WASHINGTON – Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza accused anti-Trump activists of wrongly connecting nationalism to fascism, arguing that nationalism is not a “defining feature of fascism.”
D’Souza argued that the economic policies of the Democratic Party are fascist.
“I want to say a word about fascist economics because I want to show that the economic policy of the Democratic Party, of Obama but also of Bernie [Sanders], of Elizabeth Warren is fascist in the classic meaning of the term, in the dictionary meaning of the term. If you look up fascism, the economic part of it, it basically says state-run capitalism, state-directed capitalism, that’s the meaning of fascism,” D’Souza said at the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference on Friday.
“We often accuse the left of being socialist but in reality these guys aren’t socialists, because what do socialist countries do? Socialist countries nationalize industries. The government takes over the energy industry, the government takes over the banks. Now, notice under Obamacare we still have private insurance companies, we still have private hospitals but the government is directing them. The government is fixing the price. The government is telling them what to do,” he added.
D’Souza said government “direction and control” expanded under President Obama in the health, energy and education sectors.
“That’s why Bernie and Hillary wanted free college. Their idea was the government now gets to direct even private colleges in telling them what to do. So my point is this is not socialism. If it was socialism the government would have taken over all this stuff. This is actually fascism, state-directed capitalism. That’s what fascism means and, in that respect, fascism is with us now,” he said.
D’Souza said the left has gone from playing the “race card” to playing the “fascism card” on Republicans who support President Trump.
“The Democratic Party has been the party of slavery, of segregation, of Jim Crow, of racial terrorism, of the Ku Klux Klan, of opposition to the civil rights movement of the ’60s. They did it and in an unbelievable slight of hand they now are trying to blame us for what they did. It’s almost like a bunch of guys who poison the wells and then pretend to show up as the water commissioner. So that was the theme of Hillary’s America, but if you are watching things very carefully now you realize the left has shifted gears,” he said.
“They’ve gone from playing the race card to a new card: the fascism card. And the fascism card is not an abandonment of the race card because the fascists, particularly the Nazis, were racists. They were anti-Semites. They tried to create a regime based on racist supremacy, and so the race card is now back but it’s inside the umbrella of the fascist card,” he added.
D’Souza said liberal activists often falsely claim Trump is a “fascist because Trump is an ultra-nationalist.”
“The truth of it is nationalism is not a defining feature of fascism; that’s a lie and it can easily be shown to be a lie by simply looking at people around the world who were or are nationalists. So, for example, I’m originally from India; Gandhi was a nationalist. Mandela was a nationalist in South Africa. The American founders were nationalists. Winston Churchill was a nationalist, so was de Gaulle in France,” he said. “All the anti-colonial leaders were nationalists. Now, obviously all these men were not fascists. So it’s simply if ultra-nationalism were to define fascism, then they would be so the notion that fascism is nationalism is clearly erroneous.”
D’Souza said the left has “stripped fascism of its actual ideological content” and created a “fictional definition” of the term because fascism was “on the left” historically.
“Before World War II, everybody knew that fascism was on the left – the fascists knew it and the anti-fascists knew it,” he said. “But after the war, fascism became re-defined and moved into the right-wing column.”
According to D’Souza, there would be a state-directed economy under fascist rule.
“I heard Bernie Sanders the other day talking about extreme right-wingers. If there was such a thing as an extreme right-winger, because conservatism is the philosophy of limited government, the extreme of the right is a guy who doesn’t want any government at all,” he said. “At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the all powerful government, the communists believe in that, the fascists believe in that and the progressives believe in that.”
D’Souza charged the Democratic Party with blaming America for problems such as segregation when southern Democrats had opposed efforts to end segregation in the ’60s.
“America didn’t do these things, you did. Some Americans did them and other Americans stopped them,” he said. “All of these evil things you are accusing us of, not only are you guilty of them but you’ve never admitted to them, you’ve never apologized for them and you’ve never done restitution.”
D’Souza mentioned the antifa protesters on college campuses, who he said “seem to resemble quite closely” Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts.
“But the main difference is they claim to be anti-fascists, so they are drawing on the moral prestige of anti-fascism and they are trying to stain us with the fascism that has the ineradicable legacy of holocaust,” he said.
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