In their coverage of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, establishment media continue to warn “fascism” is on the rise in America.
But a bestselling conservative author and filmmaker contends fascism isn’t on the rise – it’s already entrenched in leading institutions controlled by the left.
In an interview with Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio, Dinesh D’Souza discussed the state of American politics and his remarkable discoveries while writing his new book, “The Big Lie: Exposing The Nazi Roots Of The American Left.”
He said the left-wing journalists complaining of the growth of “fascism” are being deeply disingenuous, because white supremacists don’t have any actual power.
“The reason they want Trump to call out the white supremacists is they want to put all the attention on these rag-tag guys who have very little power in American society,” D’Souza said.
“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 campus. They just don’t have that kind of power,” he said.
Molyneux added that white nationalists “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.”
“It’s not even David versus Goliath. It’s like a flea on a distant mountain versus Goliath,” the host said.
D’Souza said the coordinated media campaign against white nationalists is pure projection by the actual fascists who control major American institutions.
“Goliath is trying to take his own fascism and impose it on the flea,” he said. “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 prevailing ideologies.”
D’Souza explained the current leftist tactic of targeting and removing political dissidents from jobs or positions of influence is simply an old fascist tactic carried over to the present day.
“The Nazis called this ‘Gleichschaltung,’ meaning 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,” he observed.
“The reason Trump is such a renegade is because 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.”
D’Souza argued “fascism” has a specific meaning even though the left simply uses it as a slur against people it doesn’t like. The New York Times bestselling author explained fascism grew out of socialism when leftist
intellectuals needed an explanation for why Karl Marx’s supposedly inevitable communist revolution was failing to manifest.
“This is very important because this is a part of the origin of fascism that the left has suppressed,” he told Molyneux. “The progressives in academia have tried to make sure that this story does not get into the textbooks.
“Fascism is an outgrowth of Marxism and of socialism. At the end of the 19th century, a lot of intelligent Marxists were scratching their heads because a lot of the prophecies of Marx weren’t coming true. Marx had predicted the outbreaks 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.’
Out of that, he said 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,” D’Souza noted. “So 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.”
Yet many progressives would simply dismiss that history as having no contemporary importance. It’s a critique D’Souza recognizes.
“What does this matter today?” he asked rhetorically.
And he had a direct answer.
“First of all, the ideology of the Democratic Party now, its economic ideology, is essentially indistinguishable from fascism,” he said. “It’s closer to fascism than it is to, say, Marxian socialism. Consider this: Socialist countries like to nationalize private industry.
D’Souza said that in his native country of India, the socialist governments since the 1940s have taken over the banks, the energy sector, the airlines and other industries.
“Now, in America, we don’t have that. Even under Obama. Look at Obama – we have private hospitals, we have private health insurance companies, but the government tells them what to do,” he said. “The government sets the prices, the government decides who is eligible. So we have state-directed capitalism. We’ve seen that in the banking sector, investment, housing, we’ve seen that in the energy sector. This state-directed capitalism much more closely approximates classical fascism than it does classical socialism.”
Drawing on Mussolini’s famous definition of fascism as “all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” D’Souza said it is very easy to determine which of the two major American political parties aligns more closely to fascist ideology.
He explained fascism reduces individuals to a kind of “cell” whose rights don’t matter but simply exist to serve within the “living organism of the state.”
“Well, hey, does that sound like the platform of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party,” D’Souza asked?
Given the massive power of the left, what can be done?
D’Souza offered two concrete suggestions.
“The first solution is to be informed, and I don’t mean be informed in a generic sense,” he said. “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. Democrats transferring responsibility for their own bigotry onto the Republican Party which was trying to stop them. This is what’s going on 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 be able to have the weapons to shoot them down.”
The second suggestion is more immediate. In response to the rise of the alt-left “Antifa,” D’Souza urged the Trump administration to no longer allow progressive extremists to riot and attack people as they have been doing for so long.
“We need to enforce the law across the board,” he said. “Sure, the white supremacists who plowed down that poor woman, he’s going to get his comeuppance. I’d like to see the felony rioters from the Inauguration [also receive criminal punishment], more than 200 of them, including 11 journalists arrested for rioting, that carries five to ten years in prison.
“And yet from the left’s point of view going back to the ’60s, they’d be like, ‘Oh, I’ll spend a night in jail, I’ll be out in the morning, I’ll then be on MSNBC.’ But I think we need to say, ‘No, the law should be enforced across the board, and once we start handing out five- and 10-year sentences some of these Aantifa guys will think twice.’”
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