1. Right-wing former convict Dinesh D'Souza's new "movie," "Death of a Nation," is opening on Friday. It claims white supremacists are actually leftists. He even interviews Richard Spencer & paints him as a leftist. And, of course, he claims the Nazis were "firmly on the left."
2. This trope, that Nazis and other white supremacists are somehow magically left-wing, is a convenient bit of historical revisionism designed to leave the right pristine and pure while dumping all the crimes of the right in the pile where all the crimes of the left are. Handy.
3. I never tried to track the origins of this argument, but I don't recall hearing anybody spout it myself until the 1990s. It has become increasingly commonplace and, why not? It fits perfectly into the War on Truth being waged in the U.S. right now. Don't want to own up to
4. the enormities and excesses associated with your ideology? Then pretend it was some other ideology responsible. These grotesque revisionists in particular exploit the ideological differences between Southern Democrats of days gone by and Democrats in general now, also known
5. as the Southern realignment or the great realignment. Needless to say, Donald Trump Jr was on hand for the "premiere" of the movie, parroting D'Souza to claim that the current Democratic party platform is "awfully similar" to that of the Nazi Party of the 1930s. It isn't,
6. but that's basically beside the point, because the truth doesn't matter to such people. The truth is whatever you want it to be--whatever is convenient, whatever fits your ideological comfort zone, whatever would make convenient ammo to hurl at your enemies.
