Conservative polemicist Dinesh D’Souza presents a series of conspiratorial talking points, a freewheeling parade through American history that is comically grotesque.
D’Souza is a master of historical elisions and ideological inversions, but his most impressive trick is his idea that the Republican and Democratic parties have not changed at all in 180-plus years.
This allows him to say that the Democratic Party has always been rotten, a band of thieves little changed from Andrew Jackson to the Clintons. His sustained attack on Hillary Clinton is a fever dream, which is entirely typical of D’Souza’s realm: malignant fantasy.
If you scratch the surface any deeper than “Yeah go team GOP!!!!!”—much less run his historical summaries by Wikipedia—D’Souza’s arguments implode like a bad soufflé. It’s of a piece with the kind of blind Manichaeism Fox News is so into.
Yet at the same time, he presents himself as a “scholar” who is giving you the true version of American political history. In this way, he’s pretty savvy about tapping the conspiratorial, persecuted conservative mindset. His revisionist history appeals to these people precisely because it flatters them and doesn’t demand fact-checking.
The film’s fundamental claim is that Hillary Clinton steals things. And because Clinton steals, the entire Democratic Party is all about stealing, and it has been from its inception.
D’Souza doesn’t even make a credible argument that Bill and Hillary are corrupt, even though in many ways it’s low-hanging fruit. Instead, like many a fringe weirdo who has come after the Clintons over the years, he overreaches and invents an absurd conspiracy.
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