Vice News: Dinesh D'Souza's new film equates Democrats with Nazis & Trump with Lincoln

As nu-right darlings like Tomi Lahren, Mike Cernovich, Diamond and Silk, James O'Keefe, and Joy Villa made their way down the red carpet, their commonalities began to reveal themselves. Lahren specializes in bleating out outlandish statements to goad liberals into mocking her. Cernovich and his minions dig into Trump-bashing celebrities' online history in attempts to get them fired. Diamond and Silk, two former Democrats-turned-Trump loyalists, have carved out a nice gig for themselves playing contrarians. Project Veritas's O'Keefe specializes in going "undercover" to humiliate the right's political opponents, then often selectively editing the resulting videos. And Joy Villa, a singer best known for her MAGA dress at the 2017 Grammys, was mining that same vein of attention-seeking at the D'Souza premiere, traipsing down the red carpet in Betsy Ross cosplay.

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D'Souza still trots out the half-baked baloney that he's been selling, like an oily lawyer, for years. His favorite gambit is to acknowledge the sins of America that get liberals most incensed (like institutional racism), only to "turn the tables" and blame those same sins on the left, equalizing every action of the Democratic Party from the days of Reconstruction through the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and doing it with a connect-the-dots fairy-tale logic as smug as it is simplistic. The fact that Abraham Lincoln, America's greatest president, was a Republican is used as proof of the eternal honor of D'Souza's side. In "Death of a Nation," he photographs an actor playing Lincoln in sweeping-his-hand-through-the-wheat-field shots, hailing Lincoln as a noble "disruptor," who is therefore just like that other disruptor, Donald Trump.

The sin of slavery, according to D'Souza, is that it was "socialism": all part of the great Democratic plot to separate people from their earnings. Therefore, according to the film, the real crime of American slavery had nothing to do with race; it was all about stealing labor. That's an obscene argument — and in its ugly way, a preposterous one. Yet it allows D'Souza to make a racist case against liberal "racism" while winking at his own racism. That's quite a feat of hater jiu-jitsu.

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When he is not reciting the five or six historical facts he knows, D'Souza lets his imagination run wild. B-roll and historical reenactments make up the vast majority of Death of a Nation's runtime, and this is where D'Souza has developed (or deteriorated) most as a filmmaker since his last offering. Hillary's America certainly had its share of superfluous historical reenactments — the worst of which showed slaves being whipped in graphic detail — but those were explicitly described as examples of Democratic evil.

In Death, D'Souza mostly neglects to make those connections, leaving the audience stranded in lengthy historical reveries with little relevance to modern American politics. The opening scene — the opening scene — is a bloody reenactment of Hitler's 1945 suicide and makeshift cremation outside his bunker. The film's title appears, and then it cuts to a reenactment of D'Souza reading as a child in India, with a narration along the lines of "when I was a boy, I liked to study history, which made me love America." The whole thing is like this.

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Ridley327 said:

I mentioned this in another thread on the film, but AV Club pointed out an argument the film makes that shows off the level of stupidity that D'Souza is foisting:

To thoroughly unpack the falsehoods, rhetorical sleights of hand, goalpost shifting, and general bad-faith arguments would require a monograph. One example will suffice: To prove that Hitler wasn't a "right-winger" but truly belongs to the left, D'Souza notes that the dictator is often deemed right-wing because he's perceived as homophobic. (Well, yes.) But in fact, that's incorrect, because Hitler tolerated homosexuals in the brownshirts as long as they were good fighters; ergo, he wasn't homophobic, and by extension he's not right-wing. Beyond the ridiculousness of the claim, D'Souza either missed the logical conclusion of his own argument—that to be right-wing is to be homophobic—or hopes the audience doesn't clock the trap he's set for himself.

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thecouncil said:

Well, it's been fun watching historians constantly dunking on this moron in direct responses to the garbage he throws out on Twitter though.

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New Republic said:

D'Souza has made a specialty of highlighting the undeniable racism of the 1960s Democratic Party as a way to tar the current party. His arguments ignore the way the two political parties switch positions on Civil Rights in the 1960s, with the Democrats embracing Civil Rights and Republicans, under the guidance of national leaders like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, exploiting racist backlash.

On Monday, D'Souza put up a challenge to his critics:

Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, a scholar who has made good use of Twitter as a forum to popularize academic knowledge, took D'Souza up on the request:
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Kruse's entire twitter thread is an expert class in how to marshal scholarly evidence in a popular debate. It's worth reading from start to finish. The only problem is D'Souza is unteachable:

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Toxi said:

So it's a typical Dinesh D'Souza movie.

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Penguin said:

There's a thread on this already, but eh I say new blood to dunk on him.

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Dude Abides said:

An immigrant with a criminal record? Shouldn't he be deported?

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Lump said:

"Because when I think of confederate flags, I think of liberals."

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greatgeek said:

I'd wager that at least half of D'Souza's fans can condemn the modern Dem agenda because of its supposed continuity with the historical Dixiecrat agenda while also defending the South and slavery, secession, and segregation.

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The Outline said:

In the early 1990s, D'Souza capitalized on the newly militarized "PC" debate by attacking academia with his book Illiberal Education. Aiming higher and perhaps becoming more deluded, in 1995 he declared racism dead with The End of Racism, in which he did all he could to downplay the evils of slavery without explicitly defending it. "The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well," he wrote. He also implied that black people actually owe white people reparations for abolishing slavery. "Africans were not uniquely unfortunate to be taken as slaves; their descendants were uniquely fortunate to be born in the only civilization in the world to abolish slavery on its own initiative," one passage reads.

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When in Hillary's America D'Souza attempts to address the fact that the vast majority of black people began voting Democrat at the same time Southern whites turned to the GOP, he uses the classic racist argument that the Democratic Party functions as a "modern slave plantation." Black people didn't begin voting Democrat because northern Democrats like J.F.K. embraced civil rights, but because Democrats offered them free stuff. "Progressives supply the basic needs of poor blacks, creating for them a new plantation called the inner city. There blacks are provided with food, subsidized housing, medical care, and so on," he writes, channeling a talking point from 1992. This is the Achilles' heel of any "liberals are the real racists" argument — in order to make it, you also have to make the blatantly racist argument that 90 percent of black people are gormless rubes

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