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wardaddy: "Now he’s part of this NRO position that Democrats were always bad and GOP always good and context and historicaL perspective is irrelevant which is stupid to me."

Naw, you're missing the point, and it's an important one: Democrats and their allies are working furiously to rewrite history, turning Confederates into conservative Republicans and making Lincoln's northerners into liberal Democrats.
That's what Tim Russert's color change in 2000 of Republicans from Blue to Red was all about, just one small piece of the bigger puzzle.

What D'Souza is doing is standing up against the Big Lie, saying, no, wait a minute, facts matter, the truth matters and the truth is that Democrats today are basically the same as they've always been.
D'Souza lays out the history of how we got from then to now, and how today's Democrat insanity well reflects that of Democrats in the past.

I'd hate to think that some our Southerners would prefer to accept Democrat lies to the truth about them.

The political parties have undergone ideological swings, which you seem to be denying. In the 1840s the Democrats were the more Conservative Party, the Whigs--here as they were in Britain, the more Liberal Party. (While I would have been a Democrat in that era, I can still respect outstanding American Whigs such as Henry Clay & Daniel Webster.)

Of course the Whig party collapsed in the 1850s, and was replaced largely by the Republican Party, which in the aftermath of the panic of 1857--a seriously underlooked factor in the turmoil that followed--and the terrible war, brought in elements clearly to the Left of the Whigs. Thus the Democratic Party remained the more Conservative Party until the next great economic upheaval, the Panic of 1893, when the Conservative Democratic Administration of Grover Cleveland completely lost control of their own party to the easy money movement headed by William Jennings Bryan.

In the early 20th Century, each Party had a "liberal" wing & a "conservative" wing, but with the next great economic panic (the Great Depression) the Democratic Prty took a sharp turn to the Left, but still retained local Conservative politics, such as the Byrd Government in Virginia & similar traditionalists in South Carolina.

With Strom Thurmond's shift to the Republicans, in order to support Barry Goldwater, in 1964, the Republican surge to the right was underway, which led to several Republican victories, Conservative Supreme Court appointments, the election of Ronald Reagan, etc. (To understand the dynamics involved, I would recommend a book by Bill Rusher in the mid 1970s, The Making of the New Majority Party. Rusher, in that era was the "Publisher" of National Review, and was more pragmatic than some there, today.

“Democrats and their allies are working furiously to rewrite history, turning Confederates into conservative Republicans and making Lincoln’s northerners into liberal Democrats.”

Nice try. It fits the confusion that Dinesh and his ilk are sowing.

Those extremist northerners were in fact the Radical Republicans, a name that they gave themselves as early as 1854. It included a healthy number of 48er radicals who had come to the US after their failed European revolution, Carl Schurz being one, and who were involved in the founding of the Republican Party. A group that believed in the raw use of government power. But they were the driving force for the complete eradication of slavery and for war to eradicate secession. I suppose they are the true heroes for today’s yankeefa as they tour the country eradicating statues.

Lincoln didn’t belong to the Radicals but they were a powerful force in the government. Sumner. Stevens. Stanton. Butler. Logan. Stanton and Butler had both been Democrats. They often were at odds with Lincoln, he was too moderate for their purposes. Stevens even made speeches the seemed to call for the extermination the white population of the south. He could probably get elected today on that one, but he might have to run as a California Democrat.