(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Dinesh D’Souza’s “Police State” Maintains Jan 6 Insurrectionists are Victims of State Persecution [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-06
Police State, the ultra-conservative, conspiracy-addled Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie, maintains that the Democratic Party and federal bureaucrats are persecuting normal, harmless Americans who participated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. They, according to D’Souza, are political prisoners and victims of the police state!
D’Souza’s movie is being dubbed “his scariest and timeliest” work ever. The movie, which debuted on Rumble, premiered Wednesday, November 1, at Mar-a-Lago -- sans Donald Trump -- is critical of Democrats persecuting Republicans and prosecuting January 6 arrestees. According to Newsweek’s Paul Bond, “around 500 conservative influencers, media personalities and politicians … partied at the former president's Florida home without him.”
Bond noted that “While progressives typically dismiss D'Souza's work as conspiratorial, a Rasmussen poll in September found that 72 percent of voters are worried that the U.S. is becoming a police state, which the poll described as a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.”
A police state is defined my the Merrimack-Webster dictionary as “a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”
Whatever you might think of D’Souza as a filmmaker, his movies have done very well at the box office. He is, as Newsweek notes, “the right's most successful producer of conservative documentaries. In 2012, his debut movie, 2016: Obama's America, scored $33 million at the box office, enough to become the second most popular political documentary of all time, after Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.”
In addition to his ultra-right movies, D’Souza is also known for “plead[ing] guilty in 2014 to enlisting the help of a straw donor so that he could give more money than was allowed by law to a Senate candidate, “ Bond pointed out (
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/press-releases/dinesh-dsouza-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-five-years-of-probation-for-campaign-finance-fraud). After serving time, he was subsequently pardoned by Trump.
"This movie will expose the threat to the basic rights of Americans and the alarming movement toward the country becoming a police state,” says D’Souza. “It’s my most urgent and powerful film, and I’m delighted to be streaming it on Rumble and Locals."
Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer recently reported (
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/dinesh-dsouza-if-it-can-happen-to-me-it-can-happen-to-you-the-world-according-to-police-state/) that in the movie “Telling this horror story are right-wing luminaries such as former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, former Trump administration official Kash Patel, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who explain how ordinary people could, at any time, be just like the ‘nonviolent protesters’ who sacked the US Capitol, and have jack-booted FBI thugs kick down their door, ransack their homes, scare their children, and haul them away to jail. Once there, they’ll be forced to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit simply for being conservatives exercising their free speech rights.”
Mencimer, who saw the movie at an AMC multiplex in Alexandria, Virginia, added:
The work of far-right fringe characters who populate Rumble and Truth Social, Police State may nonetheless help shape the GOP narrative that will dominate the 2024 presidential election next year. “If politics is downstream from culture, what is more upstream from politics than going to AMC to see a movie?” says Danielle Tomson, paraphrasing the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. A researcher working on a book about conservative influencers, Tomson sees the film as a preemptive strike on an inevitable Trump conviction ahead of his presidential campaign. “They think like Hollywood screenwriters,” she notes.
“We’ve made a lot of progress with our pay-per-view functionality, and we are excited to bring this movie to the platform," said Rumble Chairman and CEO Chris Pavlovski. “With a significant following and an impressive portfolio of movies, D'Souza is a powerful voice, and we expect a great turnout," he added.
Mother Jones called the movie the work "far-right fringe characters" and notes that "None of the alleged victims in Police Stateare innocent people like George Floydor Breonna Taylor, who literally died at the hands of overzealous cops."
According to Yahoo!finance, “Viewers can stream the movie for $24.99 on Rumble, and annual paying supporters of D’Souza’s community on Locals will have immediate access, along with other live streams and movies like 2000 Mules."
Daily Dot recently reported that some “D’Souza fans were frustrated by the high cost” of renting the movie.
“You have to click ‘buy access’ and pay 25 bucks…and you only get it for 72 hours? For that much you should have unlimited access or a DVD. WTF? Sorry, not going there. If it was 10 bucks I’d be watching it right now…”
“lol $24.99 to rent a movie? Nope.”
“Sorry, I’m not paying $25 for this. All of us are struggling to survive and to help restore all our countries,” wrote one, concluding with an admonishment for the ages. “NO PATRIOT HIDES HIS WORK BEHIND A PAYWALL.”
Mother Jones’ Mencimer warns: “As blatant propaganda goes, Police Statemight be viewed as a success; as entertainment—not so much. At nearly two hours, Police Stateseems like just a much longer version of D’Souza’s strangely popular yet mind-numbingly dull YouTube videos. Yet more than 30 years after he first splashed onto the conservative media scene with his book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus,it would be a mistake to ignore
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/6/2203903/-Dinesh-D-Souza-s-Police-State-Maintains-Jan-6-Insurrectionists-are-Victims-of-State-Persecution?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
