Dinesh D’Souza is a Big Liar

Dinesh D’souza in 2014. The frauds that he commits with his books are unfortunately legal.

I listened to some of Dinesh D’Souza’s recent speeches and interviews about his new book, called The Big Lie, which was published a few days ago (on 31 July 2017). I do not have the book, but I assume that what he has been saying in his recent appearances resembles what he has written.

Last year in Hillary’s America, D’Souza used significant omissions to make that argument seem tenable, like the fact that the Ku Klux Klan endorsed Republican Calvin Coolidge for president in 1924, and the fact that the Jewish takeover of the Democratic Party caused Southern segregationists in huge numbers to switch to the Republican Party in the 1960s and ’70s, corresponding to what was called Nixon’s Southern strategy.

D’Souza’s relationship with the truth does not seem to have improved in the past year.

Broadly speaking D’Souza’s new work seems to be a repeat performance of Hillary’s America, the message of which boils down to “Democrats are the Real Racists,” except that now it’s “Democrats are the Real Nazis.” 

D’Souza refers to violence of Antifa and “the irony of using fascist tactics to fight fascism.” 

There is nothing ironic here, unless one begins by accepting the leftist and Jewish premise that Nazis and Fascists invented political violence. In fact the paramilitary Brownshirts organization was created to protect National-Socialist meetings against attacks by leftists.

In general, like the rest of the National Review crowd, D’Souza proceeds from assumptions that are Jew-approved.

An important point of dishonesty in D’Souza’s presentation is his reference to images from concentration camps supposedly proving the Holocaust. Those images are really the foundation of the general demonization of Adolf Hitler and National-Socialism, with Fascism being demonized mainly by association with that, but in fact, those images do not prove anything. The fact that D’Souza leans on this shows again that he is pandering to popular misconceptions and basically lacks seriousness.

D’Souza summarizes Hitler’s description of the Big Lie without bothering to mention that Hitler accused the Jews of using the Big Lie. This has to be deliberate dishonesty and a deliberate omission on D’Souza’s part.*

As examples of the leftist “Big Lie” D’Souza points to the accusation that Trump is a fascist, and the accusation that Trump is a racist.

In fact, Trump’s movement does resemble a less than fully developed fascism, insofar as its message is nationalist and populist. It is also certain that Trump gets a lot of support from White people based on the perception that he represents the interests of White people. That is what those on the left call racist. So what? I don’t see Trump doing backflips to avoid such labels.

In general, D’Souza’s presentation is about fear of labels, and about applying those feared labels to others instead of bringing reason to bear. For an educated person, this is on its face not a very convincing kind of argument. Nonetheless I shall dismantle some of D’Souza’s major claims.

Since Jews have created in the mind of the public a spurious link between eugenic sterilization and the Holocaust, D’Souza would like to identify the movement for eugenic sterilization in the United States with “progressives.” By the same token, however, D’Souza definitely does not want to identify it with Republicans. 

Republican Gov. of Indiana J. Frank Hanly

Perhaps D’Souza never bothered to find out that the first American states to enact forced eugenic sterilization laws were all Republican states.

James Franklin Hanly, the governor of Indiana who signed the first eugenic sterilization bill into law in 1907, was a Republican.

In 1909 Washington, California, and Connecticut all had eugenic sterilization bills signed into law by Republican governors. In 1911 eugenic sterilization was signed into law by Iowa’s Republican governor Beryl F. Carroll. The first five states to adopt eugenic sterilization had it signed into law by Republican governors.

The Southern and Democratic states were slower to adopt the practice, possibly because of the influence of Christianity in those states.

Dinesh D’Souza calls Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, a progressive, and maybe he was, but Madison Grant was also a Republican, and a friend of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who called himself a progressive.

Unlike Roosevelt, however, Madison Grant was unequivocally a racist. Can we really say that a man who advocates racism is on the left? From one perspective, maintaining a race is the most profound form of conservatism. From the perspective of the followers of Ayn Rand, however, racism is “collectivism” and therefore on the left. That is the kind of pigeonholing that Dinesh D’Souza promotes.

Westbrook Pegler

It goes back to a semantic question about what is right, what is left, and what is conservative. These terms do not mean the same today as they meant 100 years ago. 

During the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, the meaning of the word liberal changed drastically. Westbrook Pegler, a dogged critic of the New Deal, wrote this in his column of 21 September 1953:

The truth is that our entire people have been brainwashed by the Roosevelt-Truman administrations for the last 20 years. The result is that today most of us don’t even know what our constitutional rights really are. We are afraid to say that Hitler was right about communism and Soviet Russia. Words which formerly had honest meanings now mean exactly the reverse to most of us. Those few who stubbornly insist on using the word “liberal” in its old, genuine meaning, are almost totally misunderstood. We even know we will be misunderstood when we use it.

[…]

I am one of the most liberal liberals in the country. But those who use the name “liberal” as their designation of a line of thought put me down as a reactionary. Well, I am. I hit back when I am hit. That is my reaction to abusive action. Suppose then that we say I am a reactionary liberal. These two political cliches are supposed to be mutually contradictory, although they really are not as any person must admit who knows the meanings of plain American words. [Westbrook Pegler, Reading Eagle, 21 September 1953]

Pegler tells us that before FDR, a liberal was somebody who wanted free markets and less interference from government. That political orientation today is called conservative.

So, if what now passes for conservative used to be liberal, what was conservative? I will give you a clue. Being conservative 100 years ago was not about less government. Conservatives 100 years ago used to recognize that individual freedom had a downside to it.

In the UK, in fact, there was a concept known as Tory Socialism. You could be a Tory, which is to say a member of the Conservative Party, and also a socialist.

Niles Carpenter wrote in 1922 that Tory Socialism was a form of “political mediaevalist reaction” that was also known in the 19th century as the Young England movement, and its most prominent advocate was Benjamin Disraeli.

… Young England started among a group of Oxford students. Disraeli became the leader, and although the group went to pieces in 1845, the more vital of its principles have carried on to the present day. Disraeli and his followers sought “to reconcile the working classes to the Throne, the Church, and the Aristocracy”; that is, to restore feudalism at its best. This theory was supported by a practical policy, at once progressive and reactionary. [Niles Carpenter, Guild Socialism, 1922: p. 41]

Carpenter says that the Tory Socialists claimed to be the real “friends of the people” unlike the liberal free-traders. The general idea was an alliance of the traditional institutions of Britain with the working class, against the bourgeoisie, which had dominated politics since 1832.

At the turn of the 20th century, a prominent advocate of Tory Socialism was the writer G. S. Street, who authored an essay by that name.

During the 20th century, the British Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin (1935-1937) (who was nominally opposed to socialism but called moderate in policy) and Harold MacMillan (1957-1963) have been characterized by others as practitioners of Tory Socialism.

In Germany, the modern welfare state was invented in the 1880s, not by a red socialist Jew like Ferdinand Lasalle but by a military man, Count Otto von Bismarck-Schoenhausen, who was not a member of any party but had been relying on the support of the Conservative Party since 1873. The introduction of the welfare state in Germany brought the working class to the conservative, forming an effective coalition against the commercial class (as well as the far left) just as Tory Socialism had intended in England.

A German Communist member of the Reichstag named Karl Korsch, who left Germany in 1933 and ended up in the United States, teaching at Tulane University, referred to Bismarck’s policies as “a kind of Tory Socialism.”

I have pointed out, in an earlier installment of What Would Hitler Do?, that Adolf Hitler in some ways walked in Bismarck’s footsteps, doing the same kind of thing as Bismarck but more of it.

The fact that such a thing as Tory Socialism could exist, and the fact that Hitler’s movement can be categorized in this way, is important, because Dinesh D’Souza takes for granted that socialism and conservatism are never the same thing. D’Souza follows the customs of National Review, using only political concepts from the postwar period, after the period of brainwashing under Roosevelt and Truman that Westbrook Pegler described in 1953.

In his speech at Trinity University earlier this year, Dinesh D’Souza claims that Italian fascism grew out of the “Crisis of Marxism” that happened after the First World War. Most of us who have heard of this Crisis of Marxism know it as the event that spawned Cultural Marxism, a mutant branch of Marxism that no longer made its appeal to the workers but to discontented minorities of every possible kind, and also made an issue of sexual repression.

D’Souza does not even mention the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism as a product of this Crisis of Marxism. Instead, he says:

“And out of that Crisis of Marxism came two new variations of Marxism…. The first was Leninist Bolshevism, and the other was Italian Fascism. This is the undisputed truth of history.” [D’Souza, Speech at Trinity University, 2017]

Of course D’Souza is wrong when he says that it is an undisputed truth of history. He immediately contradicts himself on that point when he goes on to say that there was “a very important progressive coverup project” after the Second World War, “to camouflage the close associations of the political left with Fascism and Nazism, and to move Fascism and Nazism from the left, where they were always understood to be, into the right-wing column.”

Whether National-Socialism and Fascism are to be called left or right is a question of definition. Since D’Souza is working with National Review’s definitions, and cannot conceive how an expansion of government could be used for essentially conservative ends, of course he tags National-Socialism and Fascism as leftist.

The fomentors of proletarian class-struggle, however, always understood Fascism and National-Socialism, with their goal of class-reconciliation, as something fundamentally different from what they were trying to do.

A Communist member of the Reichstag named Karl Korsch wrote about the products of the Crisis of Marxism in 1931, and what he says is probably more accurate than what D’Souza says. Mind you, D’Souza has said that it was undisputed, or at least undisputed until after the Second World War, that Fascism was one of the two products of the Crisis of Marxism.

First, Korsch wrote in 1931 that there were two movements within Marxism that had continued since before the First World War. These were “the reformist state socialism of the social democratic parties” and “communist anti-imperialism.”

Korsch also named three new movements, resulting from the Crisis of Marxism, that rejected Marx’s eschatology. These three innovative movements, Korsch identified as: “unionist reformism, revolutionary syndicalism, and Leninist Bolshevism.”

In Karl Korsch’s account of the products of the Crisis of Marxism, from 1931, Fascism and National-Socialism do not appear.

In 1940, Korsch went on to explain that Fascism and National-Socialism were, from his Communist perspective, counterrevolutionary. He favored the summation of Italian Marxist Ignazio Silone who said: 

“Fascism is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never took place”

In other words, Fascism consists of measures taken to secure the loyalty of the workers (including removal of the incorrigible troublemakers from society) so that a proletarian revolution cannot happen. That might not be a right-wing thing to do, but in the big picture it is certainly conservative, in the most important conceivable way.

The kind of argument that D’Souza presents seems to be directed primarily to stupid and cowardly people who live in fear of being tarred with some taboo label. Republican status-seekers who live in fear of having anyone know their true racial attitudes might be excited over a production like Hillary’s America or The Big Lie that allows them to deflect the accusation that they most fear at somebody else.

In other words, Dinesh D’Souza is not making a contribution to rational public discourse, at all.

Beyond that, he is suggesting to people who need to get over the stigma of being called racist or Nazi that instead they should cherish that stigma as they apply it to somebody else. Thus they become ever more deeply entrenched in their own cowardice and dishonesty.

D’Souza is himself a very dishonest man. In 2014 he was sentenced to five years for fraud (after being reported by the husband of a woman with whom he, also married at the time, was having an affair). As a writer, Dinesh D’Souza is still committing fraud.

D’Souza comes to us from a highly corrupt society that has also given us storekeepers who systematically overcharges customers by small increments, anticipating that few will complain. These people are opportunists and crooks.

Allowing an Indian to come to the United States and to tell our people what to think about political matters is almost as unwise, I would suggest, as allowing a Somali to become a policeman.
_____________________
* In his public speeches on the subject, D’Souza lets his audiences believe that Hitler advocated the big lie in Mein Kampf. D’Souza knows better. In his book, as it turns out, while admitting that Hitler does not advocate the big lie and even warns his readers against it, D’Souza invokes psychological jargon as a way to rationalize accusing Hitler anyway. D’Souza invokes the old psychoanalytical term transference, but he cannot even get that right: what he means is projection. D’Souza must have recognized that this psychobabble argument was too transparently gratuitous to seem convincing if spoken aloud, and therefore, in his speeches, has opted to let his audiences believe that Hitler advocated the big lie.