Everybody’s favorite Ronald Reagan advisor-turned-racist Obama conspiracy theorist-turned-criminal is out of jail community confinement center and ready to take on his arch-nemesis: The Democrat party.
Following on the heels of 2016: Obama’s America and his much less popular documentary simply titled America, comes Hillary’s America, an insightful look into the way the Democrats and Hillary Clinton are “stealing” the “most valuable thing the world has ever produced…” *puts on sunglasses* America…
To his credit, D’Souza clearly gave every single one of the voices in his head a chance to really shine in this film. The trailer features – in no particular order – The KKK, Union bosses beating up workers, black people teaching D’Souza how to Get Hard in prison, a gunshot in a Cadillac, and music bearing more than a passing resemblance to that from Inception. It’s insane. It’s paranoid. It’s delusional. It’s classic D’Souza.
Let’s dive in.
The trailer begins with a D’Souza voiceover that asks “Who are these Democrats?” The answer, as we see over the next three minutes range from cruel slave-owners to KKK leaders and leads directly to Hillary Clinton.
In a remarkable bit of fan-fiction, D’Souza manages to turn his 8 month prison vacation into a bragging point. He wasn’t locked up for, say, violating numerous election laws, he was sent to the slammer because he got too close to the truth about Obama. The fact that the worst Obama could do to him was send him to a “community confinement center” where D’Souza was allowed to go home every day only adds to the mind games. What is Obama playing at?
The rest of his evening would look something like this: He would check in to the confinement center at 7:57 P.M., three minutes before his 8 P.M. curfew. Certain that the Obama administration is waiting for him to slip up, he wouldn’t risk being late, which is why he eats near the facility and not at his home, 20 miles away in La Jolla, where he is free to spend the day (though he may not leave the confines of San Diego County).
But if Obama thought this staycation would shut D’Souza up, he has another thing coming. Prison, as they say, is like crime school and D’Souza just got his associate’s degree by taking night classes.
What did he learn? His gang member friends clued him in: “All crime is about stealing.” (Except the Joker’s crimes. He just wants to watch the world burn.)
The “big” criminals, he explains, “are still at large.” The camera subtly pans into a television featuring Hillary Clinton.
At a minute in, you might be thinking the most insane things have already come, but you would be very wrong. D’Souza hasn’t even gotten into his cosplay section yet.
In the next two minutes, D’Souza will take us “behind the curtain” to discover the “soul of the Democratic Party” (Hint: It’s 19th century racism.)
Cut to: Slave being whipped by a cigar smoking, Hillary voting motherfucker.
Where D’Souza once made the argument that Obama was driven by a need to destroy America to make up for “colonialism” in Africa (a Michael Jordan at the end of Space Jam length stretch), his newer argument is that the Democratic Party was founded on racism (fact check: Kind of true) and therefore is still racist, but trying to hide it.
D’Souza shoots… he scores!
And D’Souza, whose previous film literally featured footage of a black family fighting over a game of Monopoly as he explained how Obama planned to take wealth from (white) Americans and redistribute it, knows a thing or two about racism. In a change of pace, he now gets to play the role of benevolent anti-racist, hoping to enlighten us to the idea that the 1890s KKK somehow means we can’t vote for Hillary Clinton. He glosses over the fact that white supremacy has been the domain of the Republican Party for the last six decades and that their current front-runner has been endorsed by actual current and former KKK members. It’s a pretty big omission, right?
There is no escaping the idea that the Republican Party has much more to answer for than the Democrats (at least for those of us born in the last 100 years). Having been building for years, the Republicans went “full-racist” in the 1960s with the rise of the so-called “Southern Strategy” used by Nixon and his party explicitly play up racism to garner white votes.
The Southern Strategy was designed to capitalize on Southern white resentment of court-enforced busing to end school desegregation, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination in interstate commerce, of enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to prevent historically racist Southern counties and states from discriminating against blacks who sought to exercise their right to vote where once they’d been effectively barred. By playing on these issues, Nixon and other Republicans of this era won many traditionally Democratic votes in the South. Later, GOP opposition to affirmative action, race-based hiring “quotas” and all other methods of compensating for the debilitating legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation fed into what was one of the momentous shifts, a total turnaround in just more than a decade (1970 to 1984) from a solidly Democratic South to a solidly Republican one.
That legacy hasn’t left us, as even a casual glance at an electoral map shows us. We’ve seen it even more clearly in recent debates in which Republican politicians rush to stand with racist iconography like the Confederate flag or dabble in racist conspiracy theories like birtherism. If anyone has to answer for racism in 2016, it’s Republicans who have used it as a cynical election tool and a way to maintain their support in Deep South states where phrases like “welfare queen” and “ghetto youth” have a certain je ne sais quoi.
The fact of the matter is, if D’Souza could use anything more current than the 19th century to support his claim, he would. Instead, he is forced to tie Hillary Clinton to the Civil War and pretend the entire 20th century simply did not exist. So we get scenes like this one, in which a horse-riding KKK member literally leaps out of a movie screen and into the audience.
The trailer concludes that the Democrats went from “slavery” to “enslavement” (what?), and whereas before black people were sold, shackled, and forced to work for no money, now they are a “slave” to the welfare state. This makes them just as bad off, D’Souza argues. And it’s not just African Americans. The rest of us are also being secretly held in bondage by Democrats who have convinced us that things like universal healthcare and fire departments are “good” (says you, Obummer!).
As is par for the course with D’Souza, the film ends with D’Souza himself promising to reveal the “secret history” of the Democratic Party. The fact that all of this information is either public knowledge one could find on Wikipedia or else wild conspiracy theories pushed by fringe ideologues who say things like “there are very few coincidences” doesn’t get in the way of the claim.
It’s unclear just who exactly D’Souza is trying to fool here. As with his previous work, this film looks made exclusively to reinforce the pre-existing ideas of a political bloc that can only be described as “Breitbart.com comment section.” The ideas are batshit, misleading, and paper-thin. It’s hard to imagine anyone with above a 5th grade education and even half an inclination to put it to work would find what is being laid out here convincing in any way. Instead, D’Souza appears to be banking on what has worked well for him in the past: Tea Party conservatives coming into theaters by the busload to symbolically support the smearing of Hillary Clinton with their box office dollars. Sadly, the only thing “stolen” here is their time and money.
