Aug. 11, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:02
4165 Death of a Nation | Dinesh D'Souza and Stefan Molyneux
"Not since 1860 have the Democrats so fanatically refused to accept the result of a free election. That year, their target was Lincoln. They smeared him. They went to war to defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him. Now the target of the Democrats is President Trump and his supporters. The Left calls them racists, white supremacists and fascists. These charges are used to justify driving Trump from office and discrediting the right "by any means necessary.""But which is the party of the slave plantation? Which is the party that invented white supremacy? Which is the party that praised fascist dictators and shaped their genocidal policies and was in turn praised by them? Moreover, which is the party of racism today? Is fascism now institutionally embodied on the right or on the left?""Through stunning historical recreations and a searching examination of fascism and white supremacy, Death of a Nation cuts through progressive big lies to expose hidden history and explosive truths. Lincoln united his party and saved America from the Democrats for the first time. Can Trump—and we—come together and save America for the second time?"Dinesh D'Souza is a multiple time best-selling author and filmmaker. His latest documentary “Death of a Nation” and the companion book “Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party” are now available in both theaters and retailers. Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/death-nation-bookMovie: http://www.deathofanationmovie.comWebsite: http://www.dineshdsouza.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/dineshdsouzaYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Back with Dinesh D'Souza, a magnificent filmmaker, a multiple-time bestselling author.
His latest documentary, Death of a Nation, and the excellent companion book, Death of a Nation, Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, are now available in both theaters and retailers.
Now, for those who've never written a book or made a movie, it is an excruciating, multi-year, extensive process.
And you don't so much finish it as you simply can't stand to look at it anymore.
At least that's been my experience.
If I just can't read it one more time, I know that it's done.
What was the germ or the basic idea or the inspiration behind the movie that had you commit so many resources and so much time to producing it?
A book and a movie are really two different things.
A book is an intellectual argument.
A movie is an emotional narrative.
So in making this movie, I had to ask myself, is there a story here that I can tell?
And there is. And the story is quite simply that the racist and the fascist tale do not belong in the Republican elephant, but really belong in the Democratic donkey.
We've been sold a bill of goods.
And this is not just about Trump.
This is really about is fascism on the right or on the left?
Did the party switch sides?
Or is the racism even today in the same place as it was with the historic party of racism, which is, of course, the Democratic Party?
So these were the big swirling questions I tackle in the movie.
And we're very excited to have it in a thousand theaters across the country.
What was the most surprising element that showed up in your research?
Something that just blew your mind compared to your prior expectations?
I think two things shocked me, but I'll start with the one that's more contemporary, and that is that, you know, I kept hearing that it doesn't matter if the Democratic Party was historically the party of bigotry, of the slave plantation, of segregation, of Jim Crow.
It doesn't even matter the Democrats were in bed with the Italian fascists.
It doesn't matter that progressivism was complicit with some of national socialism in Germany, because now, today, The white nationalists are on the right.
They're wearing their Trump hats, their Make America Great Again t-shirts.
So white nationalism is a right-wing phenomenon.
I thought this was historically fishy because the Democratic Party almost invented white nationalism.
In fact, after the Civil War, when the Democratic Party was almost finished, I mean, the old slave plantation had been blown to smithereens.
The Democratic Party feared it would go the way of the Whigs and disappear.
But they came up with white nationalism as a way to kind of unify.
This was the glue that held the progressive Democrats together, especially in the South.
So I thought, wait, are you telling me that there's been some sort of metamorphosis and the white nationalists today have sort of moved to the other side?
And then I found out that one of them, Jason Kessler, the organizer of Charlottesville, an Obama guy, an Obama activist, an Occupy Wall Street guy, And so now my Sherlock Holmes hat came on because I thought, what sense does it make to call an Obama activist a white supremacist?
Something is really off here.
And so what I did here is I began to look at these white nationalists one by one.
In the movie, of course, I bring out Richard Spencer, the poster boy of white supremacy.
This guy routinely portrayed as a right-winger for over a year now.
And there's a very interesting interview with him in the movie in which I ask him.
I say, basically, you know, all men are created equal.
Yes or no? He goes, false.
I go, well, where do our rights come from?
Do they come from the fact that we are created by God?
Do they come from nature? He goes, no, no, no, no.
Rights are given to you by the state.
They're the gift of the state.
And it becomes very clear that this is a guy who's Supports nationalized healthcare.
This is a guy who doesn't like Reagan.
His favorite presidents are all Democrats.
And down the list you go until the audience, you know, has this dawning realization, wait a minute, we've been sold a major bill of goods here.
And, you know, the power of a movie is that, you know, it's one thing if I interviewed the guy, had a transcript, put it in a book, people read it, they'd be like, yeah.
But to see the guy walk on stage, sit down, you get this out of his own mouth, you can see the expressions in his face.
It's not only convincing, it's irrefutable.
Well, and I found the interview with him He was contradictory and somewhat incomprehensible in terms of his, you know, when somebody is an atheist, I automatically know that they have yet to solve the problem of ethics because atheism has yet to solve the problem of ethics.
Where do ethics come from?
Where does morality come from? Where do human rights come from?
And so naturally, he's more likely, as are most people of that ilk, to be more of a Darwinian, which means he's going to be race-obsessed, which means he's going to be a nationalist in that sense.
If you are that way, then what is the barrier to you for big government programs?
If you believe in personal responsibility and property rights and freedom from coercion, then you're a small government free market person.
If you cast all that aside, of course you're going to end up in a sphere where you just kind of tinker with whatever works in your mind and there's no particular ethical barrier to the expansion of state power.
I mean, my favorite part of the interview is when I was talking to him and I said, you know, you really not only sound, but even the way you're dressed, you look like a kind of Woodrow Wilson progressive from the early 20th century.
And he sort of balked at that.
So finally, I said to him, I said, OK, listen, the movie Birth of a Nation, have you seen it?
He goes, yes. What do you think of it?
Amazing movie!
See what I'm saying?
This is the racist movie that Wilson showed in the White House to his cabinet.
This led to a nationwide revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
This is your team.
These are your guys.
This is your script.
And so again, what we're dealing with here is, and I'm not really blaming even Spencer, I'm actually blaming the media left for having figured out a way to spin this narrative.
I mean, I think this is what we get because of progressive dominance in academia, the media and Hollywood.
So many big lies, one on top of the other.
It really, it's almost a full-time job to unravel all this and make sense of it and then put it in a way that people actually believe and make sense to people.
And this is a wild thing, too, which really helped me connect the dots in the movie, Dinesh, was that there are some people out there these days calling the welfare state, the modern welfare state, the Democrat plantation or the Democratic plantation.
You make this connection from the southern plantations of the days of yore to the modern welfare state or the modern political patronage system very clear.
I wonder if you could step people through that a little bit because it's a very powerful part of the movie for me.
Yes, and this is elaborated at even great length in the book, because what happened is the Democrats were the party of the slave plantation in the South, but in the North, they invented a new institution that was modeled on the slave plantation, but with important modifications.
Now, the genius behind this was Martin Van Buren, the Democratic successor to Andrew Jackson.
And Van Buren was head of the very powerful New York political machine.
He made many trips down South, And he saw the slave plantation and his basic view was, this is a really great setup for the Democrats in the South.
How do I do this in the North?
Now, of course, there were no slaves in the North at the time, but there were immigrants.
And Van Buren noticed that the immigrants were in a position somewhat roughly analogous to the slaves.
They were poor. They were dependent.
They were fearful. In fact, many of them didn't speak the language.
And so Van Buren goes, well, here's a good racket.
How about if we work out a deal with these immigrants, let's just say the penniless Irish who have been disgorged by the Irish potato famine, I don't want to have to compete for their votes individually.
Let's see if we can round them up collectively.
They all agree to vote for the Democratic Party.
That will put our bosses in power.
We will then raid the city treasury, rip off a bunch of money, keep most of it for ourselves, and give some of it to them.
A flask of whiskey, a job reference, and so on.
And these penniless immigrants can't expect a lot, so this kind of dirty bargain began, today known as the Northern Urban Machine.
I call it the northern plantation.
And so between the southern plantation and the northern urban machine, we actually see the sort of plantation model set up nationwide for the Democratic Party.
Lincoln was all over this. In fact, Lincoln would say the Democrats want to turn all of America into a plantation.
And this is what he was talking about.
There's something that is embarrassing to have pointed out, which is an insight that is so clear when you see it and so, as I mentioned, embarrassing when you didn't get it, which is, of course, this idea that the founders were slavists, pro-slavery and so on.
And the simple fact that you point out in the book that two-thirds of the history of slavery from its start to its end occurred before America even became America, that it was founded by Britain, by the king and the queens of England and so on.
Let's just run through some of the evidence that you cite Lincoln as saying about the founders and their relationship to slavery.
Well, Jefferson has a very striking comment in the first draft of the Declaration, which actually Congress edited.
Jefferson basically said, the abolition of slavery is the great object of desire in the American colonies.
And I was almost stunned by that.
I thought, wait a minute, here's a Southern planter who has his own slaves, and he's literally saying, as an expression of the American mind, that we Americans want to get rid of slavery in the North and the South.
He's speaking for the South, no less than the North.
And he's saying that slavery has been foisted on America by the British.
And then I remembered that the first slaves came to America around 1610.
Of course, the founding is in the 1770s and 80s, so it's 150 years later.
The left today tries to pin slavery on the founding, as if the great network of plantations was a creation of the founding.
No. In fact, there weren't that many plantations at the founding.
There were about 650,000 slaves in America in 1790, but by 1860, there were 4 million slaves.
Why? Because it was Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin at the very end of the 18th century, the turn of the 19th century, That's what led to the massive spread of cotton plantations in the South.
And in fact, a new political party, the Democratic Party, started in 1828, became the champion, defender, and protector of that plantation.
That's actually the dirty secret that Democrats tried to camouflage when they say, let's blame America, let's blame the founding, let's blame the South, let's blame everybody except the party that actually championed the slave plantation.
It was a very interesting thing for me to think about, Dinesh, because I'm very much an idealist and work in sort of pure realm of ideals.
And the argument that you make in the book in particular that the founders said, well, we got to have a union, otherwise we'll have no way to influence the South to end slavery.
If we end up as two countries or three countries, we'll basically lose our capacity to to undermine the institution of slavery in a unified country.
That is one of these things that's like, way too much compromise for me, the purest, but it's hard to argue against it from a practical standpoint.
It is. It is.
You know, it's so common these days to see progressives go, well, you know, the blacks were declared to be three-fifths of a human being, the notorious three-fifths clause of the Constitution.
But the three-fifths clause emerges out of a fight between the North and the South over political representation.
You know, amazingly, the North wanted blacks to count for zero because they wanted to reduce the political representation of the South, of the slave powers.
The South wanted blacks to count for one, for a full person.
So the three-fifths compromise is actually no reflection whatever on the intrinsic worth of blacks.
So all of this is right there in the historical record, but it's amazing how it's been smudged over.
And even intelligent people, intelligent authors, Michelle Alexander in a book, The New Jim Crow, she doesn't know the meaning of the three-fifths clause.
And this is somebody who is presented not just as an ordinary activist, but as an icon of progressive thought.
Right, right. So, one thing that – one parallel that kind of emerges for me is this idea that the Democrats represent, in a sense, wage slavery.
Like they want – they were fans of slavery because it gave, of course, cheap labor.
And to some degree, this – Protection of illegal immigrants, which drives down wages, particularly in the agricultural sector, seems to me kind of common that although they champion the little guy, they're actually kind of well aligned with the big business imperative to keep wages low, either through slavery or endless waves of low-skilled immigration.
I mean, the Democrats have actually never...
...been truly the party of the little guy.
That's always been the rhetoric.
But I mean, let's remember that even the planter class in the Democratic South always claimed that slavery was good for the slave.
This was the point of the so-called positive good school of slavery.
Slavery is not just good for the slave owner.
No, no, no, no. We're doing it in part for the slave.
It's a school of civilization for these Africans and so on.
And so on and on we go.
And today we have all these Today, it's a multicultural plantation.
You've got the black ghettos, you've got the Latino barrios, you've got the Native American reservations.
Now, you'll notice that these places, despite trillions of dollars, remain poor.
It's intergenerational.
And all the features of the old slave plantation, like dilapidated housing, broken families, A high degree of violence to keep the place together.
A kind of sense of nihilism.
No one gets ahead. I mean, you see those same features in contemporary Oakland or on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota or even the Latino Barrios where my wife grew up in South Texas.
So this, I think, is actually where institutional racism really lives.
And to me, it's downright comic when the Democrats go, hey, look at Richard Spencer.
Look at that toothless white supremacist over there.
That's the most dangerous man in America.
No, that guy has no political power.
But the Democratic plantation has a whole overseer class, very powerful.
And that's why, by the way, if you looked at the faces of the Black Caucus when Trump was talking about reduced unemployment, For Latinos and Blacks, they looked, they didn't just look upset, they looked crushed because it was kind of like saying, listen, you're dismantling the Democratic plantation.
Where on earth are we going to have a living going forward?
Well, this is the astonishing thing to me.
It fundamentally is astonishing that when you say to an entire group of people based upon their race, oh, you're surrounded by white nationalists and white supremacists and racists and white privileged and institutionalized this and massive amounts of police brutality and so on, aren't you kind of luring them into a kind of trap that they can't get out of economically?
Aren't you taking away their hope?
I have never, I have been around the world, I've spoken to, I can't even imagine how many people over the course of my life, Dinesh, I've never met one person who said, boy, I wake up every morning just hoping that the black community continues to be fatherless and crime-ridden and stuck in poverty, and I'm willing to triple my taxes to achieve that objective.
I mean, everybody wants every other, everybody of any decency, wants every other group to To do well.
And this constant drip, drip, drip of nihilism and hopelessness and surrounded by the high walls of white racism and privilege, to me, is one of the most destructive mental plagues coursing not just through America, but the West as a whole.
Yes, I think that the...
And, you know, if you look at Trump, I mean, Trump is somebody who has drawn a line.
And the line is not a racial line.
It's between the legal and the illegal immigrant.
And it seems to me that what Trump is saying—let's remember, first of all, that most legal immigrants who come to America today are nonwhite.
They come from Asia, Africa, South America.
Trump seems to have no problem with that.
So what Trump is really defending is a multiracial America that is united by patriotism and economic opportunity and the freedom to live your own life.
I think that is actually—that's the Lincoln model.
And in that sense, I think Trump is standing not even so much in the Reagan tradition as in that older Lincoln tradition.
And the circumstances, of course, of Trump and Lincoln are eerily similar, right?
Here you have, with Lincoln, an outsider president, a Republican, narrowly elected, not expected initially to win.
All hell breaks loose the moment he does.
And the Democrats, even the Northern Democrats, there were calls for Lincoln's assassination.
The Southern Democrats are ready to break up the country.
So, you know, that kind of craziness, which Lincoln had to become familiar with and deal with, very...
Firmly, that's back with us today.
The same party, the Democratic Party, will not abide the result of the election.
And I think a lot of this incendiary, he's a racist, he's a fascist, he's a white supremacist, all of this is a ruse to, in a sense, say, we get to override the results of a lawful election.
That's really what this is all about.
Right. One of the things that sort of started me on this journey was way back in my history undergrad, suddenly thinking, why do they call it Nazi?
You know, every other group gets its names, the communists, the republicans, the fascists, and so on.
And suddenly you get this amalgamation of sort of two words in German called Nazi.
And I remember thinking, okay, look it up.
National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Ah, socialist. Well, it makes it a little tough to put Nazism on the right if you include the word socialism, so they have to strip it out so they can pretend that it's on the right.
And if, as you, I think, correctly point out, both the Democrats and the Nazis are on the left, then they may have some things in common.
I wonder if you could tell people a few of the things that you found in common.
Yeah, I mean, we, first of all, in the movie, we put up the Nazi 25-point platform.
And that's important because the Nazis in 1933 were the largest elected party in Germany.
And they had to campaign because, you know, the guys on the left say, well, the Nazis just used the name socialist.
It was kind of a ruse. They were just trying to get the working class vote.
So I'm like, let's look at that platform.
This is what they actually campaigned on.
And you look at it. State control of banks, state control of healthcare, state control of energy, state control of education, state control of religious liberty.
And down the list you go and you realize, wait a minute, you know, Trump doesn't agree with any of that.
That's not right of center.
In fact, if you spell it out, you're gonna find Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren checking some boxes on this list.
So I think the advantage of a movie like this is that you're able to put it in front of the audience.
Let the audience figure it out.
And then, of course, we have these crushing scenes where the Nazis and the Italian fascists are actually learning lessons from and using the blueprints of the Democratic Party and American progressives to put in their eugenics schemes, their sterilization schemes.
I mean, you've got guys on Margaret Sanger's board getting congratulatory letters from Hitler, and far from being dismayed, they run to each other's homes to show each other their letters from Hitler.
Look, Hitler calls my book his Bible.
And the other guy goes, wait a minute, let me reproduce my letter from Hitler.
Now, all of this is really going on, and yet you're not going to find it in the Planned Parenthood catalog.
You're not going to find it in the history books or even on Wikipedia.
The movie kind of blows the lid on the cover-up of progressive historiography.
I think this is really what the progressive intellectuals are most scared about.
Is blowing the cover on the very beautiful arrangement in which they've been able to rig the narrative and put a whole lot of lethal and toxic facts under the rug.
The Southern strategy, and there's a very powerful moment for me in the film, Dinesh, where you check out the number of Southerners who supposedly flipped parties as the result of Nixon's witchy moves to lure them away from racism.
That has been a very common trope in American history, and it's astonishing to me how quickly, like in a matter of minutes, it's completely dismantled.
The Democrats need it very badly because it's their get-out-of-jail-free card.
It's their way of saying, yeah, we may have been the bad guys once, but there was an amazing transformation.
The parties exchanged platforms, and so Nixon's Southern strategy is critical for them.
The problem with this, of course, is A, they've never found any racist campaign statements by Richard Nixon that were made to deep Southerners.
And B, one of the first things that Nixon did when he came into office was implement affirmative action.
Now, quite frankly, if you are a racist candidate trying to court a racist audience, you're not likely to implement legal preferences for blacks and against whites.
And then, of course, as you mentioned, you know, Nixon lost to Deep South, which was won by the Democratic segregationist George Wallace.
And finally, on the screen in the movie, we put up The Dixiecrats, about 150 of them, senators, congressmen.
And then we count how many of them switched over to the Republican Party.
One guy did, yeah, two.
One in the Senate, Strom Thurmond.
One in the House, Watson.
And that's it. So 148 Dixiecrats out of 150 stay in the Democratic Party.
They die as Democrats.
Their buildings in Washington, D.C., named after them.
So I mean, to me, when I see all this, I'm just amazed at the chutzpah with which the left has been able to pull this off for so long.
I mean, how do you sustain these big lies in an age where you and I are educated, we have access to information.
So I think at the end of the day, what it means is you have to put this information out.
When you do, it's incendiary.
The cat is out of the bag.
The big lie just doesn't really work so well anymore.
Well, that's straight out of Hitler's playbook, right?
You tell a big lie often enough and repeat it endlessly and it will be perceived as the truth.
So let's talk a little bit about the bichromatic rainbow of responses to the movie.
I mean, the Rotten Tomato meter to me is quite telling.
What has been the reviewers versus the popular perception of the movie for you?
Well, on Rotten Tomatoes, it's telling, right?
We have literally 0% from the critics.
Now, admittedly, the critics, you think of some big constellation.
No, these are 11 guys.
They're probably all in the same yoga class together.
Anyway, 11 critics give us a zero, but over 4,000 audience reviews.
I mean, hundreds of pages of audience reviews, and they give us 90%.
A group called CinemaScore, an independent ratings agency, they interview people coming out of the theater randomly.
We get an A. It's very difficult for movies to get an A. Most get a B or a C. We have an A. That shows audiences love the movie.
People like The Washington Post have been bashing me and bashing the movie.
Claims that Hitler was a liberal Democrat.
No, I actually don't claim that.
If I did claim that, I would be a kook.
Rather, what I do claim, they can't say.
I do claim that Hitler and the Nazis were influenced and modeled themselves on some of the schemes of the Democrats.
Now, they can't accuse me of that, because that's a fact.
Right, and it was really a shocking moment, which you recreate in the movie, regarding the fact that the Nazis looked at the one-drop rule of the Democrats and said, well, no, no, that's way too racist for us.
And my source for this, by the way, is the Yale legal scholar James Whitman and his book, Hitler's American Model.
Now, notice Whitman is kind of being politically correct.
He calls it Hitler's American model, even though every segregation law in the South was passed by a Democratic legislature signed by a Democratic governor.
But nevertheless, Whitman has the transcripts.
He's got the goods. It's all there in his book.
I cite him in my book.
So this is this is not exactly I'm not making here a contention.
Dinesh's history versus somebody else's history.
This is actually what happened.
Oh, yeah. No, I bring facts to people and they always say, well, according to your narrative or your opinion, it's like, no, they're facts.
They're facts, please. Now, let's just close on this.
It's a very interesting, maybe a little bit of a personal question, but you paid a very heavy price for your Obama movie, a very heavy price, a price that no one should have to pay or except maybe perhaps Rosie O'Donnell.
But was there ever a time I think we all face this, who are trying to sort of bring the truth to people in a sometimes hostile world where you say, price is a little high, price is a little high.
What was it that got you motivated to sort of get out and start making movies again after what happened?
Well, I would say that my experience, I don't know if this is a mark of my perverse personality, but had the opposite effect.
Far from intimidating me, it actually forced me to step back and say, you know what, I've actually lived in a very rarefied world where I've looked at American politics as some kind of a debate.
A kind of intellectual joust between one side that believes in liberty, one side that believes in equality, and so on.
I said, wait a minute, I've got to realize that there are very powerful motives of anger, revenge, ambition, and these human motives are not excluded from politics.
Progressivism is motivated by, I think, a lust for power.
Progressives want to be in control of our lives and our liberties.
They want to be able to tell us what to do.
And of late, we see that they're even willing to make us into digital non-persons.
They're willing to drive us from polite society, cost us our jobs, in some cases, lock us up.
So these things go way beyond the fact that they're right and we're wrong or we're right and they're wrong.
Ultimately, it's the motivation of the old slave owner who is perfectly willing to grab another guy, tie him down, whip him until he goes to work for you and you can steal the product of his labor.
That mentality, what Lincoln called that serpent, that tyrannical impulse.
I think it's very much part of even a free society.
We always have to be vigilant against it.
I'm determined to play my part.
That's very admirably spoken, my friend.
So I really want to thank you for your time.
I want to point out that we'll put a link directly to the book below.
Well, well worth reading. The book is Death of a Nation, Plantation, Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party.
And the movie, of course, is Death of a Nation, a very nice mirror image of Birth of a Nation.
And the website is deathofanationmovie.com.
You can find out where to get the movie from there.
The website, DineshD'Souza.com, twitter.com forward slash Dinesh D'Souza.
Really appreciate your time and thank you so much for the movie.
It was a real, I consider myself fairly woke on historical matters and this was a whole series of truth bombs going up in my brain and I really appreciate your time and energy in making it.
