Dinesh D’Souza’s Death of a Nation lives up to its reputation as one of the worst films ever made.
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I originally planned on opening this article by talking about the sprawl of right-wing Howard Zinn’s in recent years. I was going to talk about horseshoe theory, and how Dinesh is just the same as the worst on the left in every way other than his opinion on taxes. I planned on going on and on about how his recent feud with Nick Fuentes might null his thesis that authoritarianism only exists on one side. But it’s not worth it.
Death Of A Nation is not worth some long analysis about the future of the right. It is barely worth an article. In fact, if Dinesh were not a syndicated columnist, a regular on many top networks, and a friend of the President, I would not even give it so much as this article.
Yes, because of some form of morbid curiosity, I watched Death Of A Nation last night. I could easily call it one of the worst documentaries I’ve ever seen.
The movie opens by re-accounting the 2016 Presidential Election, and how everyone (including Trump, considering he didn’t even draft a victory speech on election night) thought he’d lose. Of course, this was because Trump voters, when polled, were much more likely to declare themselves “undecided” than Clinton voters. Why? Because they were embarrassed they were voting for Donald Trump. Great argument Dinesh.
He also shows some clips of The Young Turks infamous meltdown, proving once and for all that they are liberal and sometimes irrational. Betcha didn’t know that.
The left then turned to violence and later impeachment, claims of sexual harassment, and the 25th Amendment. According to Dinesh, this is also the treatment Abraham Lincoln got. To be honest, tactic by tactic I’m much more reminded of how Bill Clinton was treated than Lincoln was.
Seriously, Clinton was impeached, accused of sexual misconduct by Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, and had 1,500 threats on his life each year! Sure, nobody used the 25th Amendment on him, but nobody could on Lincoln considering it wasn’t ratified until 1967.
Yes, I know what he means. My point is this is quite a silly comparison because every President has been opposed by members of the opposite party. That’s why we have more than one party in the first place.
Dinesh now moves onto the topic of fascism. You see, Roosevelt was a fascist because many of Europe’s worst praised him and his kind, and Roosevelt’s squad was quite happy to return the favor. As someone who wrote last month about Roosevelt’s relationship with Stalin, I will say however that if Roosevelt was a Nazi, someone should have told the Nazis.
For instance, if Roosevelt was a Nazi, why did a group of fascists called the American Liberty League try to hold a coup against the President? Why was his biggest political enemy (besides Huey Long) a radio host named Charles Coughlin? (Coughlin was a man who not only praised Hitler and Mussolini but also published On The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion in his magazine Social Justice).
And let’s not forget Roosevelt’s enemy Charles Lindbergh, who accepted a medal from Herman Goering, the main spokesman of the America First movement, a movement of fascists pretending to be isolationists. Oh, and to spite Dinesh further, I’ll point out three Presidents are known to have been members: Herbert Hoover, John Kennedy, and Gerald Ford (two Republicans and one Democrat).
While a large amount of this was going on, Roosevelt’s Vice President was Henry Wallace. Here’s what he said on fascism:
“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance towards those of other races, parties, classes, religious, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique, or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or political party.”
Yes, a few members of Roosevelt’s administration looked at fascist Italy for inspiration. But much of that was in the first half of his first term, at a time where fascism was simply any economic ideology in between social democracy and communism.
Now let’s move onto Hitler. According to Dinesh, Hitler wrote in a positive light about Planned Parenthood founder Margret Sanger. This is helped by the fact that the doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, later became an abortion doctor in South America.
But wait, even Live-Action admits that Sanger never said a positive word about abortion. Planned Parenthood did not even start offering them until the 1970s, the decade after Sanger died. For that matter, in all her writings she tried as hard as possible to deny the connections between birth control and abortion.
Comparing the eugenics of the two is quite misleading. Sanger considered herself a supporter of “negative eugenics,” or someone who believed the “inferior races” would weed themselves out. Hitler believed in “positive eugenics,” or someone who believed the state should forcefully sterilize people to stop them from spreading. A negative eugenicist would have no such concerns.
While this may seem like splitting hairs to some, if you wish to compare someone to Adolf Hitler, the least I ask is you have all your details right.
Now allow us to end this at home, the good old USA.
To start off with, Dinesh notes that to Lincoln the issue with slavery was not race but theft. Yet, he never wonders why that was. The answer being, by modern standards, Lincoln was a racist himself. In fact, during his famous debates with Senator Douglas, Lincoln said “I am not nor have I ever been in favor of . . . making voters or jurors out of Negros, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”
Then, we learn that Wilson, the first progressive president, was the man who restarted the KKK. However, the Democrats only picked Wilson in hopes of competing with former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had just declared a third party campaign as a Progressive. Roosevelt, a Republican, also wrote a letter praising Charles Davenport, a leader of the American Eugenics Movement.
Then Nixon comes up, and Dinesh says that it’s impossible that Nixon appealed to racists because he never said anything racist during his campaign. It is true that in 1960, Nixon’s running mate Henry Lodge said, if elected President, Nixon would have one African-American on his cabinet. In 1968, Nixon also did not say anything openly racist (although that could be because he knew the open segregationists would vote for American Independent George Wallace).
As for the claim Nixon used “crime and drugs as a code word for racism,” Domestic Affairs Adviser John Ehrlichman did say the only reason Nixon made heroin illegal was because he “couldn’t make it illegal to be . . . black.” He also said “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: The antiwar left and black people.”
Mind you, the claim by Dinesh that Nixon only went after the hippies is already odd without knowing that. Really? Nixon voters took no issue with Malcolm X? Or Huey Newton? Or everything involving the Black Panthers? Nixon also opposed desegregated busing, are we really to buy race played no factor in Nixon defeating the Vice President of the man who signed the Civil Rights Act into law?
Of course, I could sit here and nitpick a million things regarding how Dinesh views history. For instance, he calls Robert Byrd a former Klansman who led the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act and not the more appropriate title of the longest-serving Senator in United States history. He cites Kevin Phillips as the man behind the southern strategy (or, at least, the man others cite as behind it), but that title normally goes to Roger Ailes. Things like that.
Instead, I’ll end by talking about his tale of Chancellorsville, including an interview with Richard Spencer. Mind you, since the release of this film Spencer has come out against Trump a number of times, so I do not take issue with trying to prove he’s not a Trump supporter. I do take issue with the softball questions Dinesh gives him.
Dinesh more or less just asks Richard if he’s a Republican about fifty times, then gets onto him for liking James Polk or something. To be fair, Spencer’s brand of relativism does make him hard to pin down, but Dinesh asking the same questions over and over again doesn’t make him look like the big guy.
From this point on, the last half-an-hour of the film could be cut. Seriously, the rest of it his theories with Project Veritas founder James O’Keef regarding George Soros, an okay historical reenactment, and some talk about how Trump is the next Reagan reminding you this is a Republican made film.
At this point, is it any surprise this film was a bomb? Metacritic considered it one of the worst films ever made and basically everyone involved with it is embarrassed by it.
So why did I write this article? Well, we here at The Liberty Hawk are prone to wasting our time. Seriously, that’s it.
While I am no fan of the modern Democratic Party or progressives, they simply deserve better than this. They do not deserve to be straw manned for two hours and compared to some of the worst humans in history simply for opposing a specific president just like people who shared the name two centuries ago opposed a different president.
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