WASHINGTON – The progressive left typically dismisses the Democratic Party's history of segregation and slavery, contending the two parties "switched," with the GOP morphing into the party of "white supremacists," contends documentary filmmaker and bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza.
In an interview with WND, he called the claim the parties switched a "big lie."
Democrats, he asserted, are "trying to shift the blame for slavery and bigotry from the Democratic Party, where it actually belongs, on to someone else."
"That someone else is the white man, it's the South, its America that is to blame," said D'Souza, author of the newly released best-seller "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left."
The famed founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud called it "transference," D'Souza noted, when "the guilty party takes his own crimes and sins, tries to project them onto someone else."
"What makes this a particularly big lie, is that the Democrats are trying to move the blame to the Republicans, who are actually the good guys that fought them all the way," he said.
D'Souza believes the Democratic Party's agenda is as racist now as it was during the Civil War.
In contrast, he insisted the core principle of the Republican Party today is identical with the principle Abraham Lincoln articulated in 1860.
Lincoln defined slavery as "you work and I eat."
"In other words, slavery is stealing another man's labor. According to Lincoln, that's what the Democrats were all about – stealing other people's labor," he said.
Dixiecrats 'died Democrats'
D'Souza said the idea that the segregationist Dixiecrat lawmakers became Republicans is "pure fiction."
He said the reason the "big switch" gained some plausibility is that the South used to be Democratic and it is now largely Republican.
"Superficially, on the surface, it seems to corroborate the big switch. But as racism declined in the South, the South became more Republican," he said.
He argued there's an "inverse relationship between racism and Republicanism."
"If you drew a chart, you'd see the South's racism throughout the 20th century 'til now going down, down, down, down and its Republican affiliation going up, up, up, up."
When Republicans led the charge against slavery, they also were targeted for death and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, D'Souza said, which effectively served as the military wing of the Democratic Party.
He pointed out that among the long line of Dixiecrats, only one, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, switched to the Republican Party.
The rest, including former KKK leader Robert Byrd, "stayed in the Democratic Party and died as Democrats."
D'Souza described Byrd, a senator from West Virginia who served in various party leadership roles, including Senate majority leader, as "one of the most notorious racists of our lifetime."
"Hillary Clinton called him her mentor – this guy died in 2010, we are not talking about the 1960s or the 1860s, " he said. "Yet, half of West Virginia is named after Robert Byrd. As you drive up and down, there Robert Byrd highway, Robert Byrd medical center, Robert Byrd monument, Robert Byrd this and Robert Byrd that.
"If the left was really trying to get rid of the stains of racist history, they'd be pulling down all of those monuments. They'd be renaming all of those schools. They don't do that. Why? Because they are actually about something else – trying to shift the blame for slavery and bigotry from the Democratic Party."
Check out all of Dinesh D'Souza's smash hits at the WND Superstore!
Why are most blacks Democrats?
Recognizing Lincoln’s role in ending slavery and the virulent segregationist policies championed by Southern Democrats, the majority of African-Americans were strongly aligned with the GOP from Reconstruction to the Great Depression.
Today, however, approximately 87 percent of black voters identify with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with just 7 percent who identify as Republican or lean Republican, according to the Pew Research Center.
The transformation of the American electorate had nothing to do with the Democratic Party changing its stance on civil rights, D'Souza insisted.
"Blacks aren't voting for Democrats because Democrats have been good on race relations," he said. "Most of the shift actually occurred in the 1930s, under FDR, for economic reasons, because of the economic benefits of the New Deal.
"Remember, at that time the Democratic Party was blatantly and openly the party of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, so it makes no sense to say that blacks were joining the Democratic Party because it was the party that was progressive or better on the issue of race relations. It manifestly was not."
The Democratic Party's platform of wealth distribution, government dependence, high taxes and social programs is the antitheses of social mobility, D'Souza argued.
"The Republican Party is the party of getting to keep the stuff that you earn. As Lincoln put it, 'The hand that makes the corn, has the right to put the corn into its own mouth,'" he said.
"Now, I ask you, isn't this exactly what the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for today? The Republican Party stands for keeping your own earnings. And the Democratic Party stands for the principle, 'You work and I eat.'"
Filtered message
But D'Souza said the GOP's attempts to communicate its message is filtered and obstructed by the Democratic "megaphones": Hollywood, academia and the media.
"The left is very dominant in all three, and so they are able to put out a massive supply of fiction. Even if you or I know differently, it's difficult for us to try and contradict it because we don't have as big a megaphone," he said.
The Democratic Party has no desire to erase its bigoted history by demolishing Confederate statues, D'Souza argued, but is determined to attribute to its legacy of standing on the wrong side of civil rights to its political opposition.
The series of DNC emails WikiLeaks published during the 2016 presidential election, which revealed that high-ranking officials of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign used racist, anti-gay and sexist slurs when referring to constituents, proves the Democratic Party's repudiation of racism is a façade, D'Souza told WND.
"The racism in the Democratic Party today has taken on a new form. It's still there, and we know its there. We actually saw hints of it during the presidential campaign when private conversations among Democrats showed that they talked very differently in private about minorities than they talk in public," he said. "The public racism is gone. Democrats today don't go on the Senate floor and start using the 'N' word in the way that they used to in the '20s and '30s. But we see a similarity today in the way that the Democrats use minorities, particularly African-Americans."
The most troubled, dysfunctional cities in the United States are Democratic bastions where Democratic mayors have been elected for decades.
According to Investors Business Daily, Detroit, which last elected a Republican mayor in 1957, is the poorest city in the nation, with almost 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Chicago, which last elected a Republican mayor in 1927, is the home to some of the worst inner-city violence in the nation. More than 2,300 people were shot in the city last year, and nearly 400 lost their lives to homicide.
D'Souza attributes the high rate of poverty and crime prevalent in Democratic-run cities to Democratic lawmakers' implementation of institutional racism
"Look at all of these neighborhoods, Oakland, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago – these places are as miserably off now as they were in 1968. Trillions of dollars of money have been spent and yet somehow the places never seem to get better," he said. "But the Democrats don't mind it that way. Why? Because they have one-party rule in those places. And they are able to get what they want out of the minority groups, which is votes.
"As long as the Democrats are getting minority votes, they are not particularly invested in the welfare of those communities. That, to me, is the new face of racism in the 21st century."
D'Souza said he was compelled to write the "Big Lie" after discovering uncanny similarities between the American Democratic Party and the German Nazis.
"I knew that there were some chilling similarities between things that were going on in the Democratic Party in the United States and the Nazi Party in Germany. A case in point is that the Democrats for example had the Ku Klux Klan, an organization with three to five million members. The Nazi Party had the Nazi Brownshirts, also three-five million members," he said. "Both were kind of para-military organizations. Both practiced racial terrorism – the Klan focusing on blacks but also other minorities, the Nazi Brownshirts focusing on Jews.
"But what I didn't know is that the Nazis, and Hitler particularly, got some of his most vicious and genocidal ideas from the American Democrats, from the American progressives, and this is all documented in the "Big Lie."