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1) I’d like to start a thread chiming in on the marvelous deconstruction of @DineshDSouza and his thesis that the Southern Strategy and subsequent party switch in the 1960s and ‘70s is a myth, courtesy of @KevinMKruse and Co. Consider this a kind of return to the present.
2) As @KevinMKruse, @rauchway and @HC_Richardson have all demonstrated, D’Souza’s historical claims are afactual, absurdly so. The facts he cites are all predicated on the historical reality: prior to the 1930s, the Democratic Party was home to the USA’s most conservative voters.
3) Indeed, the Klan (to which D’Souza oft returns) was linked closely to Democrats both in the 1870s and in the 1920s because that was the party of white Southern conservatives. But like Jeffrey Lord, he cannot credibly claim that it was thus in any regard “left wing”:
4) But let’s forget about the past for a minute. Let’s talk about here and now. Specifically, let’s talk about D’Souza’s thesis in his book that lays all this out, “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.” It came out last July 31. Let’s look at the cover.
5) As you may surmise, D’Souza expands his afactual historical thesis, complete with the erasure of the Southern Strategy, to argue that today’s “antifascists” are descendants of the fascist legacy and thus the face of Nazi and Klan ideology today.
6) The book came out almost exactly two weeks before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. It was praised at the White House by Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka when he visited there in early August. http://www.newsweek.com/dinesh-dsouza-visits-steve-bannon-and-sebastian-gorka-white-house-646816
7) Probably no one in the country looked more ridiculous the morning after the smoke cleared in Charlottesville than D'Souza. Because what America saw on their TVs was black-clad antifascists doing pitched battle with Klansmen, neo-Confederates, white nationalists, neo-Nazis ...
8) ... You know, actual fascists, or their proto- version. The evil “fascists” of D’Souza’s alt-universe in fact were battling a bunch of guys wearing MAGA hats and shouting “Hail Trump!” … along with “Blood and Soil!” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”
10) So who were the actual descendants of the Klan and neo-Nazi legacy out there marching in Charlottesville? It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see that it was the far-right proto-fascists marching with red ballcaps. “Very fine people” notwithstanding.
11) This is the point that revisionists like @DineshDSouza and @JonahNRO always furiously ignore and eradicate from their theses: That fascism in the USA has an actual ongoing lineage, handed down from those early and later Klansmen and eugenicists, still very much with us today.
12) In the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s, there were various White Citizens Councils and American Nazi Party manifestations. Eventually these gave birth to such outfits as the Posse Comitatus, while the Klan reimagined itself gradually as the neo-Confederate movement.
13) I came face to face with them in the late 1970s, very early in my newspaper career, in the Idaho Panhandle, which is where the Aryan Nations – a neo-Nazi outfit originally from California – relocated to at that time. Soon the region became known for its white supremacists.
14) After years of community organizing against them (I am a fourth-generation Idaho native, and not shy to admit I was involved, mostly in providing news coverage), the AN was finally driven out of business in Hayden by the SPLC. Here’s their compound in its final days.
15) These people, as you can tell from the large swastika on the roof, were open Nazis who despised Jews and black people and held cross burnings and committed hate crimes, including the infamous crime-and-murder spree of The Order in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_group)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_group)
16) I covered them in real time and, regardless how hard anyone might try to alter reality now, there was nothing remotely leftist or liberal about these neo-Nazis. They loathed Communists, liberals, “race mixers,” gays, lesbians and transgender folk, Jews, Muslims - you name it.
17) They actually wanted them dead and fantasized about it. Their ur-text was ‘The Turner Diaries,’ the climax of which is ‘The Day of the Rope,’ when 'good' whites will string up, not nonwhites, but rather every “race traitor” and white liberal who caused their misfortunes.
18) Eventually this created situations like Ruby Ridge (involving a family that attended AN gatherings) and led eventually to the birth of the militia movement in the ‘90s, essentially a version of white supremacism attempting to present a mainstream “patriotic” appearance.
19) That in turn gave birth both to domestic terrorists like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, but also a conspiracy-theory cottage industry led by Alex Jones and others of his ilk that kept growing until it became a significant media entity by 2010. All are right-wing politically.
20) At the same time as the “Patriot” movement was gaining converts in the 1990s, hardcore white supremacists who were uninterested in subverting their racial ideology in the interests of promoting an antigovernment movement began forming enclaves around pale-conservatives.
21) They rebranded themselves “white nationalists,” and promoted both ardent nativism as well as a naked brand of white ethno-nationalism. Like the Aryan Nations – which sought to create a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest – these ideologues promoted a pure ethnostate.
22) Their names included such figures as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, as well as Peter Brimelow of VDare, not to mention Patrick Buchanan, one of the progenitors of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that plays such a major role in modern radical-right recruitment.
23) Indeed, these early white nationalists eventually helped give birth to the alt-right, mixed with a heavy dose of neo-Confederate ideology and the new, Internet-bred misogynist anti-feminism. And that was who we saw marching in the streets of Charlottesville.
24) It would be almost funny if it weren’t so potentially dangerous to our national discourse to watch D’Souza twist himself into knots trying to explain away the presence of the alt-right and the open fascists such as Atomwaffen SS and Patriot Nation who are riding the wave now.
25) For what it’s worth, Goldberg more or less responded the same way, refusing to acknowledge that there’s a strain of fascism afoot in American society directly descended from real actual Hitler-loving fascists. He dismissed the Klan as “a fanboy craze.”
26) You can read the exchange here. His concluding line: “Who gives a rat’s ass about the Posse Comitatus?”
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/responding-to-jonah.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/responding-to-jonah.html
27) (For further amusement, you may want to check out what happened when some real historians/scholars of fascism – Roger Griffin, Robert Paxton, Chip Berlet, and Matthew Feldman – whose rebuttals I assembled for History News Network, gave ‘Liberal Fascism’ its similar due. ...
(Scroll to the end of the intro for all the links.) https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122469
28) The point is that D’Souza’s book, as well as all the arguments he has been making in the media and on social media, are just fundamentally incoherent and incompatible with known historical facts, including those of the recent present. It's garbage. Bestselling garbage, alas.
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