His documentary and companion book "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party" was credited with helping curb the effectiveness of the left's "race card" during the 2016 elections by documenting the Democratic Party's history of racism and exposing its tactic of projecting its own sins on Republicans.

Now, as the left wields the "Nazi" and "fascist" card against President Trump in what he describes as a "coup" attempt, author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza has introduced the "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left," contesting the conventional wisdom that the ideologies behind genocidal tyrants Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler belong on the right side of the political spectrum.

In an interview with WND, D'Souza said the battle between left and right that has so severely divided the nation is rooted in "spiritual warfare," and he emphasized the importance of terminology in the left's "resistance" against Trump.

The "fascist" rhetoric, he said, "is the basis for the action of the mainstream and the left in the Democratic Party, and that's why I think it's really important to blow it out of the water."

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D'Souza noted the term fascism "bears the odor of the Holocaust, the gas chambers, Dachau, Auschwitz."

"And so, think of what a clever move it is for the left to take fascism from the left-wing column and move it into the right-wing column," he told WND.

"This is a way to attach moral opprobrium to the right and give the left a kind of moral license to do whatever it wants to do to fight the right."

Dinesh D'Souza's "The Big Lie" is available now at the WND Superstore

D'Souza pointed out that the protesters who have become infamous for threatening and carrying out violence to shut down conservative speakers on college campuses call themselves "anti-fascists."

The label, he said, has become "the basis of all the crazy stuff they're doing."

"So that if you ask antifa protesters, what gives you the right to stop people from speaking on campus, they go, 'Oh, that's because we're fighting fascism,'" he said. "Or, if you say to a bunch of Democrats, 'What gives you the right to not show up at a president's inauguration, a president who won a lawful election?' They'll go, 'Well we don't want to normalize Trump in the same way that the Germans should never have normalized Hitler in the 1930s.'"

He said that even the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller into alleged collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign is "based on the implicit rationale that we have to get rid of Trump by any means necessary."

'Devastating facts'

D'Souza describes the attempt to oust Trump as a coup carried out by an alliance of the Democratic Party with the media, Hollywood and large parts of academia.

"The coup here is actually traveling under the passport that: 'Wouldn't it be justified to oust a Mussolini in the 20s or Hitler in the 30s, even if you had to do so on bogus premises? Think of all the cataclysm that could have been averted. The German people failed. The Italian people failed, but we, the left in America, are going to succeed.'"

"So, I think most of the Democrats know that what they're doing against Trump is abnormal behavior, but they think it's abnormal behavior that is warranted under the circumstances," he told WND.

D'Souza believes today's collaboration between a political party, media, entertainment and academia is similar to the Nazis' effort to bring a whole society in line with their ideology, which they called Gleichshaltung, or coordination.

The thuggish attacks on free speech at universities, such as was seen recently at Evergreen State College in Washington state, is exactly what was going on in Germany in the early 1930s, D'Souza said, citing "the hounding of professors, the cleaning out of the universities, the intimidation of defectors."

"So, the thugs at Evergreen are sort of the brownshirts of our day. Now, what's the main difference? The main difference is that the old brownshirts were proud to call themselves fascists, and the new brownshirts calls themselves anti-fascists."

He said the left was unable to refute a single fact in "Hillary's America," and he predicts the same will be true of his new book.

"It has devastating facts," he said.

He pointed to the many progressives who praised Mussolini in the 1920s, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and had "nice things to say" about Hitler, even as late as the end of World War II, including John F. Kennedy.

"This all today forces us to reconsider what was going on and also makes us suspect that the story that we were told about it leaves a lot out," D'Souza said.

He acknowledges that during World War II, economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued in his seminal book "The Road to Serfdom" that fascism, National Socialism and socialism had common roots. More recently, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, in his book "Liberal Fascism," pushed back against the conventional wisdom, demonstrating the American left's ideological ties to European fascism.

But D'Souza said he goes further than Goldberg, equating the modern American left with Nazism as well as with fascism. D'Souza, as does Goldberg, points out that that while they are similar, fascism and Nazism are two different ideologies.

Spiritual battle

A noted intellectual defender of the Christian faith who has debated atheists such as the late Christopher Hitchens, D'Souza acknowledged there is a spiritual dimension that helps explain why the conflict between left and right appears to be intractable.

"The political debate is the tip of the iceberg, and underneath the political debate is a moral debate that is about fundamental moral issues and the fundamental question of how we should live our life," he told WND.

"But underlying the moral debate the spiritual debate – or what evangelicals call spiritual warfare – which is to say a kind of deep struggle in which we get that sense that our own life and our own politics is a larger playground for spiritual forces that we don't control."

D'Souza said that if that sounds like a strange way of talking, it's no different than the way George Washington or Abraham Lincoln talked when they referred to America as a providential nation.

"What they meant is that there is a kind of hand of providence, a divine hand, at work, even if its immediate workings couldn't be always easily discerned," he said.

D'Souza believes the current "resistance" requires individual Americans to respond, noting in particular the ability of anyone with a social media account to help expose myths perpetrated by the left.

"I urge people to see themselves as sort of 'dangerous Americans,' because we're living in a kind of abnormal time in which we are called up on to do more, both in the spiritual sense as well as in just the normal political sense," he said.

D'Souza noted that Republicans, in general, come into politics expecting a "gentleman's fight."

"And it's true that in the past, politics was more of a gentleman's fight, but today it's a little bit more of a knife fight," he said.

"So, the Republican who essentially wants to find middle ground and look for the good things in his opponent finds that all these efforts are unreciprocated," said D'Souza.

"Your opponent shows no interest in finding any good things about you, and, in fact, they only exploit your good will in order to damage you."

Dinesh D'Souza's "The Big Lie" is available now at the WND Superstore