Because there’s no longer such thing as bad publicity, Dinesh D’Souza was recently accused of making illegal campaign contributions, just in time to kickstart the promotion for D’Souza’s latest film. D’Souza is behind America, a documentary that opens on July 4th and politicizes the holiday as an opportunity to reset the political conversation in America. A bit trollish, but welcome: any opportunity to discuss the issues is welcome, even if it’s coming from the same source that gave us the numbskulled 2016: Obama’s America.
The new trailer has surfaced for America, just in time for internet commentators to claim that D’Souza is being made a political martyr. And, well, it’s a doozy. The amount of loaded imagery, coded language and peculiar juxtapositions in this is enough to make your head explode. America, which is being released on July 4th (oy!), supposedly presents leftist concepts about American history being based in theft and criminality and challenges them in D’Souza’s confirmation-bias-y attempt to refute them. Hey, good luck.
The trailer, narrated over treacly piano chords by D’Souza, begins with borderline romantic shots of the capital as D’Souza quotes Edmund Burke. D’Souza groups the teachings of schools and universities with liberal thought (take that, education!) in stating that the country’s legacy has been portrayed through the lens of "stealing and plunder," which he states while we see a shot of him making his way through Noam Chomsky’s Occupy. Mentioning the Native Americans, slavery and the Mexican-American War certainly makes it seem as if he’s pursuing a leftist agenda. But when he starts talking about how Americans view foreign policy with a jaundiced eye, it’s over shots of people dressed as Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Captain America and Batman. What exactly is going on here?
This dovetails into his coded language about how the free market economy robs people of "What Obama calls ‘their fair share.’" This plays out over corporate logos in Times Square, and then a theoretically homeless man trying to keep warm. The images start to come fast and furious as he claims that America’s "theft" is "never effectively answered" even though the whole legacy argument he just made sounds pretty sound. We get various shots of the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street as he says he wants to engage progressive thinkers in the film and "actively debunk" the theory, which would be kind of a very neat and pat was to reduce our nation’s history, but whatever. Liberals must be stopped.
D’Souza was recently released on $500,000 bail, though he could be facing up to five years in prison for making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. In the meantime, promotion on this latest, directed by John Sullivan, will continue unabated, as America could be the documentary event of the year for some people who made 2016 the second highest grossing political documentary of all-time. Though, to be honest, spending the 4th of July in a theater watching D’Souza verbally spar with progressive thinkers doesn’t really seem like the best way to spend the holiday.
