When I heard the catchy title, I thought the movie would be a showcase of all the achievements American prosperity has enabled, including medical breakthroughs like the eradication of polio, malaria, and tuberculosis; a litany of all our Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer prize-winners; singular miracles like Norman Borlaug’s work that made it so easy to feed the world, the PC and satellite communications, and yes, even the atom bomb.
But that’s not what the movie was about. Lefty reviews criticized D’Souza’s use of Hollywood's signature product: using “moving pictures” to bring a narrative to life. “That’s not a documentary!” - “He has no business making movies because he doesn’t even know what a documentary is!” - shriek writers for Salon. And of course reviews in the MSM pounced on the catchy sub-title as evidence that D’Souza is a liar, and therefore every single thing in the movie is a lie.
But the left’s most hypocritical, self-righteous criticism of the film is that D’Souza is a convicted criminal who plead guilty. They don’t even mention that his infraction was violation of campaign finance laws! He gave money to like-minded friends, to contribute to one cause or campaign or another. Every politician, and every campaign manager, are absolute experts at finding loopholes in campaign finance laws. And virtually all of them are likely guilty of breaking those laws, but mostly for amounts of money/speech that are on the order of 10,000 times greater than any activity D’Sousa was ever involved in.
Of course, campaign finance laws are unconstitutional. But it is easy for whoever is in power to prey on the American public’s fear that “money talks”, and it’s not fair for the wealthiest candidate to have such an advantage. Well, money does talk. It costs money to run ads and get your message out all across the country. Nevermind that the very 1st, most important, First Amendment to the Constitution expressly forbids limitations on speech. In fact, the Founders knew that freedom of political speech was the single most important guarantee of a government "by the people". And, to this day, the USA remains the only country in human history where you CANNOT (legally) be punished for saying the wrong thing about your leaders. We take it for granted. Most Americans are so blessed that they are blissfully ignorant of this unique protection. And having no awareness of the value of it, they’ve been led like lambs to the slaughter, to favor campaign finance restrictions. There has been such an erosion of this principle that some of us worry that the right to speak freely is long gone. But nowhere else on Earth can you openly, legally criticize any politician or powerful government officer, and know that you are protected from prosecution. With the hue and cry for campaign finance reform, politicians have most Americans convinced that what D’Souza did was wrong. But all such laws are unconstitutional. And if we return to our founding values, D’Souza and many others will be vindicated.