Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza compared left-wing protestors who destroyed a Confederate statue in North Carolina to the terrorist organization ISIS and violent fascist regimes.
D’Souza appeared on the August 15 episode of Fox News Radio’s “Todd Starnes Show” to continue blaming the left for violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist alt-right demonstrator killed one person and injured more than a dozen others after speeding his vehicle into a group of counter-protestors.
Before ending the interview, Starnes turned the discussion to “anti-fascist” protesters in North Carolina who forcefully toppled a bronze statue that memorialized Confederate soldiers. Starnes asked D’Souza if Americans should “be concerned about this whitewashing of history,” to which D’Souza responded by comparing the protestors to ISIS and other fascist groups.
“Just think about it. When is the last time somebody did this?,” D’Souza said. “The last time somebody did this is when ISIS was sandblasting and blowing up statues.”
D’Souza continued, “This whole idea that you want to erase history that you don’t like—this is a kind of behavior that is characteristic of a despotic mindset. The fascists did the same thing.”
Liberals, D’Souza claimed, are comparable to “black shirts” in Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italian regime and “brown shirts” in Nazi Germany. “The fascist mindset is revealing itself fully on the left,” D’Souza said.
D’Souza’s comparison is yet another installment of the pro-Trump right’s attempts to blame the violence in Charlottesville on the left. The conservative author has also capitalized on the violence in Charlottesville to promote his new book, which promises to expose “the Nazi roots of the American Left.”
