>> DINESH D'SOUZA: Thank you very much. Wow, this is amazing. I want to congratulate you, not just on Liberty's
athletic victories, but also on being one of the few remaining open-minded colleges
in America. I mean, imagine the prospect of a Bernie Sanders
or a Jesse Jackson speaking at Liberty. We don't actually have to imagine these things
because they have happened, and the reception you gave them was cordial, respectful, intellectual,
civil. And contrast this with the reception accorded
conservative speakers on the left-wing campus. It's totally the opposite. I'm very excited to be here talking about
some themes in my new book called The Big Lie. In the interest of full disclosure, I should
tell you that if you're choosing among books, Hillary has a new book out. It's called, What Happened. What Happened? Now I've recently learned that due to an inexcusable
and astounding mistake, the titles of our two books became interchanged. Hers actually should have been The Big Lie. Now, I think you know that we're living through
a very extraordinary political moment in American History. Even as we speak, left-wing thugs are rampaging
through the south, pulling down Confederate monuments. Now, when I first saw this sight... And let's be clear about what this sight is. This is Democrats knocking down the statues
of other Democrats. So, at the first glance, I thought to myself,
maybe the Democratic Party is coming to a moment of true self-recognition, true honesty,
true willingness to account for its own past. Maybe the Democrats, for the first time in
all their history, are saying, yes, we did it. We are the party of slavery, of segregation,
of Jim Crow, of the Klu Klux Klan, of racial terrorism. We are the party that attempted to block the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965. And we are not just so thoroughly ashamed
of our own history, that we have to take down these terrible reminders that we keep seeing
in the form of statues of who we are. But of course, I realized that is not what
is going on right now. What is actually going on is something more
like the big lie. And the big lie is the effort on the part
of the Democrats to take the things that they did and to project the blame and the responsibility
onto someone else. They want to blame the white man. They want to blame America. They want to blame the South. Now, to be honest, the secession debate of
1860 was between the North and the South. But the slavery debate, which had been going
on for much longer, the slavery debate was not a North South debate. It was actually between the pro-slavery Democratic
party, North and South, and the anti-slavery Republican Party. In my last movie, Hillary's America, I made
the observation that in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave. All the slaves in the United States, four
million of them, were owned by Democrats. Think about that. Since then, in the last year, the left has
been thrashing around to find a single counter example to undermine my Thesis. And all they'd have to do is give me a list
of five Republicans who owned slaves, and I'd have to take it back. But they can't do it. After intense labors, one Democratic Ph.D.
student said, I found an example. I found an example. Ulysses S. Grant inherited a slave on his
wife's side. And I said, that's true. But at the time that happened, Ulysses S.
Grant was a Democrat. So even the single counter example doesn't
really work. Now, since Trump's election, you might have
noticed that the big story— I call it the meta-story of American politics—
has shifted. And the left has moved from playing the race
card to now also playing the fascism card, the fascism card. “Trump is a fascist.” “The Republicans, the conservatives, the
Christians, these are the neo-Nazis of our time.” Now, why does the left say this? What's the point of making these kinds of
accusations? It's not just intended as an insult;
it's intended to be a legitimization, a justification for all kinds of extreme behavior that would
otherwise be inexcusable. Ever since Trump's election, we've been seeing
all kinds of craziness from the left. Let's convince the electors not to vote for
the candidate that they're pledged to. Mainstream Democrats refusing to attend the
inauguration. Let's disrupt the inauguration. Let's go on the campuses, dress up in masks,
carry baseball bats, and bike locks, and beat up conservative speakers who show up to try
to offer a very rarely offered alternative point of view. Now, how can you condone this kind of madness? Well, the left's answer is, “we condone
it, because it's like we are fighting Hitler in the 1930s.” If Trump is a fascist, we have every justification
to use every means necessary to get rid of him. Even if we stage a quasi-coup, it's warranted,
because anything would've been warranted to get Hitler out of there before he could go
on to cause all the carnage that he did. Now this notion that fascism and Nazism are
phenomena of the right—they are somehow right-winged—this notion long predates Trump. It actually goes back to World War II when,
in a sense, the big lie was concocted. It was manufactured. Now why do I call it a big lie? The term ‘the big lie’ was actually used
by Adolf Hitler. And Hitler made the point that small lies
are actually kind of easy to catch. The trouble in Benghazi was due to a video—small
lie, easy to catch. If you wanted to “keep your doctor, you
can keep your doctor”—small lie, easy to catch. But big lies, Hitler says, are more sneaky
because they're so large you can't get your head around them. And so, it's actually easier to pedal a big
lie than it is to pedal a small lie. And the big lie is the lie that fascism and
Nazism are somehow right-wing. In reality, the opposite is the truth. The founder of fascism is not Hitler;
it's Mussolini who established the first fascist regime in the world. When Mussolini established the fascist party,
he received a telegram of congratulations from Lenin. Why? Because Mussolini was the most famous Marxist
in Italy. Lenin recognized Mussolini as a fellow revolutionary
on the left. Hitler's part was officially called the National
Socialist Party. And, you know, I was watching a little bit
of the Emmy's last night, and I was thinking that... Some of you may have seen on social media,
Stephen Colbert did his infamous Nazi salute. He was trying to actually describe Trump,
but here we saw at the Emmys, literally it's Stephen Colbert... Well, first of all, if he did his Nazi salute,
his ratings might have been a little better, but if he literally opened the Nazi 25-point
platform and began to read from it— nationalization of industry, universal healthcare,
let's go after the greedy, swindling bankers and so on, and so on, and so on—
he literally would've gotten thunderous applause from the audience. In other words, what I'm saying is, the platform
of the Nazi party was manifestly left-wing. And, historically in America, the left recognized
the Nazi, recognized the Italian fascists as kindred spirits. Hitler, in fact, got some of his most maniacal
and destructive ideas from the American left. I'm not saying that there were similar things
going on. I'm saying Hitler literally lifted it the
blueprints from the example supplied by the Democrats and by the left. To take a single example... This is, I would call it, the Hitler-Margaret
Sanger connection. Today, if you pick up a brochure of Planned
Parenthood and you thumb through it, you get the idea that Margaret Sanger, the founder
of the organization was a champion of choice. She wanted every woman to decide whether and
how many offspring to have. When you read this, your kind of big lie antenna
should be going off, because the real Margaret Sanger wasn't like this at all. The real Margaret Sanger opposed choice. A slogan that she had which was published
in her magazine Birth Control review: "More children from the fit, fewer children
from the unfit. This is the chief aim of birth control." So, Margaret Sanger's view is that if you
are unfit— unfit, of course, in her view—
then you should be prevented from reproducing at all. No kids, ideally by persuasion, but if you
refuse, by force. And the progressive eugenicists in America,
the gang around Margaret Sanger, had basically two approaches to achieving this goal, the
goal of preventing the unfit from reproducing. The first was forced sterilization. This was the one that Margaret Sanger supported. The other one was euthanasia, which basically
referred to killing off people who were seen as sick, disabled, old, and so on. Now, amazingly, the Nazis got wind of this. Through international conferences, they learned
what the American progressives were proposing. It was a California progressive Paul Popenoe
who said, listen, if we're going to have euthanasia, we can't kill people one at a time. We need to have a more systematic way of doing
it. And he proposed, quote, "lethal chambers to
carry this out." And what I'm saying is that the Nazi's go,
“what the Americans are proposing, it's fantastic. We're going to run with it.” The Nazi sterilization laws of 1933 and the
Nazi euthanasia laws of 1935, which were, in fact, the first gas chambers. The Nazis used poisonous gas, carbon monoxide
gas, to kill, initially, not Jews, but the sick, the disabled, what Hitler called imbeciles,
and so on. So, what I'm saying is that the Nazis adopted,
almost wholesale, the blueprints applied by Margaret Sanger and her American progressive
buddies in the eugenics movement. Now, I've been speaking about fascism. I've been speaking about Nazism. It's worth taking a second to ask the question,
what is fascism? What does it actually mean? Because if you knew the meaning of fascism
and Nazism, you could then decide better, does it belong on the left? Or does it belong on the right? Now, the very term fascism comes from a bundle
of sticks held together so tightly, bound together so compactly, that they can't fall
apart. And the fascist idea was that societies are
stronger collectively than they are individually. It's easier to break one stick at a time than
to break a whole bunch of sticks put together. Fascism, as Mussolini defined it, is everything
in the state, and nothing outside the state. So, what this means, is that the state, the
government, is kind of like a living organism. And each of us individuals, we are like cells
within the organism. Our individual value is basically zero. Individual rights are nonexistent. Our importance as individuals, as cells, is
solely the degree to which we serve the collective, the state. So, I ask you, does this actually sound more
like the platform of the Republican Party, or more like the platform of the Democratic
party? Fascism has always been on the left. FDR knew this. President Roosevelt, in the New Deal, sent
members of his brain trust to fascist Italy, because he saw fascism as more progressive
than the New Deal. He wanted his best thinkers to study fascism
to bring some of those ideas to America. He admired Mussolini as a fellow leftist,
and Mussolini. And Mussolini, for his part, revered FDR. It was a mutual admiration society. Mussolini reviews FDR’s book in a magazine,
and a summarize his review in this way: “Great guy. He's one us. He's a fascist.” He's a fascist. Now, interestingly, after World War II, when
fascism and Nazism became irreparably stained by the reputation of the Holocaust—
when American troops went into the concentration camps and out came those ghostly, emaciated
figures— suddenly fascism and Nazism became permanently
dirty words, incendiary words, symbols of horror. And the progressives in America, who were
then just starting to come to power in academia, in the media, in Hollywood, they actually
knew that fascism and Nazism were on the left. They knew about the deep connections between
the Democrats and the fascists. They knew, for example, that the Nuremberg
Laws—in which Hitler essentially made Jews into second class citizens, prohibiting them
from intermarrying with other Germans, confiscated Jewish property, had state segregation against
Jews segregating them into ghettos. These laws, by the way, were directly lifted
from the Democratic laws of the Jim Crow South. Again, I'm not saying that they were parallel
or similar. I'm saying that the leading Nazis who drafted
the Nuremberg Laws had in their hands the Democratic laws from America. By the way, I should point out every segregation
law in the American South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic
governor. There is no exception to this rule. So, these are not American laws;
these are Democratic laws. But after the way, as I said, the progressives
realized how damning and deep their association was with fascism. And so, they decided, we've got to cover it
up. “All this stuff that Dinesh is talking about,
we've got to make sure that all that stuff is left out of the textbooks. We don't want young people finding out about
it.” Why? Because if they did, they'd never want to
be a Democrat. They'd never want to be a progressive. And, most cunning of all, we have to take
fascism and Nazism from the left-wing column, where they've always belonged,
and we've got to move it over into the right-wing column. Now, this is easier said than done. In other words, big lies are not that easy
to pull off. How do you get intelligent people, not dummies,
intelligent people to know something that isn't true? How do you achieve that? Well, first of all, it really helps when you
dominate the three megaphones of our culture which is academia, the media, and the whole
entertainment industry—not just Hollywood, but Broadway, the music industry, the comedians. If you have all that, you can put out a lot
of big lies. Why? Because even if some guy in the audience knows
it's a big lie, they don't have a big enough megaphone to contest it. So, that's one way you pull off big lies. You kind of own the bull horns to promulgate
them. The other way you pull off big lies is you
have to be, intellectually, very crafty. And one thing we can say about the left is
it is crafty. And so, in moving fascism and Nazism from
the left-wing column to the right-wing column, they realized we can't go around saying that
fascism is the philosophy of the centralized state. Everyone's going to look at us. We've got to strip the socialism out of national
socialism. We've got to sort of redefine fascism and
make... People talk about fake media. We need fake scholarship. We need to create a fictional fascism, and
take that fictional fascism and pin that fascist tail on the Republican elephant. And so, the left came up with this idea. “Let's redefine fascism so fascism is not
centralized government, which it's always been. Let's just say fascism is ultra-nationalism.” Ultra-nationalism. So, here's Trump:
“I want to make America great again!” Hey, that sounds a lot like Hitler. Didn't he want to make Germany great again? Now, in order to dissect this big lie and
expose it, you've got to realize that nationalism is, in fact, not essential to fascism at all. In fact, nationalism is not exclusively on
the right. There are plenty of nationalists on the right. I'm originally from India. Gandhi, the founder of modern India, was a
nationalist. Mandela in South Africa was a nationalist. All the anticolonial leaders were nationalists. Winston Churchill was a nationalist. Abraham Lincoln, the American founders, all
nationalists. Now, does it make any sense to call these
people all fascists? No. So here we begin our task of unmasking the
big lie. Unmasking the big lie by showing that this
effort to pin fascism on the right is an intellectual fraud of mammoth proportions, mammoth proportions. And you might say, well, Dinesh, this may
all be true, but you're talking a little bit in a historical vein. What about now? What about now? So, I want to point out that now, today, the
party that reflects not only fascist history— we've talked about that. Not only fascist ideology, the centralized
state, but even fascist economics and fascist tactics, that is coming today exclusively
from the left. And let me show why. The essential economic meaning of fascism—if
you literally just Google it, look up the definition, you'll see—is state-directed
capitalism. That's the meaning of fascism. Now, interestingly, if we look at the Democratic
Party now, it doesn't advocate socialism of the Marxist type, because true socialist governments
do what? They nationalize industry. The government takes over the industry. The government will take over energy or banking. And the government itself will administer
those industries. That's Marxian socialism. We don't have that. Obama care, for example, in Obama care we
have private hospitals. We have private insurance companies, but the
state tells them what to do. The state sets the prices. The state tells them who's eligible for insurance
or for healthcare. The state denies this procedure or that procedure. In other words, state-directed capitalism. Under Obama, we have seen the state-direction
of all kinds of industries that were previously largely private. The state takes over the banks, tells them
what to do. Takes over the investment firms, tells them
what to do. Takes over, increasingly, the energy sector. We mentioned the health sector. Hillary and Bernie wanted to do this to education. So, this, what I'm saying, is this state-directed
capitalism in which you have private actors, but the state is, in a sense, quarterbacking
them, this is the classic and clinical definition of fascism in an economic sense. And now I turn to the fascism of tactics. You know, when I compare the rag tag white
supremacists in Charlottesville with the Antifa groups on the campus. Trump, by the way, took a lot of heat for
saying the violence is coming from all sides. But not only is Trump right in that, in fact,
he's been proven right about that. But he greatly understated the case. He greatly understated the case, because the
white supremacists in Charlottesville have no cultural or political power. The Klu Klux Klan is actually a shadow of
what it used to be. Today, if the Klu Klux Klan has a rally in
any part of the country, they'd be lucky to get 100 guys. And those 100 guys would be encircled by 500
guys protesting them. Now, the Klu Klux Klan once had real power. In the 1920s, for example, the Klan marched
50,000 hooded Klansmen down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Where were they going, by the way? To the Democratic Nationalism Convention. Many of them were delegates. But these rag tag white supremacists of today
are marginal. But what the left wants you to do is say let's
focus exclusively on them. Why? So, you can actually ignore the far more dangerous
intimidation, violence, bullying that we are doing on a much more systematic scale. Now look at these Antifa guys for a minute
at Berkley. By the way, Berkley, the home of the free
speech movement, it is a far less liberal place, in the true meaning of the word, than
Liberty. The free speech movement actually belongs
here at Liberty, because speaker can freely speak—not just people like me. So, think about what's happening. The people who are genuinely intolerant, the
left, are accusing the people who are tolerant,
us, of being intolerant. The Antifa guys, if you look at them, with
their masks and their hoods, their weapons. You listen to them. You watch them. They seem not only the natural descendants
of the Klu Klux Klan, in other words, a paramilitary wing of the left, just as the Klan was in
the 20s and 30s. But, they also seem natural equivalents or
counterparts to Mussolini's black shirts of the 1920s or Hitler’s brown shirts of the
1930s. The only difference is that the old fascists
were happy to accept the name. “Yes, we're fascists.” The new fascists report and pretend to be
antifascists. And yet, these Antifa antifascists are not
the most dangerous fascists in America, because even they represent, you might call it, the
fascism of the street. And the fascism of the street is not half
as dangerous as the fascism of the institutions. One reason that Antifa can morose freely at
Berkley is that the mayor of Berkley is in their pocket. He's a member of one of their Facebook groups,
reportedly. He's the one who tells the cops to stand down
to give Antifa room to maneuver. Unlike the rag tag white supremacists of Charlottesville,
Antifa has powerful allies among the faculty, among the deans. In Hollywood, and in the mainstream of the
Democratic party, the fascists I worry about are the fascists of Google who can throw a
guy out, fire him, for writing a memo mildly critical of their diversity policy. Or the powerful studio bosses in Hollywood
who will destroy your career. Even if you're a famous guy, they'll ruin
you if you're on the wrong side of the political aisle. Or powerful deans who run billion-dollar endowments
that will topple the career of our young academic, turn him or her into a pariah, because they
happen to speak out on behalf of conservatism or Trump. Or in the era of Obama and Hillary, Hillary's
still wondering, why did I lose? What happened? Well, what happened is you became the most
corrupt figure in US History. That's why you lost. But under Obama and Hillary, what the left
would do is mobilize the weapons of the state—the IRS, the FBI, the justice department—to
go after their critics. This is the most dangerous kind of fascism
of all. It's the fascism in which the government comes
to visit you, not with two guys in a suit with a folder, but with police cars, helicopters
overhead, and SWAT teams, SWAT teams directed at American citizens. So, this is the fascism of our time. It is the phenomenon not of Trump, not of
the right, but entirely, entirely of the left. And what I want to do today, here, is to alert
you to it. Why? Because knowledge is a very powerful thing. The best way to diffuse big lies is with big
truths. And the beauty of living today is you don't
have to take my word for it. You can check it out. You can look it up. And once you get this knowledge, you become
a very dangerous Christian and a very dangerous American. I'm very proud to say I am today, kind of
a dangerous American. Since the election, all these guys on the
left—Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthew, Ben Jones—
all these guys have been bloviating about fascism this and fascism that. Now, as soon as my book comes out, they're
all really hard to reach. They're nowhere to be found. They've all gone down rabbit holes. Why? Because they know that when big lies are confronted
with facts, historical truths, they can't keep going. And so, think about this. The left has a race card. In fact, I took on the race card in my last
movie Hillary's America. And they have a fascism card, and they use
these two cards, not to have a debate, but to prevent debate. Their point is when we play the race card,
we are calling you the bad guys, and we don't need to talk to you. When we call you a fascist, it's another way
of saying that our job is not to converse with you but to repress you, to shut you down. After all, who would want to have a conversation,
or a debate with Hitler in 1933? And so, these cards are used to shut down
debate, to shut us up. And a lot of Republicans haven't woken up
to this. In fact, they respond in a very, sort of,
weak and invertebrate fashion. Don't be like that. Instead, be curious. Be truly open-minded. Be willing to go where knowledge takes you. Be willing to stand up for your convictions. You are, in fact, the enemy of the big lie. You are, in fact, the standing weapons and
instruments of truth. Thank you very much.
