D'Souza: Antifa the 'real' brownshirts

Antifa at war

Author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza says the violent "anti-fascist" protesters are the real fascists, that white nationalism is rooted on the left, and that Republican operatives urging conservatives to vote for Democrats this year as a check on President Trump "need to have their heads examined."

D'Souza's latest project is the movie and companion book "Death of A Nation," which draws parallels between the outrage following the election of President Trump and the volcanic opposition to the 1860 victory of Abraham Lincoln.

This past weekend, antifa protesters took to the streets of Charlottesville and Washington and spent most of their time hurling epithets at police and the media. D'Souza says antifa protesters might claim to be opposing fascism, but they clearly embody what they say they hate.

"They're posing as anti-fascists. Of course they dress like fascists. They act like fascists. They have the same intolerance as fascism. And let's notice that their target isn't fascists. When you're targeting cops and Republicans and patriots and Christians, you're actually not targeting fascists but anti-fascists.

"So we have an amazing situation in which the fascists – antifa – are pretending to be anti-fascists and targeting anti-fascists, whom they claim are fascists," D'Souza in an interview with Radio America.

So why does the far left have a compulsion towards violence?

"Their view is that since Trump is like Hitler circa 1933, they are fully justified in using, as they say, any means necessary to eject him, including illegal means, including violence," said D'Souza, who also asserts that fascism is a far left ideology that academic liberals twisted to blur the coziness between the American Democrats and fascist leaders before World War II.

"Fascism is properly defined as the ideology of the centralized state, when you have the state organizing and running the private economy, when you have the states running the lives of citizens. That's fascism. That's how Mussolini understood it. That's how Hitler understood it," said D'Souza.

Antifa took to the streets to counter a planned rally by white nationalists who never showed up. The tension between the two sides is often characterized by the media as right versus left. D'Souza says that's wrong because both are on the left. He says this is made clear in Charlottesville organizer Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, whom he interviewed for "Death of a Nation."

"These guys actually have backgrounds in the left. They're not right wingers and yet the media doesn't report this. Why? Because they're trying to pin the fascist and racist tail on the Republican elephant," said D'Souza.

D'Souza says white nationalism is a "spent force" that usually cannot muster more than a few dozen people to events that are then dwarfed by counterprotesters. But if white nationalists are of the the left, why did so many openly endorse President Trump in 2016?

D'Souza says it was their ticket to short-term relevance.

"They call (the rally) 'Unite the Right' because they want to feed the left- wing narrative that they are somehow representative of Trump and this somehow gives them an inflated notoriety. In exchange, what they're giving the left is that they're confirming and corroborating the left's narrative," said D'Souza.

Liberal protesters take to the streets en masse in opposition to most Republican presidents, but D'Souza says it's worse this time because Trump fights back.

"Trump realizes that he's in a big fight. The left does not hold back. The traditional Republican strategy of going under your desk or running for the exit doesn't really work in this situation," said D'Souza.

He says the next big fight is in the midterm elections. D'Souza says Democrats already have several racial and ethnic groups dependent upon government to supply what they need to exist and handing them the majority means they will only look to expand what he calls "plantation politics."

"They'd love to have everybody in this position of ethnically enforced dependence. It's actually a horrible system and it would make this a horrible country, which is why we have to work really hard to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality," said D'Souza.

Several anti-Trump Republican operatives like Michael Gerson and Steve Schmidt are urging conservatives to vote for Democrats under the logic that the GOP has been corrupted by Trump and must be destroyed so it can be rebuilt again.

D'Souza rejects that entirely.

"These people literally need to have their heads examined," he said. "They're talking absolute nonsense and should be completely ignored."