>> you are watching booktv on c-span2. we in las vegas at the freedom festival. the gathering of libertarians not theirs and one of those authors is "new york times" bestseller dinesh d'souza and his most recent book is called "the big lie" exposing the nazi

roots of the american left. mr. d'souza you write in your book that if you run a platform without knowing its source you could easily be forgiven for thinking you are reading a 2016 platform of the democratic party >> guest: the nazis had an official platform i believe with 25 points to it and if you go down the list you basically realize they want minimum wage. they want to have a national health care system. as you read down you begin to realize wait a minute, this runs against everything i have been taught. this has been an idea since world war ii. fascism is somehow a right-wing phenomenon and hitler was a right-winger but when you read it to its in its collectivism. this bears an eerie resemblance to socialism and if not the

ingredients of obama certainly the ingredients of elizabeth warren and bernie sanders in that wing of the denmark had a party. >> host: the definitions of fascism, socialism, marxism, and how close are those philosophies? >> guest: socialism refers to the workers owning the means of production. later communism talked about the states owning the means of production. fascism is very similar. fascism simply means that the state while not owning the means of production directs them so capitalism is fascism. modern progressivism is more like fascism and socialism because they think about let's look at obamacare. obamacare does the government on the hospital's? no. is saddam the doctors directly? no, they are private companies that do that but the government controls them so progressivism

being state-directed capitalism is more fascism than socialism. let's go you spend quite a bit of time with benito mussolini. >> guest: many link fascism with hitler but hitler never call himself a fascist. if you read my book the word fascism almost never enters. hitler wanted to marry -- hitler was a racist. hitler was an anti-semite and he made this anti-semitism and bigotry a central part of national socialism. mussolini was not a racist. mussolini ultimately will represent pure fascism and mussolini came to power in the 1920s. hitler came to power in 1933. hitler revered mussolini. hitler said mussolini is the last of the seas are so if you

look for fascism at the beginning at its point of origin you have to look at mussolini. let's go you are saying that fascism is a left-wing political cause. >> guest: fascism was recognized to be left-wing not only by the fascist but the idea of fascism and this is all at the time. later there was a revision as the cayman in which progressive writers and historians redefine fascism and tried to move it into the right-wing column but mussolini was the most famous marxist and italy. was the leader of the italian socialist party. he was the editor of his magazine and is fascism grew out of socialism. essentially mussolini said the prophecies of marks are not coming through, why and how does that exploration fascism grew out of marxism. so this is, i'm not saying anything that controversial. this is actual history.

in germany, and italy, and spain and england all of them came from the left. they were from the labour party in england the social party in france the communist party and one of mussolini's closest advisers was the head of the congress party and after the war he went back to being a communist. this is the actual history in the book. why? because it has burning relevance to what's going on today. today we have anti-fascists who dress like fascists and they look exactly like the black shirts of mussolini. they behave like fascists. they go out and beat people up and they overturned cars. this is exactly what the fascist dead but they call themselves the anti-fascists so they claim to be fighting fascism. how do you fight fascism while doing fascists staff? that's the paradox i unravel in the book. >> host: why do you think world war ii as you say we considered fascism nazism of the right?

>> guest: the fascism in the 30s was very much in bed with the left and in fact when fdr came to power he did not admire hitler but he revered mussolini. fdr actually felt mussolini was much ahead of him in implementing principles. fdr would dispatch delegations to italy to study mussolini's fascism to bring here. all of this is the actual history of our country. after world war ii the gas chambers, auschwitz. nazism and fascism became morally abhorrent. they became associated with the holocaust and so the progressives were like wow this is bad news. if people associate fascism with the left we are through so we have to figure out how to move fascism into the right-wing column. in order to pull that off you need to be very prominent in academia and dominant in the

media. in other words you have to be able to pull off a big lie and the dig lie itself is the fascist concept that was promulgated by hitler. hitler says they can take a big lie it's really hard to get your head around it. it's so big and you don't know where to attack it. it encompasses smaller lies so one of the biggest lies we are living with now is that fascism is wrongly attributed to the right where it always belongs in left. >> host: bucolic transference. >> guest: transference is a term of psychology where people take things that they do and blame others. you try to take over and make everybody liked him. that's what the nazis did.

they ironically hitler was making his own homicidal destructive power hungry ideas and trying to foist them on a scapegoat, the jewish and we are seeing the same thing on politics of april ... blaming the right for patterns of behavior that indulges them. >> host: and "the big lie" you have a chapter on george soros. >> guest: i wrote a chapter in soros. soros claims to be the great anti-fascists. soros funds a lot of antifascist parties. what i do as i say okay soros will talk about for example the fact that he's inspired by libertarianism by the open society. in reality and look at soros past his secret history of you will. realize realizes soros along with the mentor of his was a collection boy for taylor.

a bit hard to say but it's true. steve kroft in an interview with soros -- he says you go around confiscating the property of the jewish and turning it over to the nazis and how can you feel good about that? soros goes i don't feel bad about that at all. he goes let's remember if i didn't do it, somebody would do it. this gets me thinking because i remember a very powerful theme. this actually involves joseph mengele the killer of auschwitz. mangal they escaped after the war and went to argentina one of his sons tracked him down and confronted his father and said dad, how could you do the things you did at auschwitz and guess what mengele said? mangal he said if i didn't do them somebody else would have. here were to people and i simply saw the opportunity to make them into research specimens that don't blame me because the bad

stuff would don on anyway. there's a mysterious parallels between what i would call up the mengele defense and george soros out of his own mouth, not as a young man. i don't blame anybody for what they did at the age of 15 but as a mature george soros now reflecting upon his past there are a lot of dark secrets. >> host: tell me if i'm wrong in my reading of this, do you connect mangal a two planned parenthood? >> guess why connect them in this way. a collectivist on the left have always had a problem and that is what do we do with disposable people? we at the top are going to run society but there are some disposable people we need to get rid of. remember that the nazis started not with gas chambers. they started with sterilization and where did they get those ideas? they got them direct from the

laughs. the american left. why? the american left is at the forefront of the eugenics movement. sanger was an inspiration for the early nazis in the 1933 the nazis imposed sterilization per member the american eugenicists supported not voluntary but mandatory sterilization. the nazis then moved on from that. the next idea was euthanasia. where did they get that? from the american progressives. american progressives that if sterilization doesn't work on the euthanasia and one of these american eugenicists leaders said we need gas chambers. he literally advocated gas chambers and the nazis got it from him. mangal lay when he went to argentina was in hiding. he was sheltered by neo-nazis there and they told him listen if you want to support yourself you need to have a profession. guess what his profession was? he became an abortionist. mangal they set up shop as an

abortionist and carried out abortions until his death by drowning. it's not apply to the imagination. there is a deep connection between the same kind of eugenics philosophy that led margaret sanger and the sterilization program on the other. >> host: this is dinesh d'souza's latest book "the big lie" exposing the nazi roots of the american left. thanks for being on booktv. >> guest: my pleasure. >> there are three books that are on my reading list. the first is the path which is about the chinese philosophy and then some history books that look not just at the history of mankind but also the future and that is sapiens and naess. >> what information did you learn about humanity and how you apply that to your job? >> i'm still working through t