Not only are leading white supremacists in America – including the organizer of the infamous Charlottesville rally – not in alignment with President Trump politically, their philosophical beliefs are rooted in the progressive left, contends Dinesh D’Souza in his new film, “Death of a Nation,” which opens in theaters Friday.
In an interview with WND, D’Souza emphasized he’s not downplaying the tragedy of the clash last August in Virginia in which one person was killed.
“What I am questioning is the media-left narrative of Charlottesville,” D’Souza said. “And this is a narrative that basically says that however bigoted the Democratic Party might have been in the past, nevertheless, white supremacy is clearly on the right.”
According to the left, he points out, Charlottesville is a symbol of Trump’s “racist base.”
But the oft-featured images of three guys in Make America Great Again hats is not evidence, D’Souza argues.
In the movie and companion book with the same title he presents an interview he conducted with white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, who was not at Charlottesville but who has become a symbol of white nationalism.
“There is a remarkable phenomenon that many of the leading white nationalists have deep roots in the left, and this has gone completely unreported in the mainstream media,” D’Souza told WND.
In the interview for the movie, he asked Spencer about his beliefs and their philosophical underpinnings, including whether or not he sought to conserve the principles of America’s founding.
“I’ve been critical of the American founding throughout my career,” Spencer replied.
The whole concept of individual rights, he said, was “problematic.”
Later in the interview, D’Souza asked Spencer about the fundamental conservative principle of limited government.
“No individual has a right outside of a collective community. You have rights, not eternally or given by God or by nature,” Spencer said.
D’Souza then asked: “Who gives them to us?”
Spencer replied: “Ultimately the state gives those rights to you. The state is the source of rights. Not the individual.”
D’Souza told WND that on “all these all these key issues, Spencer and Trump are coming from a very different place, and the effort to equate them and pretend like they are ideologically on the same page – this is the media’s big lie.”
D’Souza said that as he interviewed Spencer, he found himself trying to place him ideologically and concluded Spencer’s views are virtually identical to the beliefs of the racist progressives of the Woodrow Wilson era.
“I think Spencer would have served excellently in the Wilson administration,” D’Souza said. “He echoes the rhetoric. He is a statist, which is to say he wants a powerful centralized state in the mode of the early 20th century progressives. He also advocates white identity and white supremacy. And he loves the movie ‘Birth of a Nation’ that Woodrow Wilson screened in the White House, leading to a national revival of the KKK.”
D’Souza noted that the early 20th century progressives were conscious of the fact that they were breaking with America’s founding. Wilson, he said, was the first American president to openly attack the founding.
D’Souza provided WND exclusively with a clip from the movie outlining the Nazi platform in Germany in 1920, showing the party was “firmly on the left.”
See the exclusive clip:
[jwplayer P1aJaoUV]
Occupy Wall Street activist
The organizer of the Charlottesville rally, Jason Kessler, was profiled on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center — to the apparent surprise of the left-leaning group — as an Obama supporter and an Occupy Wall Street leader.
D’Souza told WND that when he mentioned Kessler’s leftist background, someone made a video portraying D’Souza as a tool of the rich.
“In other words, he weirdly reinforces my view of Kessler as a leftist,” D’Souza said.
Kessler’s former girlfriend said in an interview in the Charlottesville paper that they broke up because Kessler found her to be too conservative or “not liberal enough.”
Another figure D’Souza mentions is Andrew Anglin, the co-editor of the neo-Nazi newspaper the Daily Stormer.
Anglin once depicted Trump and Rudy Giuliani as being in a twisted homosexual relationship.
“This guy is in no way a Trump supporter. He hates Trump,” D’Souza said.
Anglin has been quoted saying white people have destroyed the world.
“When the Klan was a potent force, it was the domestic terrorist wing of the Democratic Party,” D’Souza said. “Now that the Klan is virtually defunct, the left is trying to foist it on the Republican Party.”
See a trailer for “Death of a Nation”
[jwplayer kFn7UoPr]
New white nationalism
D’Souza cites the rise of a “new white nationalism” documented by Carol Swain, a leading African-American historian who has written two books on the subject.
“The new white nationalists speak in the language of multiculturalism,” D’Souza said. “In other words, they use the language of white power in a rhetoric that is almost identical to the language of black power.”
Some of the new white nationalists are fans of Malcolm X, he said, and “their only objection to multiculturalism seems to be that it is a form of ethnic affirmation that leaves white people out.”
The white nationalists, who deny they are white supremacists, said D’Souza, “want to be welcomed to the multicultural picnic.”
“The Democratic Party invented the original white identity politics,” he said. “Then the Democratic Party moved away from that to embrace minority identity politics. And now the white nationalists are using that same language of identity politics to redefine themselves.”
Trump a racist?
D’Souza said that while Trump may not be as philosophically minded as presidents such as Lincoln and Reagan, he “embodies in his bones the principles of the founding.”
In a previous interview with WND, D’Souza explained why, in the movie, he likens Trump to Lincoln.
As to the charge that Trump is a racist, he said “not only has Trump never been critical of blacks, Trump embraces the African-American community,” noting, for example, his many black supporters on social media.
The argument that Trump is a racist, he said, comes mainly from his policy on immigration and his position on the travel ban.
Regarding the travel ban, aside from the fact that Muslims are not a race, he said the issue amounts to Trump “protecting national security by trying to keep people out from dangerous places.”
“And that is not racism, by any definition of the term,” he said.
Regarding immigration, D’Souza argues Trump distinguishes between legal and illegal immigration while the left conflates the two.
“The fact is that the vast majority of legal immigrants to America today are non-white,” D’Souza pointed out.
“Trump has never said we want to have more immigrants from Iceland and New Zealand and South Africa, but fewer immigrants from Barbados and Bombay.”
That, in fact, is Spencer’s view, as D’Souza documented in the interview.
“If Trump had said that, then he would be vulnerable to the charge of bigotry,” D’Souza said. “But he’s never done that.”
