the roots of German attachment to this strange man?
So Adorno basically decides that he's going to be the guru of anti-fascist education in the United States.
And he develops an F scale, F standing for fascism.
And you basically fill out a questionnaire and it determines if you have fascistic tendencies.
Now, the thing that makes it today, I think in retrospect, somewhat amusing is Adorno could have solved that problem by asking a simple question.
Do you support the strong centralized state Controlling the economy and people's lives.
If you answer yes, you've got fascistic tendencies.
You answer no, you don't.
But instead, Odorno ignores that question, the most important question, and he invents 10 irrelevant questions.
He says things like, you know, do you think, for example, that men should be able to tell women what to do?
Do you think, for example, that children should show unquestioning obedience to their parents?
He essentially converts fascism from what it really is, the ideology of the centralized state, to essentially an ideology of what Adorno considered to be sexual repression.
So the bohemian becomes an anti-fascist.
And if somebody believes in conventional sexual morality, they become the ultimate fascist.
Now, of course, what makes this whole thing super dumb is that the actual sexual attitudes in fascist and non-fascist countries at the time were identical.
It's not exactly like the Germans were super sexually repressed, but the English were not.
Or the Italians, to take a cliche, right?
Exactly. So my point about this is that today it's easy to be scornful of all this, but the F scale served an important role in the 50s in the big lie, in taking the actual meaning of fascism, stripping it of its ideological content, and making new definitions of fascism, which are used to this day to try to flay Donald Trump.
Fascism is confused with nationalism.
Fascism is assumed to be something like, you know, hostility to immigrants.
Well, Hitler wasn't hostile to immigrants.
The Jews weren't immigrants.
They were Germans. The line that Hitler drew was inside of Germany between the Nordics and the Jews.
This was not Trump's division between natives and immigrants.
Hitler loved new people coming into Germany, which is why he kept expanding Germany, so to speak.
He was going out and absorbing millions of people.
I guess you could consider them a kind of immigrants if the country moves to absorb you.
It's not that dissimilar.
This is also interesting as well, because it was one of these materialistic clubs that was used against traditional morality and against the Christian restraint of wanton or licentious sexual behavior, which has served as this ideology of sexual gratification has arisen, served to undermine the family, promote illegitimacy, dependent on the state, all that kind of useful stuff.
Because if it's like, well, I believe with Freud that sexual restraint is one of the foundations of civilization, aha!
Yeah! You're a fascist!
And it became kind of cool and hip to have these, you know, flea bag orgies that spread STDs like wildfire.
Well, I'm about publishing an article in Breitbart about this in the next couple of days, but here's the thing.
The Nazis were actually not that way at all.
The Nazis were actually bohemians.
And, you know, Hitler had a mistress, Eva Braun.
He married literally the day before the two of them committed suicide.
Mussolini was notoriously promiscuous.
Himmler was a vegetarian who was obsessed with natural farming.
In fact, he would go to Auschwitz mainly to taste the milk.
There was a milk farm at Auschwitz and Himmler was obsessed with the quality of the milk.
And so these Nazis were crazy characters.
When Hitler showed up to get rid of these brown shirts, most of the brown shirts were having a gay orgy when Hitler showed up.
He shows up at this hotel.
The rooms keep opening and the brown shirts keep coming out two by two.
In fact, one of the guys named Heinz jumps up totally nude and says, Heil Hitler!
And Hitler basically says to him, if you're not dressed in five minutes, I'll have you shot.
So, again, this does not exactly sound like what happens at the National Review or the Republican National Convention.
You're much more likely to see it at the Democratic National Convention.
Well, and also when one of the Nazi leaders was saying, you know, this gay thing in the brown shirts not doing us a lot of good, Hitler's like, yeah, whatever they do, I don't care.
In the privacy of their own bedroom, what matters is that they're an effective fighting force.
I guess he went more Sparta than, I guess, middle century U.S. military, and that's something to remember as well.
Yeah, I think when we look today to try to trace the fascism that is in the institutions now, look, first of all, what the left is so determined to do, the reason they want Trump to call out the white supremacists is they want to put all the attention on these ragtag guys who have very little influence in American society.
The white supremacists don't have the power to keep a book out of a library.
They don't have the power to decide what students read.
They can't drive conservative or liberal speakers off the campus.
They just don't have that kind of power.
And sorry to interrupt, but they don't own the media.
They don't own academia.
They don't own the mainstream news outlets.
They are inconsequential in the larger sphere of...
It's not even David versus Goliath.
It's like flea on a distant mountain versus Goliath.
And that's why Goliath is trying to take his own fascism and impose it on the fleet, because the more dangerous fascism in America today is in the institutions.
It's not even Antifa.
It's the Hollywood boss who gets to say, who works in the industry.
It's the dean who controls a billion-dollar endowment, who gets to exclude a whole swath of conservative thought from the campus.
It's the ability of the media to bludgeon people into submission, to threaten to humiliate them and destroy them and make them pariahs.
If they don't pay obeisance to the prevailing ideologies.
The Nazis call this Gleichschaltung, which means coordination, but it really refers to beating the whole society using the institutions of culture, media, film, the state, Against your opposition to make them cower before you.
And that's what's going on right now.
The reason Trump is such a renegade is he refuses to cower before these guys.
Mitt Romney will cower.
McCain will cower.
Conservative intellectuals are perfectly happy to do genuflections.
But Trump won't do it.
And I think he's stronger for it.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, there was a tweet that basically was Mitt Romney just yesterday basically put out a tweet saying, yeah, I'm pretty much fine with Antifa because I consider them anti-fascist.
And it's like, well, that's not great.
Now, let's close off, Dinesh, if you don't mind, with just talk about some solutions.
Having identified these challenges, what is it that people can work towards to try and turn this around?
Well, the first solution, I think, is to be informed.
And I don't mean be informed in a generic sense.
I mean have at your disposal, in your quiver, the arrows to shoot down the big lie.
In my last book and movie, Hillary's America, I tried to shoot down the race card.
Show how bogus it is.
It's the Democrats transferring responsibility for their own bigotry onto the Republican Party, which tried to stop them.
This is going on again with the fascism card.
The real fascists are on the left.
Fascism is a leftist ideology.
They're trying to project it onto the right.
You need to have the weapons to be able to shoot them down.
Second, I think we need to enforce the law across the board.
Sure, the white supremacist who plowed down that poor woman, he's going to get his comeuppance.
I'd like to see the felony rioters from the inauguration, more than 200 of them, including 11 journalists arrested for rioting.
Look, that carries five to 10 years in prison.
And yet, from the left's point of view, going back to the 60s, they feel like, oh, I'll spend the night in jail.
I'll be out in the morning. I'll then be on MSNBC, you know.
But I think we need to say no.
The law should be enforced across the board.
And once we start handing out some five and ten year sentences, some of these Antifa guys will think twice.
Right, right. And I wanted to also – the only criticism I had of the book myself was that, you know, when I'm going to do one of these interviews, Dinesh, I go through and I highlight what I think are the very important things.
Here's the only criticism I had that there was very little to not highlight.
Like I'm looking at my notes here and they just go on and on and on.
And so I really wanted to point out to people that this book is packed full of – I mean, I've been studying, I guess you could say, the blue pill or red pill history for decades, and I'm still blown away by some of the information that you've managed to put together.
So I really want to urge people, go out and get this book.
It will make you a very fascinating dinner party conversation.
You might even get to finish your second course before being thrown out into the street.
And I really want to remind people, the book is Big Lie Book.
The website, dineshdessousa.com, twitter.com slash Dinesh D'Souza, and check out Dinesh's books and movies.
They're fascinating, and it is like being re-gifted truth after a century of lies.
So I really want to thank you for taking the time today, and I hope we get to talk again soon.
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