Dinesh D’Souza on His Provocative New Film, Death of a Nation

Dinesh’s best movie to date. Saw it tonight with the Missus.

Learned a lot I had not known before about the connections between the Democrats/Progressives and European liberal fascism.

And the acting was SO good ... there were some historical scenes that hit close to home for me (being the son of survivors of the German occupation and atrocities of WW2).

The last scene with Sophie Scholl (if you saw the film you know what I am talking about) was positively eerie - if that didn’t connect with your soul you might not have one .. ;>)

“Learned a lot I had not known before about the connections between the Democrats/Progressives and European liberal fascism.”

I’m curious to know if he mentions Republican progressives, like Teddy Roosevelt a dozen years before Woodrow Wilson. In fact, TR helped elect Wilson by running third party in 1912 on the Bull Moose ticket- the real name of which was the Progressive Party.

And does he mention the connection between the 1848 German Revolutionaries and the founding of the GOP? The German 48ers included Marx and Engels, and although they remained in London a lot of their comrades emigrated to the Midwest and played a significant role in Lincoln’s gov’t and the Union Army. Their leftwing slant still echoes in the politics of that region.

I agree. Movie was great. Saw it in liberal Marin County and there were about 40-50 people there. We all clapped at the end of the movie and again after the credits rolled. It was powerful. The beginning of the movie is the laffer roll of fake news talking heads melting down at Trump’s win election night. Seen it many times, but still fun to see it on a wide screen! The White Rose section was very moving. The timing of this movie is good for the fall elections and I hope that there are some who show up out of curiosity because Trump pardoned Dinesh.

Great flix.

He didn’t mention Teddy.

He also didn’t talk about 48ers but he did talk about the Nazi’s using the rat’s KKK guidelines to justifies their mass extermination of the Jews. How FDR admired Hitler and Mussolini.

He reviewed the history of the progressives that started in the 1830

He did talk about how Lincoln was anti-progressive and this was his basis for being anti slavery. The quote he used “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”

Full quote

“That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
— October 15, 1858 Debate at Alton, Illinois

I always thought the progressive mind set started here in the 1930’s but he presents an argument it started 100 years before. If you think about it has been around since the dawn of man.

“Nazi’s using the rat’s KKK guidelines to justifies their mass extermination of the Jews.”

Which of the three eras of the KKK is supposed to have had a policy like that? KKK violence was of a localized variety, hardly the genocidal mass murder of Nazism.

Every study I’ve ever seen about the roots of Nazism leads to the Volkish movement, the German pagan revival, Prussian militarism, a host of ideological movements that had been simmering in Europe long before and without any connection to events in America. Read George Mosse’s “Nazi Culture”, considered to be one of the authoritative works on the subject, you won’t find any reference to the KKK.

“How FDR admired Hitler and Mussolini.”

America had a powerful isolationist movement in the late 1930s, mostly Republican, and Congress passed the Neutrality Acts to keep us out of the European War. But FDR announced in 1940 that we would be the Arsenal of Democracy and sell weapons to Britain and Canada, in spite of opposition from the isolationist Congress. And in March of 1941 FDR arranged the Lend-Lease pact with Churchill, which was a sub rosa means of getting us into the war against Germany and Italy. We had destroyers stalking U-boats in the North Atlantic, while the country was still officially neutral. If anything FDR was far ahead of the rest of the country in wanting to wage war on Hitler and Mussolini.

“He did talk about how Lincoln was anti-progressive”

Progressives by definition intend to change the old order of society and/or government. And the agrarian slave based society of the South was about the oldest American order, the same society that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe had been born into and were part of. Abolitionists and Radical Republicans were the agents demanding change. They were the progressives of 1860, and their fan club included an old 48er named Karl Marx who covered the American Civil War for The New York Tribune. That’s the very same Karl Marx that we all know.

Now the only way that Lincoln was anti-progressive is that he was a moderate Republican rather than a Radical or an Abolitionist. But he wasn’t opposed to them, he just wasn’t as extreme as what they were.

Freepers need to be careful of taking Dinesh’s ‘history’ as gospel. He plays fast and loose with facts because he wants the past to fit a particular story that he is selling.

I’d love for someone with your knowledge of history to see the movie and give us feedback. Sincerely.

The way I looked at the movie is that he trying to explain the current propaganda of use of the term “Progressive” to sound like change to actually mean authoritarianism.

I went with a gaggle of women who are very politically active but were shocked at the comparison. (I wasn’t. Been hangin out here for almost 2 decades!)

It takes more time to learn the real truth in history than most of us our willing to spend. (Tried to research the source of anti-FA. Sources widely differ. D’Souza compared them to the brown shirts and black shirts. I think that is fair.)

I think the main message of the movie was not to be so much a history lesson but a reminder that governments can be abusive. We’ve seen it in the past and we maybe seeing it start to fulminate here now. I think it’s a message that needs to be said. A warning we may need to heed.

“Today Dinesh went on a twitter bash against Andrew Jackson as a slave owning democrat”

“Guess who idolizes Jackson’s grit”

The same President who shares Jackson’s populist, anti-elitist instincts. Something that everyone familiar with Andrew Jackson spotted early on.

Dinesh is an opportunist and a fool. Freepers will eventually learn that to their dismay.

One game he is playing is “who is the biggest racist”. That was poisonous back when liberal Democrats played it in the 1960s to advance their agenda. It’s just as poisonous now.

The difference is that conservatives back then weren’t foolish enough to think that it was a good idea for them to get involved in it. Dinesh, having no roots in this country, will use any cudgel that suits him. And he attacks America’s past heroes with a critique that once was mostly the province of marxists.

The racist/ evil slaveholder cleansing naturally won’t stop with the Currently Acceptable Hate Object of the American Confederacy. Anyone with a lick of sense about American history knows that the majority of Presidents prior to Lincoln have a slavery taint. As do Andrew Johnson and Grant.

Ethnic cleansing zealots, using the logic that we must extirpate America’s evil past, will go after everyone other than the two Adams. Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan will have to go because despite being northern born and not owning slaves, they were too friendly to the South and they weren’t much interested in hurling the country into a civil war. Dinesh is sowing the wind, those who follow him will reap the whirlwind.

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