Death of a Nation (2018)

Death of a Nation review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Disgraced political felon Dinesh D'Souza is back with yet another weird warping of history to paint conservatives in a better light. This time around, D’Souza has it easy. His previous works had to work extra hard to slander the Democrats for the problems of Obama’s presidency and the dangers of electing Hilary Clinton while contorting history at the same time. But this film came out during the Trump presidency, a reactionary conservative that Dinesh D'Souza salivates over especially since Trump would eventually offer him a pardon. What better way to thank him than with a puff piece comparing Trump to the greatest of US Presidents.

Yes, D'Souza’s Trump-era propaganda masquerading as a documentary wants you to believe Trump was as great as Abraham Lincoln. Don’t see it? That’s okay because D'Souza is more than happy to walk you through his brain-worm process of making this bootlicking look like mere objective reporting. In this sense, Death of a Nation is very much like his previous films for spinning the same lies in the same ways. It’s the type of staging that makes historians blow a gasket as they struggle to muster calm in deciphering all of the inaccuracies.

If you’ve seen his other films, you know the drill. D'Souza comments on the current political climate in which Republicans are good and Democrats are bad. Before getting too deep, he runs off to history to find historical facts that support his claim. He brings up the life of Abraham Lincoln but only in how it reflects favorably on Donald Trump. Perhaps the only relation that holds water is that Lincoln and Trump were both controversial figures that drew massive ire from their opponents. In order to believe that, however, you really have to turn your head and squint to see the resemblance.

But trying to paint Trump in the most favorable hue of orange is not easy considering his record. He has done more to actively harm LGBT rights, curb voting rights, embolden racists, and become unapologetically nationalistic. Since the general response by D'Souza to these accusations is to essentially say “uh…no, Democrats do all the bad things,” he makes the wildest claim of all that any historian would laugh at; that fascism is a far-left ideology.

This demonstrates just how little D'Souza understands about fascism. The definition of fascism has been debatable among most historians but a general consensus of what it incorporates is a rebirth of ultranationalism which ultimately opposes leftism. That’s the short version but there are plenty of case studies and political history behind this to back it up. Yet the only aspects that D'Souza uses to prove this is to mention that some Democrats were Nazis once. Again, if you’re familiar with D'Souza history warping to prove points of the present, you’ve probably seen this coming a mile away. Would it shock you to learn that those interviewed for this doc have claimed Dinesh lied to them about what they were interviewing for and have disavowed what they've been roped into? It shouldn't because that's how Dinesh works. He lies all the time. The only time he really told the truth was when he was found guilty of a funnel voting scheme that sent him to prison. Only in the courtroom though. Outside of that, he loves to brag about how he was innocent.

But this ignorance of fascism only made the situation with the Trump-era brand of fascism grow all the more. One of the key points of fascism is to obscure what it really is so that it becomes less definable. It’s the same way that racists will try to recruit more into their ranks by shirking the blunt “I’m racist and you should be too” with the calmer “I have some interesting facts about black people and Jews that are innocent and objective.” If D'Souza convinces others to believe that fascism can only be left-leaning, then nothing the right does can be construed as fascism. In other words, if Republicans try to take away the rights of the LGBT community and advocate to eradicate them, that’s not fascism but if Democrats allow transgender people to have rights, you better rally up Antifa to stop them. Sorry, they don’t like or understand the term Antifa either. Perhaps Secret Police seems more acceptable. You know, the kind under the Trump presidency that had unmarked vehicles and undisclosed officers with no visual identification?

Death of a Nation is a dumpster fire of a documentary that deserves to burn to a crisp next to the racist Birth of the Nation it desired to pull its title from. It’s, even more, enraging to watch this film after everything that happened during the Trump era, up to and including the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. It’s no wonder that D'Souza’s pathetic follow-up film, 2000 Mules, is a film all about how the election was stolen from Trump, a false claim that has been disproven to death. Yet here is D'Souza, still pushing lies that only the most gullible of conservatives will gobble up, give a 5-star rating, and tell all their family on Facebook to watch. This is easily the worst documentary I’ve ever seen.