The Big Lie summary

Where do the terms right wing and left wing originate? They actually date back to the 1789 French Revolution, where revolutionary partisans sat on the left side of the National Assembly. On the other side of the aisle, the French “right wing” rallied to the king’s defense and, consequently, became known as conservatives.

The author believes that being conservative in America means defending the principles of the American Revolution. That is, economic freedom in the form of capitalism, political freedom and democracy, as well as the freedoms of speech and religion.

In 1922, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini instituted the first fascist regime. Even today, when we think of fascism we associate it with Mussolini and Hitler. We think of fascism on the right of the political spectrum.

D'Souza argues that this is all a big lie. For him, the first fascists were actually Marxists.

Hitler hated America’s unrestrained “Jewish” capitalism. But there was one thing he did admire: American racism. On top of that, Hitler’s policy for the acquisition of new land for the German race, known as Lebensraum, was inspired by the Democratic Party.

The Democrat Andrew Jackson, who served as president between 1829 and 1837, regarded Native Americans as alien occupiers of land destined to belong to white settlers. The Democrats needed a solution to their “Indian problem.”

In 1934, the Nazi Ministry of Justice concocted the Nuremberg Laws to oppress German Jews. A young lawyer, Heinrich Krieger, was their prime source. Krieger had researched US race law at the University of Arkansas. And it was Krieger who perceived how Democratic segregation laws could be used against the Jews.

The Nazis were quick to realize that US segregation and miscegenation laws could be reformulated for their own purposes.

No one represents the horrors of the Nazis more than Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz extermination camp. He performed gruesome experiments on the children there, conducting electroshock treatments and extracting eyeballs.

Mengele was driven by eugenics, the notion that the genetic qualities of the human race could be improved by preventing those with less genetically desirable traits from reproducing.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is a hero of the American Left. According to their narrative, he should be lauded because he resurrected the American economy after the Great Depression and defeated Nazi Germany.

To the author, however, FDR was the first American führer. It was he who set the American Left on its fascist path.

Even now, the Left continues to insist that they won’t stop fighting to get Trump out of the White House. The progressives simply won’t let up. So where do they get their power from?

D'Souza believes the American Left controls three powerful institutions: academia, the media and Hollywood.

European fascism fell in World War II, thanks to outside military force. But actually it would have been possible to stop Hitler and Mussolini from within, without the outbreak of war.

In Germany, the political opposition made the mistake of trying to “accommodate” Hitler. The author believes the American conservatives and the Republican Party should do their utmost not to repeat this appeasement strategy and so permit the fascism inherent in the Left. He thinks there are a couple of ways conservatives can fight the fascist Left.