The era of “That’s your fact, here’s mine,” is among us, snidely waving goodbye to the archaic days of opinions based on agreed-upon facts. In the documentary 2016: Obama’s America, director Dinesh D’Souza weaves and bobs while taking potshots at President Barack Obama’s “questionable” past, his motivations and who has inspired them. In doing so, assumptions become the driving force in this agenda-laced documentary aiming to evict Obama from the White House and witness his one-term. The electorate does not need this. No informed voter benefits from falsified generalizations to steer politics. The audience receives nothing more from this film than D’Souza’s hypocrisy rampantly masquerading itself as factual and credible conspiracy theories.
The crux of the film lies in exposing Obama’s true past and his resonating ambitions to torpedo America into third-world-country status as a result of his ravaging anti-colonialism, supposedly instilled by his father’s absence in his life as well as left-wing mentors. D’Souza’s primary curb while writing and producing this film, which is based on his previously published books, clearly depends on a lack of factual evidence to support claims—Obama’s policies are intermittently discussed. Instead of factual information, the audience receives black-and-white representations of wildly complex, multi-faceted decisions and pursuits. Discussions involving Obama’s middle-ground policies, policies far from the left, are abandoned by the narrative.
Fortunately for D’Souza, utilization of fact omission and double-standards flies right over less-discerning audiences’ heads and pulls them in. D’Souza claims America isn’t racist or sexist, that people of color and women, compared to their white, male counterparts, have complete equal opportunities at success. We are encouraged to take D’Souza’s words as gospel because of his Indian background. D’Souza’s self-loathing, ignorant theories comply with our new racism of denying racism. While holding his hand up next to a black man’s hand, he claims, “You can’t tell the difference.” He attempts to permeate American society with the idea that racism no longer exists, in an effort to eradicate from our minds that racism still exists and permeates our society so he can use himself as proof of the endurance of the fabled “American Dream.”
Inadvertently, the most intriguing aspect of the film becomes D’Souza himself. Who is funding this man’s work to be the token Indian guy, propping himself up as proof anybody can win in America? His tactics are clearly deceitful, regardless of his likely conscious complicity. His actions and ideas directly contradict the ideas of freedom that he claims to be championing. Intolerant tones saturate the narrative despite, once again, the use of himself as an example of an outsider. For example, he fails to achieve validity in the demonization of the Muslim faith and its followers. This is the most heinous form of D’Souza’s insipidly exposed anti-multiculturalism. An image depicting the “United States of Islam” in the Middle East closes the film, solely blaming Obama for this hypothetical and prejudiced scenario. Obama’s sympathy for other cultures, not murderers, does not represent a complicity in terrorist sects banding together. Distrust of other cultures and religions because of stereotypes and generalizations tend to promote that path, D’Souza.
While facts have been overtly distorted on the campaign trail, 2016 is appropriate in complementing this tone and is, unfortunately, discovering a following of like-minded, xenophobic fans willing to ignore vast amounts of information—these peons and inchworms long for D’Souza’s skewed narrative to align with their own insulated and ignorant lives. While sifting through the drivel, an appropriate argument emerges when D’Souza’s tactics are scrutinized, thus forcing an (ideally) informed electorate to analyze the detrimental affects of well-funded, agenda-driven propaganda documentaries. D’Souza’s Prop-Doc is just one of many, from all sides, with vast exclusions. Our body of voters must be efficient at identifying these desertions of accuracy.