Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party

“Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” is a big letdown. Unlike the racist conspiracy theorizing of “2016: Obama's America,” “Hillary” doesn't fantasize so much about the future as it does the past.

It relies on basic factual statements like “Andrew Jackson was a Democrat,” “Hillary Clinton is married to Bill Clinton” or “Dinesh D'Souza is a convicted felon" and spins them in outlandish ways to fit a narrative that consistently contradicts itself. Yeah, sure, it hits the beats its target audience wants to see, the most important one being “You. Hey you. Republican in 2016. You are not a racist. In fact, the Democrats? They're the real racists.”

Let's talk about it, I guess.

It takes about a half-hour for D'Souza to start talking about the Democrats, but the fun starts immediately. You see, back in 2012, D'Souza made illegal campaign contributions to a friend of his who was running for office at the time. Essentially, he loaned her $20,000; the limit is $2,500 per individual. He managed this by having two people — his mistress and a friend — each loan the campaign $10,000, and then he reimbursed them for their expense. His punishment was community service and time in a halfway house. Slap on the wrist. Anyway, he blamed being caught on the fact that he's a Conservative provocateur, not, you know, having broken the law, and the beginning of the movie is mostly him whining.

In fact, the entire movie is framed by an imaginary experience he had while "inside," supposedly meeting murderers, junkies and con artists. One such imaginary friend tells Dinesh about a scam he'd concocted, which involved selling life insurance and then murdering his customers. This scam, you see, is relevant to Dinesh's interests, because he realizes that's the basic function of the Democratic Party. To D'Souza, the Democratic Party has a secret history: although it gets a majority of votes from non-white populations, it secretly wishes to subjugate them in order to maintain power.

Most of “Hillary's America” is not about Hillary (although she does show up towards the end, and her re-enactor spends a lot of time acting suspiciously like a serial killer), but the Democratic Party as a whole. It's a “greatest hits” of lousy chain emails: we have “Saul Alinsky: so scary,” “Republicans were the true heroes of the Civil Rights Movement,” “the Southern Strategy is a myth!” Oh, we also have the “Planned Parenthood is practicing anti-black eugenics,” “the New Deal was created solely to subjugate blacks” and, of course, the classic, “Hillary is only married to Bill for political convenience.”

The key difference between this and reading through every chain email you've received is that D'Souza spent time and money creating re-enactments of various historical moments. My personal favorite is an Andrew Jackson lookalike, the “founder of the modern Democratic Party.” Much of this segment is straight out of “Goodbye Uncle Tom,” except the exploitation isn't in seeing slaves abused but in seeing depictions of “Democrats” abusing them. Perhaps the best is when Jackson is forcing a young slave woman into his bed to rape her, as Dinesh breathlessly says, “What is it with the Democrat party and innocent young women?”

The second-best moment is when Woodrow Wilson witnesses a flaming KKK member burst out of his screening of “The Birth of a Nation,” flying through the walls and right onto the White House lawn. The third-best is when D'Souza says the Civil War was ultimately about anti-slavery Republicans versus pro-slavery Democrats. The historical travelogue jumps back and forth depending on whatever odd point D'Souza is trying to make about the contemporary Democratic Party. He never presents history, or facts, within the context of their time, and never moves closer toward today without immediately cutting back to the past.

He does attempt to acknowledge the fact that the mid-20th century saw an unprecedented shift, wherein the Southern states (which had been reliably Democratic for a century and, in large part, the source of racist policy) flipped red, and the Republican electoral strategy became largely about regressive economic policy and racial dog-whistles to get out the vote. But he does so only by saying "the non-racist Democrats switched Republican because of our superior economic policy while the racist ones stayed Democrat," which is bizarre because A) the racism was largely from a cohort of states that have voted red for three generations and B) the South remains so economically destitute that most of its economy is funded by the U.S. government, but ... whatever.

Ghost KKK Member! Ghost KKK Member! Ghost KKK Member!

Anyway, this movie is a massive turd, but I still found myself enjoying it. Sure, I'm proudly voting for Hillary this November despite any qualms I have about her. But I still enjoyed this movie! It's such amazing, spectacular bullshit devoid of facts, logic and coherency. It's built to scare a specific audience predisposed against Hillary anyway, and who don't spend a lot of time researching politics or history or D'Souza himself. Technique-wise, it's amateur-hour — History Channel-plus. But the rapidity of its lies, the production and the enthusiastic insanity is something I can't help but respond positively to, with great amusement.

It received a standing ovation in my theater, but probably not for the same reasons I just mentioned.