Charlottesville

Best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza says there were fascists on both sides of the violence in Virginia on Saturday and he posits that Democrats and their allies in the media are now focused on painting all Republicans and conservatives as responsible for the racism that still exists in the United States.

Last week, prior to the violence in Charlottesville, D’Souza likened the Antifa movement and their pattern of stopping speech through violence to Adolf Hilter’s brown shirts and Benito Mussolini’s black shirts.  But with white supremacists and neo-Nazis on one side and Antifa on the other, which side is the fascists?

“Clearly, there’s a fascist streak running between both sets of violent activists.  The mayor of Charlottesville said, ‘These people all came to fight.’  They didn’t come to peacefully protest.  They wanted to tangle with each other,” said D’Souza, author most recently of “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.”

While many in the media and in Democratic circles suggest that the white supremacists are Trump voters, D’Souza says that’s not true of the organizer of the rally.

“What’s really strange is that the white supremacist who organized the rally is a former Obama guy and a former Occupy Wall Street guy.  So right away you know that something fishy is going on here,” said D’Souza.

When it comes to the rest of the neo-Nazi and KKK figures in Charlottesville, D’Souza says the story is more complicated.

“This white nationalism was actually invented in the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party has moved from embracing white nationalism to embracing every other type of minority nationalism.  So the Democrats like black nationalism, black pride, black solidarity.  They’re telling every ethnic group – blacks, Hispanics, Asians – be proud of what makes you distinctive,” said D’Souza.

He says Democrats now mobilize all of these groups against white nationalists, and that has created some changing voting patterns among white supremacists.

“Today if you’re a white nationalist, you don’t find a hospitable home in the Democratic Party.  You don’t find much of a home in the Republican Party either, because Trump is not a white nationalist.  Trump is an American nationalist.  So I think that’s why some of these white nationalists are for Trump,” said D’Souza.

“They normally would be Democrats, if the Democrats hadn’t created a type of multiculturalism in which these guys are not welcome at the multicultural picnic,” said D’Souza.

But rather than acknowledge these bigoted elements as a fringe of the American political landscape, D’Souza says liberals and the media are trying to paint the political right with a very broad brush.

“The media is up to something very vile and very cunning.  They’re trying to excuse the much more dangerous fascism on their own side.  Think about it: the driving of speakers off campus, not just the Antifa violent guys, but the deans and the studio bosses in Hollywood.  If you have a different point of view, they’ll run you out of town.  They’ll make sure you never work again,” said D’Souza.

“This is the fascism, not just of the street but of the institutions.  The Democratic Party today has much more of a fascist ideology and fascist tactics than anything you see in the Republican Party,” said D’Souza, who says he’s never seen a white supremacist at a GOP event in more than 25 years of speaking around the country.

D’Souza says this effort is a massive exercise in blame-shifting.

“There’s an effort to transfer responsibility from the actual guilty party, the Democrats, onto the non-guilty party, the Republicans,” he said.

“What’s underway here is an effort to create a national shaming of the right.  For example, look at the stuff about, ‘Trump is a fascist.’  Trump has never said one kind thing about fascism,” said D’Souza.  “The left wants to have a one-way hate campaign.”

He says there’s plenty of evidence of Democrats praising the most vile fascist regimes in history.

“When you had real fascism, very dangerous fascism, I’m talking about Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany.  We have [Franklin Roosevelt] praising Mussolini, sending members of his braintrust to fascist Italy to study Italian fascism, which he thought was more progressive than the New Deal.  He wanted to bring fascist ideas over here,” said D’Souza.

In the wake of Charlottesvile, the debate is turning once again to the fate of Confederate memorials and monuments.  Some want to destroy them, others believe they should be limited to museums and cemeteries, while others fear tearing them down is tantamount to erasing history.

D’Souza says this North vs. South debate raging around the Civil War is badly misplaced.

“The real slavery debate was not between the North and the South.  It was between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party .  Most southerners did not own slaves.  Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves.  The northern Democrats led by Stephen Douglas were actively and cunningly protecting slavery and did so for 40 years,” said D’Souza.

He says that should mean plenty of statues and memorials getting razed in the North, since so many figures openly or tacitly approved of slavery.

D’Souza also notes that the Democrats are never under any pressure to denounce any figures from their party’s past, even those as recent as longtime Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, who spent years in the KKK.

“No one is pulling his statues down.  He was lionized in the Democratic Party.  Hillary called him her mentor.  So you know there is a big lie underway.  It’s just a matter of getting our fingers on it so we can expose what’s really going on,” he said.