(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s eldest son said the platform of the Democratic Party is similar to that of the Nazi Party in Germany during the early 1930s and that history classes are biased against conservatives.
In a video posted Thursday by the pro-Trump One America News Network, Jack Posobiec — a prominent right-wing voice online who supported the Pizzagate hoax — spoke with Donald Trump Jr., who compared the present-day Democratic Party to Nazis and disparaged history taught by academics.
“I’ve been out hearing the left talking about all these things, fascism, Nazism on the right,” Trump Jr. said. “And when you look at the actual history of how these things evolved, and when you actually look at that platform versus the platform of the modern left, you say wait a minute, those two are really heavily aligned and, frankly, contrary to the right.”
He warned people against saying something “because someone told you that in a history class” because academia had been influenced by the left.
“You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there … and you look at it compared to like the DNC platform of today, and you’re saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it’s actually scary,” Trump Jr. said.
At that point, the President’s son contrasted his claims about Nazis and the Democratic Party with dreadlocked protesters making accusations of fascism in the US, claiming those protesters do not know what they are “running around and spewing.”
“But they’re able to get away with that because, you know, academia, mainstream media, they’ll sell the same false narrative,” Trump Jr. said. “And they’ve been doing it effectively for quite some time.”
Trump Jr.’s comment was a false equivalency. The Nazi Party’s violent promotion of racism and anti-Semitism is not comparable with the modern Democratic Party of the United States.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which was commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, was built on dictator Adolf Hitler’s belief that Aryan Germans were superior to all non-Aryans, particularly Jewish people. The party’s ideology was built on the central premise that Jewish people were responsible for the problems facing Germany following World War I, and that belief eventually spiraled into the government-run genocide against the Jews known as the Holocaust.
Trump Jr. made his comments at a movie premiere for Dinesh D’Souza, a controversial right-wing personality who pleaded guilty in 2014 to violating campaign finance laws. In late May, Trump announced a pardon for D’Souza, saying he had been “treated very unfairly by our government.”
Trump Jr. took to Twitter on Thursday afternoon to defend his comments.
“So the left spends the last 3 years falsely calling my entire family NAZI’s, but the second I point out the similarities between the economic platform of the National Socialists and the Democrat Party, they scream bloody murder. Here’s what I was referring to. #facts,” Trump Jr. tweeted, along with a promotional video for the new D’Souza movie, “Death of a Nation.”
