“Death of a Nation,” the latest film from Dinesh D’Souza, makes some extreme claims that will surely ruffle more than a few feathers on both the Left and the Right: President Trump is the new Abraham Lincoln and the Democratic Party was once too racist even by Nazi standards.
In a clip obtained exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter, one scene in “Death of a Nation” explores how Nazis should classify Jews in 1930’s Germany. Given that American eugenicists provided one of the means by which the Nazis perpetrated their atrocities, Germans looked to the United States for how to implement their racial policies. One policy, in particular, was the “one-drop rule,” which conferred inferiority onto anyone who had so much as a fraction of non-white genetics in their ancestry. Such a policy, D’Souza says, even the Nazis considered indecent.
“How does the American identify the Negro?” asks one Nazi in the clip.
“One drop rule. Any discernible black ancestry makes one count as black,” says another.
“Even if someone acts white, they could still be counted as black?” a third Nazi asks.
At that point, D’Souza’s narrative voice interjects to say: “As for the Democratic one-drop rule, incredibly the Nazis found it too racist even for them.”
D’Souza has cited the book “Hitler’s American Model” by Yale scholar James Whitman as his source for the incredibly shocking claim.
“The basic idea that the Nazis got the Nuremberg laws from America is not original with Whitman, but he fleshes it out in more detail than anyone had previously, Whitman is a progressive and he downplays the Democratic party’s role, although he does not deny it,” says D’Souza.
“The meeting we dramatize in the film occurred on June 5, 1934, shortly after Hitler’s ascent to power,” he says. “Present was a young justice ministry lawyer named Heinrich Krieger, who had studied in Arkansas and had done research into American race law.”
Another source, D’Souza claims, is the book “Racism” by George Fredrickson.
“Krieger knew and the Nazis knew what most American textbooks suppress — namely that every segregation law in the American South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor and enforced by Democratic officials,” says D’Souza.
The film also draws parallels between President Trump and Abraham Lincoln, as evidenced by the film’s trailer and poster, which photoshops the two president’s faces together into a cohesive entity:
After pleading guilty in 2014 to an illegal campaign finance contribution by reimbursing two associates who had each given $10,000 to the 2012 senate campaign of Republican Wendy Long, D’Souza was sentenced to five years probation and eight months living in a “community confinement center.” D’Souza’s defense claimed that he was unfairly prosecuted for his political beliefs, a sentiment shared by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The outcry culminated in President Trump announcing this past May that D’Souza had been treated “unfairly” and pledged to pardon him.