Respected by most of the right and loathed by all of the left, filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza has been stirring the simmering pot of discontent for well over a decade. Often labeled by both sides of the aisle as a “firebrand,” Mr. D’Souza has also been described as the conservative version of Michael Moore, which is not thoroughly inaccurate. However, Mr. Moore’s movies are rife with bellicose tirades, often unfounded hyperbole, and far-reaching conjecture, while Mr. D’Souza’s are mostly dispassionate and deeply rooted in fact and stone-cold statistics.
Co-written and co-directed by Mr. D’Souza, his wife Debbie, and Bruce Schooley, “Police State” is Mr. D’Souza’s sixth feature and is arguably the most ambitious undertaking in his decade-long filmmaking career. Never one to shy away from subject matter that his detractors label as neocon propaganda, Mr. D’Souza regularly calls truth to power, and “Police State” methodically lays out a case that, when finished, seems impossible to argue with or ignore.
Because he recognizes that documentaries are also movies that need to offer some degree of entertainment in addition to imparting information, Mr. D’Souza crafts his films with a healthy mix of archival clips and still photos, interviews, and dramatizations, presenting them within a traditional live-action format. His films are not only educational; they’re also visually appealing.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and the Gulag
Mr. D’Souza wastes no time with an opening title sequence showing black-and-white clips of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Josef Stalin, the OG (original gangster) police stators. This sequence ends with the quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from “The Gulag Archipelago”: “In our lives we go by many high walls and tall fences, never thinking of what lies beyond them. But that is where the gulag country begins.”The credits are presented as if they’re part of a heavily redacted top-secret document against the backdrop of what appears to be an unwarranted FBI raid on a family eating breakfast.
With the narrative framework established, the filmmakers begin what will be reoccurring separate interviews with Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), former NYPD and Secret Service officer (and co-producer) Dan Bongino, Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer, former senior Trump official and current senior adviser to Trump for national security defense and intel Kash Patel, author Julie Kelly, alphabet-agency whistleblowers, and various targeted citizens.
The time that Mr. D’Souza spends with Yeonmi Park is particularly enlightening. Ms. Park recounts being told that math is racist and capitalism is evil; she also heard about the need to tear down the U.S. Constitution and replace it with something providing “equity for all.” Ms. Park was told these things by both higher-ups in her native North Korea and her professor at Columbia University.
Slow Death
The takeaway consensus of the interviewees is that there is a difference from the draconian, iron-fisted, old-school government overthrow tactics à la Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China; today, the budding U.S. police state is doing so with a slow, death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach. This is about chipping away at freedoms a little at a time, allowing domestic terrorists (BLM, Antifa) to run rampant and instead targeting conservative law-abiding citizens who refuse to surrender their freedoms or subscribe to totalitarian groupthink.When asked where it all started, Mr. Bongino cites the U.S. Marshal-led sieges in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and a similar action at Waco, Texas, just seven months later. Mr. Bongino says that the clampdown on freedoms was further enhanced by the passage of the Patriot Act in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Boiled down, the Patriot Act loosened, if not altogether unshackled, the FBI by replacing its function as a law enforcement entity with largely unchecked and unfettered domestic intelligence capabilities. Probable cause began being usurped by often unfounded suspicions. This mission pivot of the FBI was heavily aided by the wide-berth authority spelled out in the 1978 Foreign Investigation Surveillance Act (FISA). As the name implies, this bill was created to police foreign threats, but now it is used to target U.S. citizens.
At this point, “Police State” hasn’t even eclipsed the 20-minute mark, and the hits, as they say, just keep on coming. Incident after incident is presented with each more egregious than the last.
The FBI’s 2006 targeting of a group dubbed the “Liberty City Seven” plays out less like a sting operation and more like blatant entrapment. The targeted principals were, by all accounts, bumbling amateurs who were coerced (and financed) by undercover agents posing as members of al-Qaida into destroying the Sears Tower in Chicago, which never got close to happening. How this all concluded plays out like a farcical comedy flick gone awry.
This was a typical action of the FBI during the Bush 43 administration. Under the Obama administration, more and more ordinary Americans were targeted, including Mr. D’Souza himself.
Going After Soft Targets
Mr. Schweizer adds that once the threat of Muslim and foreign terrorism subsided, the FBI was forced to justify its existence and began going after “soft” conservative targets, such as the Tea Party, or anyone daring to question authority or threaten the status quo. This led to the eventual—some might say inevitable—harassment of President Donald Trump via the three-plus-year hoax that was “Russiagate.”More recently, the FBI’s tentacles have extended to social media, where it “suggested” to companies such as Facebook and Twitter that they censor opposing users’ posts. The censorship included challenging the legitimacy of COVID-19 “vaccines,” suppressing the New York Post’s reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop, 2020 election deniers, the true perpetrators of the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” and the carefully choreographed presidential document raid at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Appearing in most of the docudrama segments is actor and conservative filmmaker Nick Searcy as an unnamed FBI administrator whose seething, jackbooted glee in doing the Deep State’s bidding is as evil and foreboding as any movie villain in recent memory.
The second half of “Police State” finds the filmmakers broaching a multitude of other troubling subjects, including but not limited to the heartbreaking plights of those present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the short-lived “Ministry of Truth,” the hypersexualization of elementary school children, child sex trafficking resulting from lax border enforcement, and the inevitable implementation of an ominous and sinister “social credit” system.
It would be difficult if not impossible for any logical, free-thinking person, regardless of political affiliation, to watch “Police State” and not conclude that our country is on the precipice of a complete and unrecoverable national apocalypse—and the permanent loss of our nation as we’ve known it.
