The Big Lie Quotes

“The American Revolution was characterized by three basic freedoms: economic freedom or capitalism, political freedom or constitutional democracy, and freedom of speech and religion. These are the freedoms that, in their original form, American conservatives seek to conserve.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Fascism is an Italian term that means “groupism” or “collectivism.” The fasci in Italy were groups of political activists who got their name from the fasces of ancient Rome—the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the unified strength of the Romans. The core meaning of the term fascism is that people are stronger in groups than they are as individuals.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Goldberg argues that fascism and communism, far from being opposites, are “closely related historical competitors for the same constituents.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“fascism and Nazism both emerged out of a debate within socialism. The problem began when the central prophecies of Marxism failed to occur. This created a massive crisis within the Left, and essentially Marxism split into two camps: the first became Leninism and Bolshevism, and the other became fascism and Nazism.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Moreover, neither the founders nor their successors implemented racist schemes like comprehensive state-sponsored segregation or created institutions like the Ku Klux Klan for the purpose of terrorizing and exterminating blacks. These were inventions of a later era and of a new party founded in the 1820s, the Democratic Party.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of the private sector, forcing their private welfare into line with the national welfare. Isn’t this precisely how progressives view the federal government’s control of banks, finance companies, insurance companies, health care, energy, and education?”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“In addition, the fascists adopted an economic policy that is closely parallel to, and in many respects identical with, today’s progressivism. Mussolini called this policy “corporatism,” but a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“It’s all very well to talk about the nation of producers and the interests of the nation, but who decides what its true interests are? Socialists claim to be in favor of equitable redistribution of income and wealth, but who determines what is equitable and does the actual redistribution? To these questions, the fascists answered: we do, through the instrument of the powerful centralized state. And this is also, in America, the answer that today’s progressives give.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“This is not my view of the matter; it is the Nazi eugenicists’ view of the matter. In the early twentieth century, eugenics and social Darwinism were far more prevalent in America than they were in Germany. Margaret Sanger and her fellow progressive eugenicists didn’t get their ideas for killing off undesirables—or preventing their births—from the Nazis; the Nazis got them from their American counterparts who dominated the field of international eugenics. So there is a two-way traffic between Nazism and the American Left.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“And just weeks into his presidency, even before Trump had done anything that could remotely be considered unconstitutional, Democratic Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Tulsi Gabbard raised the issue of impeachment.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“With American blacks, however, the situation is quite different. Although slavery ended in 1865, it lasted more than 200 years, and it had its widest scope during the era of Democratic supremacy in the South from the 1820s through the 1860s. Many of the features of the old slave plantation—dilapidated housing, broken families, a high degree of violence required to keep the place together, a paucity of opportunity and advancement prospects, a widespread sense of nihilism and despair—are evident in Democrat-run inner cities like Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Giovanni Gentile”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“exonerate”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“A Lasting Legacy I return to Elkins now, to make a summary point and a single closing observation. The summary point is that even as a closed system, slavery, simply because of its long duration, produced over time a distinctive African American culture. This is a point stressed in Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll and in his mostly sympathetic critique of Elkins. Slaves, for instance, developed a repertoire of songs and stories and relationships—sometimes lifelong relationships—that ultimately helped to form a black identity in the United States. There is no analog for this in the concentration camps, partly because of the nature of the camps and partly because they lasted for just a dozen years from 1933 to 1945. In general, camp prisoners did not form close relationships, partly because this was discouraged by the guards and partly because prisoners realized that the very person you befriended last week could be summarily executed this week. So the only behavioral changes that concentration camps produced were in the nature of short-term adaptations to camp life itself. It follows from this that the cultural legacy of slavery long outlasted slavery while the cultural legacy of the camps—including the peculiar disfigurations of personality that Elkins detected—proved to be a temporary phenomenon. The phenomena of the zombie-like Muselmanner, the ersatz Nazism of the Kapos—all of this is now gone. It makes no sense to say that Jews or eastern Europeans today display any of the characteristics that developed within that temporary closed system. With American blacks, however, the situation is quite different. Although slavery ended in 1865, it lasted more than 200 years, and it had its widest scope during the era of Democratic supremacy in the South from the 1820s through the 1860s. Many of the features of the old slave plantation—dilapidated housing, broken families, a high degree of violence required to keep the place together, a paucity of opportunity and advancement prospects, a widespread sense of nihilism and despair—are evident in Democrat-run inner cities like Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago. “There was a distinct underclass of slaves,” political scientist Orlando Patterson writes, “who lived fecklessly or dangerously. They were the incorrigible blacks of whom the slave-owner class was forever complaining. They ran away. They were idle. They were compulsive liars. They seemed immune to punishment.” And then comes Patterson’s punch line: “We can trace the underclass, as a persisting social phenomenon, to this group.” 39 The Left doesn’t like Patterson because he’s a black scholar of West Indian origin with a penchant for uttering politically incorrect truths.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“I like most of my fellow Republicans and conservatives was a victim of the progressive paradigm, embedded in all our institutions of culture, from academia to Hollywood to the media. In this case, the story that we had accepted, like suckers, was the idea that fascism and Nazism are inherently “right wing.” The Left is really good at inventing and disseminating these paradigms. When one of them falls, they simply reach for another. In my previous book and film, Hillary’s America, I challenged another powerful leftist paradigm. This is the paradigm that the progressives and the Democrats are the party of emancipation, equality, and civil rights. I showed instead that they are the party of slavery and Indian removal, of segregation and Jim Crow, of racial terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, and of opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. My goal was to strip away the race card from the Democrats—a card they had been successfully playing against Republicans for a generation. Incredibly the Democrats had taken full credit for the civil rights movement, even though Republicans are the ones who got it passed, and even though the opposition to it came almost entirely from the Democratic Party. Democrats accused Republicans—the party of emancipation and opposition to segregation, bigotry, and white supremacy—of being the party of bigotry and white supremacy. Talk about transference. This was my introduction to the Left’s political strategy of shifting the blame for racism onto the party that had historically opposed racism in all its forms. So successful were the Democrats in this con that in 2005 a head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, went around apologizing to black groups for sins that had actually been committed, not by the Republicans, but by the Democrats. 5 Equally astonishing, the Democrats have never admitted their racist history, never taken responsibility for what they did, never apologized for it, never paid one penny of restitution for their crimes. What intrigued me most was how one can get away with such a big lie. The answer is you have to dominate all the large megaphones of the culture, from academia to the movies to the major media. With this cultural arsenal at their disposal, big liars can spin out falsehoods with the confidence that no one else has a large enough megaphone to challenge them. They can have their lies taught in classrooms, made into movies and TV shows, and reported in the everyday media as the unvarnished truth. This is how big lies come to be widely believed, sometimes even by the people who are being lied about. Hillary’s America was met with outrage on the Left, but no one could rebut a single fact in the book or movie. Even my most incriminating allegations proved invulnerable. I noted that, in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave; all the four million slaves at the time were owned by Democrats. Now this generalization could easily be refuted by someone providing a list of Republicans who owned slaves. The Left couldn’t do it. One assiduous researcher finally sought to dispute me with a single counterexample. Ulysses S. Grant, he pointed out, once inherited a slave from his wife’s family. I conceded the point but reminded him that, at the time, Ulysses S. Grant was not a Republican. Fearful that they had no substantive answer to Hillary’s America, the mainstream media went into complete denial. If you watched the major networks or public television, or listened to National Public Radio, you would have no idea that Hillary’s America even existed. The book was Number One on the New York Times bestseller list and the movie was the top-grossing documentary of the year. Both were dense with material directly relevant to the ongoing election debate. Yet they were completely ignored by a press that was squarely in the Hillary camp.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“The big lie is a term routinely attributed to Adolf Hitler. Supposedly Hitler used the term to describe Nazi propaganda. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler contrasts the big lie with little or ordinary lies. “The great masses of the people,” he writes, “more easily fall victim to the big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.” 3 Hitler, however, is not referring to his own big lies. Rather, he is referring to the lies allegedly promulgated by the Jews. The Jews, Hitler says, are masters of the big lie. Now recognize that Mein Kampf is a tireless recitation of libels and calumnies against the Jews. The Jews are accused of everything from being capitalists to being Bolsheviks, from being impotent to lusting after Nordic women, from being culturally insignificant to being seekers of world domination. The charges are contradictory; they cannot simultaneously be true. Yet while lying about the Jews and plotting their destruction, Hitler accuses the Jews of lying and of plotting the destruction of Germany. Hitler employs the big lie even as he disavows its use. He portrays himself as a truth-teller and attributes lying to those he is lying about—the Jews. Could there be a more pathological case of transference, and specifically, of blaming the victim? The big lie is now back, and this time it is about the role of fascism and Nazism in American politics. The political Left—backed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party—insists that Donald Trump is an American version of Hitler or Mussolini. The GOP, they say, is the new incarnation of the Nazi Party. These charges become the basis and rationalization for seeking to destroy Trump and his allies by any means necessary. The “fascism card” is also used to intimidate conservatives and Republicans into renouncing Trump for fear themselves of being branded and smeared. Nazism, after all, is the ultimate form of hate, and association with it, the ultimate hate crime.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“to come to power. Now it must be said that when a major political party basically rejects the outcome of a free election, we are in uncharted territory. This happened in the United States once before, of course, in 1860, when the same party, the Democrats, refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The result was a bloody civil war.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Southern Democrats struck exactly the same note, deploring lynching and the Klan and institutionalizing instead, just as the Nazis did, the organized repression of state-sponsored segregation and discrimination.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“This is significant because every segregation law in the South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed into power by a Democratic governor, and enforced by Democratic sheriffs and Democratic city and state officials.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation. Mussolini called this a Fascio nazionale, a national union.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the progressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“It was Gentile,” Mussolini confessed, “who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it.”30 Gentile served as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a senator in the Upper House of the Italian Parliament, and also as Mussolini’s minister of education. Later, after Mussolini was deposed and established himself at Salo, Gentile became at Il Duce’s request the president of the Italian Academy.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“So Adorno’s F-Scale had no power to explain why fascism came to power in Germany and Italy but not elsewhere. Most real fascists, historian Anthony James Gregor dryly observes in The Ideology of Fascism, “would not have made notably high scores.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“The classic document in this regard is Adorno’s famous F-Scale. The F stands for fascism. Adorno outlined the scale in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

“Basically Heidegger’s thought emerges out of a distinction between tribal society or Gemeinschaft and commercial society or Gesellschaft.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left