RUSH: Now, we are happy to welcome back to the program Dinesh D’Souza. His new movie is opening in a thousand theaters tonight. It is Death of a Nation. You’ve had a lot of success with your previous movies. Have you ever opened on a thousand screens?

D’SOUZA: Uh, Rush, no. In the past, we’ve tended to open on limited screens and then spread out to more screens, so we do these pre-screenings to get us set up. But this time we decided to go for it, a thousand theaters nationwide and DeathOfaNationMovie.com is the way to find out where it’s playing near you. If you just put in your ZIP Code, boom! It tells you the theaters right near you. So I couldn’t be more excited. I’m a little anxious but this movie could be a very powerful force in firing people up.

RUSH: I can understand with a project like this, but I have to ask you — and as a powerful, influential member of the media, I, my friends, have seen a special copy. Meaning it’s been captioned and so forth. Dinesh, are you really worried…? Death of a Nation, that’s a very provocative title. Are you really worried that we’re looking at the death of our nation here and your movie here is attempting to fire people up to the danger, the severity we face?

D’SOUZA: I’m alerting people to what will happen if we let the logic of the progressive Democrats play itself out. In fact, almost a hundred years ago the progressive Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, showed the movie Birth of a Nation, a pro-Ku Klux Klan movie in the White House, and this led to a national revival of the Klan. And the reason that movie was titled Birth of a Nation, is that the progressive Democrats were saying, “We don’t like the founding; we’re starting America all over again.”

And the unifying glue of that was actually racism. So ironically, my argument is that if you play out the logic of the progressive Democrats, ultimately they will kill America. I don’t mean they’ll destroy the land. But what they will destroy is the soul of America, what makes America unique, the principles of the American founding. That’s why I used the title Death of a Nation. It in a sense is a reference to the progressive, racist film Birth of a Nation.

RUSH: Folks, you really… If you do go see this, there is a bombshell in this movie, where Dinesh D’Souza makes the case that the left in this country is so far gone on race and so far gone on progressivism that even the Nazis back in the ’30s and ’40s thought the Democrats of America were too extreme, correct?

D’SOUZA: Yes, we have a riveting scene, Rush —

RUSH: Wait until Jim Acosta sees that.

D’SOUZA: We have a riveting scene in the movie in which the Nazis who are drafting the infamous Nuremberg Laws — the laws that make Jews into second-class citizens. Some people call it a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. The Nazis have in their hands the Jim Crow laws of the Democratic South. Now the point here is that every segregation law in the South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor, enforced by Democratic officials.

So the Nazis knew that, and they were using the Democratic laws. They crossed out the word “black;” they wrote in the word “Jew”. So what I’m getting at is it isn’t just that the two laws were parallel. The Nazis were using the blueprint of the American Democratic Party for their vicious schemes. Now, amazingly, Rush, this is not taught in the textbooks. You won’t find it on the History Channel.

The left has been suppressing this kind of information ever since World War II because they know that if people realized the deep connections between the Democrat Party and the progressive movement on this side of the Atlantic and the fascists in Italy and the national socialists in Germany, that it would be… It would leave the progressives and Democrats discredited. That’s why “The Big Lie” came in effect.

RUSH: We’re talking to Dinesh D’Souza. His latest movie opens tonight on 1,000 screens across the fruited plain, Death of a Nation. Let me talk to you about the art of persuasion. This is a provocative scene, a provocative portrayal in your movie — and it is true. But as you said, it’s been suppressed. It’s not been taught. It’s not widely known. Even today, one of the greatest tricks in modern day America has been the Democrat Party shifting away the blame from themselves as the true segregationists and racists to the Republican Party.

When in fact, as you just mentioned, every Democrat in the South — everybody who shut a university door, turned a firehose and set the dogs on African-Americans — was a Democrat. They were the segregationists, and they’ve been able to erase that. Now we live in an era where the left and much of the media tries to draw a connection between Donald Trump and Hitler or George W. Bush and Hitler. Now, here you come. Are you…? In using this historical fact and the way you present it in your movie, are you trying to persuade? Are you trying to get people’s attention? What are you hoping people’s reaction, not just to the whole film, but to that specific scenario you just described, is?

D’SOUZA: Rush, what I’m trying to do is to educate. And I’m actually trying to challenge the left and draw them into a debate, which they are scared to do. But I do it not really just by arguments. I also do it in a sense through investigative journalism, and I’ll tell you what I mean. The left has been saying ever since the Charlottesville rally — the infamous white supremacist rally in Charlottesville — that these white supremacists, the white nationalists are right-wingers.

And this is a very valuable, important argument for the left because, think about it: The Democrat Party has been the party of slavery, of segregation, of Jim Crow, of racial terrorism, of the Ku Klux Klan, of opposing the Civil Rights movement. So what the left gets is a get-out-of-jail-free card because they’re able to say, “Yeah, but look at the white nationalists here right now! They’re wearing Trump hats. They’re right-wingers,” and it’s this elephant in the living room that I actually crush in the movie.

Because I show — both in the book, the accompanying book and the movie, Death of a Nation — that these white nationalists have a deep history of left-wing activism. Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville rally? Obama activist. Occupy Wall Street guy. Now how many Obama activists are white supremacists? Something is really fishy about this, and the media knew about this. It was on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.

But the media suppressed it because it was inconvenient to their narrative. They wanted to peg the white supremacist tail on the Republican elephant. In the movie, I have a riveting interview with the poster boy of white supremacy, Richard Spencer, and it becomes very, very clear in this interview that this guy is not only a left-winger, he’s on the far left. I mean, I asked him, “Do you think all men are created equal?”

“No.” “Do you think our rights come from God?” No. “Where do our rights come from?” “The state.” So this is a guy who wants an all-powerful state, and then I asked him, “What do you think of Reagan?” “Terrible president.” “Who are your favorite presidents?” One Democrat after another, starting with Andrew Jackson, and I go, “Well, these are Democrats.” He goes, “Well who cares about party labels?” I go, “Andrew Jackson was the founder of the Democrat Party.”

So what really emerges, Rush, when you’re watching this — and I’m not coaching this guy. I’m just asking him. It becomes really clear that we’re seeing a massive media, an orchestrated campaign to falsely peg the right — conservatives, Republicans, patriots, Christians — as being the bigots. Whereas in reality, these white nationalists, one after another, are actually anchored in the left. They’re playing a theatrical role for their own media exposure, and the left is using them and they’re allowing themselves to be used. This is the biggest of all the big lies.

RUSH: Well, not just that they are the true racists and bigots. They’re the true oppressors they’re the ones that want to limit people’s freedom want to define terms under which people can behave and cannot. It’s not us. I’ve often… The reason your premise fascinates me is that back in the early days of this program… I forget. I was talking to a political scientist.

I don’t remember who, but the point is I think that the graphic that we use to describe where ideologies lie in America, the straight line — you have centrists and supposedly the independent moderate is in the middle. You go right; you go right. You go left; you go left. I don’t think it’s a straight line. I think it’s a circle, af you go far enough left, as with Hitler, you’re going to find pure socialism, which is what Hitler even called Nazism. It was National Socialism.

So if you diagram it as a circle, it’s much easier to demonstrate how all these ideologies do not keep going farther left and farther left and farther right. They will dovetail at some point. But I don’t know how you make the point to people that don’t have an open mind that liberalism is not this open-minded and tolerant and compassionate thing and it’s rather selective, it’s suppressive. It is where racism is defined and practiced with impunity and it always has been.

D’SOUZA: I think that what I find, Rush, is by and large the left can only protect themselves in these arguments by misstating what I’m saying. I mean, there’s a blizzard of criticism descending on the movie right now and it basically goes like this: “Dinesh has put this movie out, Death of a Nation; he’s claiming that Hitler was a liberal Democrat.” Well, that’s nonsense I’m not claiming that Hitler was a liberal Democrat.

But what they do they construct this strawman in order to knock it down, and what we’re really showing — what we’re really showing — is the deep vein of racism and fascism on the Democratic left today. Today! Because look. Here’s Antifa wearing these black costumes and acting in a fascist way. Mussolini would recognize them right away. In fact, he couldn’t tell the difference between them and his own Blackshirts.

Look at the way the left uses the weapons of the state — the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ — against political opponents. That’s what the fascists did! They merged the party and the state. So for Hitler, the Nazi Party was the government, and that’s the way Democrats see it today. And then finally, of course, fascist economics. It’s kind of funny, Donald Trump Jr. came to our red carpet premiere. He co-hosted it with me here in D.C., and he was reading through — we put up on the screen — the 25-point Nazi platform. The Nazis, of course, were elected.

They were the largest political party in Germany in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor, and as you read through the platform, this is what they campaigned on: State control of banks; state control of insurance; state control of education; state control of energy; state control of religious liberty. Basically Donald Trump blurted out, he goes, “Well, that sounds like the platform of the Democrat Party!”

RUSH: It’s the platform of tyrants!

D’SOUZA: Because the Nazis were socialists, you can see there actually is going to be, in fact, a resemblance.

RUSH: Well, it’s the platform of tyrants — and tyrants, you’re always going to find them on the left. I don’t think there’s any doubt that you’re right about this. I know you’re not saying that Hitler was a liberal Democrat. But Nazism, if you’re going to put it anywhere on the ideological chart, it’s going to end up being on the left. It cannot be — it can’t be — on the right.

Now, Dinesh, where are we headed here? Death of a Nation. You obviously have made a number of these movies to try to alert the American public as to the truth of things opposite what they see in most of pop culture, in most of the news. Are you optimistic about the country’s direction with Trump, are you optimistic about the midterm elections, or are you not?

D’SOUZA: Rush, I am optimistic. I think the way in order to avert problems… The way to actually prevent us from moving in the kind of direction, for example, that Lincoln had to move in — which is the moving from merely an exchange of words to an exchange of hostilities — is actually not to back off. But, rather, to be very firm, kind of in the way that Lincoln was. And what I mean by this is by and large when Lincoln was elected, the RINOs of his own day, the weak Republicans, came up running to him and said:

“You have to give up the platform that you campaigned on because things are looking really dark. We want to avert secession. So you have to agree to stretch the Missouri Compromise line, the slavery line, all the way to California and allow slavery west of that line.” Lincoln basically said, “No.” He said, “I will suffer death before I agree to this. Why? Because we campaigned on this. We had a democratic election. I got an electoral majority.

“The mandate doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to the American people.” So Lincoln ultimately opted for firmness, and what I like about Trump is that he has some of that Lincoln-ite courage which Republicans have often not had in the past. So Trump’s fierceness, his willingness to punch back and his ability to take a punch, I think these are some of his greatest qualities. And I think even early in his presidency, he has an opportunity to establish himself as a great president.

RUSH: Dinesh D’Souza, and the movie opens up on some 1,000 screens. It’s got to be on one near you. Death of a Nation. Extremely entertaining, highly provocative in a couple of places. Congrats, Dinesh. Thank you for spending time with us telling people about it. Best of luck with it.

D’SOUZA: Thank you very much.

RUSH: You bet.