Unrevising History

I went to a matinee showing of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, HIllary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, this past Saturday. There was only one showing that day at the neighborhood theater. And the theater wasn’t one of the larger ones. But it was pretty full. And people clapped at the end.

Here's the 3-minute trailer.

I didn’t take notes in the dark theater, and it’s a couple of days later. So it’s better to refer to the movie or the associated book for facts. But I’ve tried to increase my accuracy with some basic research.

D’Souza’s makes two main points about the Democrat Party:

·         They have been racist since the beginning.

·         They are corrupt through and through.

The Racist History

There’s a lot of history in the movie. He spends some time on Andrew Jackson, a vicious southern slaveowner. I never liked Jackson mainly because of his willingness to ignore the Constitution the way Democrats do. But I had been unaware of the personal cruelty and sexual predation against his slaves.

Abraham Lincoln is essentially the founder of the Republican Party. He and his party were anti-slavery. And it was Lincoln, followed by other Republicans, who guaranteed the elimination of slavery and other deprivations of Constitutional rights based on race. D’Souza showed that the Democrats all along resisted any movement against racism. For example, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments:

·         13^th Amendment (1865)—outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude: proposed and supported by Republicans with 100% voting in favor, opposed by 77% of Democrats (including northern Democrats)

·         14^th Amendment (1868)—granting full citizenship and protection under the law: 94% of Republicans supported it, 0% of Democrats

·          15^th Amendment (1869)—prohibits states or local governments from denying the right to vote based on race or previous involuntary servitude:  144 Republicans in favor and 3 against in the House and 39 in favor with 5 against in the Senate;  all 39 Democrat votes in the House went against and all 8 in the Senate went against. (Some in both parties did not vote; at least one abstaining Republican was because it didn’t also prohibit poll taxes and literary tests.)

He pointed out that even northern Democrats approved of slavery; it wasn’t a simple case of south vs. north culture. And there’s the fact that there were exactly zero Republican slaveowners.

The Democrats grew the Ku Klux Klan to enforce their racism when the laws didn’t go their way. The Klan was mostly wiped out (at least publicly) by the turn of the century. But President Woodrow Wilson, a racist Democrat (redundant in those days), reignited the KKK as the military arm of the Democrat Party.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was not about choice for women; she was about wiping out blacks, the disabled, and anyone else she disfavored. Forced sterilization was among her favored practices.

If you think that was just the olden days, then maybe you should look at the current stats: 80% of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located in minority neighborhoods; from 1973 on black women's share of abortions has consistently been at least twice their share of live births, at 16% of live births but 32% of abortions.[i]

The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was led by Republicans. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other black Civil Rights leaders were Republicans. A greater percentage of Republicans voted for that legislation than of Democrats. Democrats filibustered the legislation in 1964. It is true that Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson favored the legislation. But for him it was a political strategy. He followed up the Civil Rights legislation with his War on Poverty policies, which keep people weak, dependent, and impoverished. He is quoted as saying,

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference... I'll have them n-----s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.[ii]

The claim today is that there was a Great Switch, with racists leaving the Democrat Party for the Republican Party. So D’Souza did the research, looking at the various Democrat officials, leaders, and prominent civilians. Only 1% switched; the other 99% remained Democrats for life.

The lie was told with the help of complicit media and academia—enough times that it was taught as true. But it has never been true. Republicans were for equality for all before the law from the party’s inception. The Democrats have been racist, and now race-card players to this day.

The Corruption

The movie begins with D’Souza’s experience in prison—because he gave more than was allowed to a friend’s political campaign (without telling the friend, so not as an attempt to buy influence). He’s the first and maybe only person imprisoned for this infraction. And it wasn’t a white-collar-criminal-type imprisonment; he was among thieves and murderers. After a couple of months of adjustment (he was out of prison daytimes and returned to prison nightly), he started getting acquainted to learn what he could. What he says he discovered was that corruption in government was pretty much exactly the same pattern as the four-part pattern of The Con.

The Con Pattern

·         The Plan

·         The Pitch

·         The Play (This is two days later. I didn’t take notes, and I don’t remember how it was worded.)

·         The Cover-up: Deny Deny Deny

The segment on Hillary Clinton was at least an hour into the movie. D’Souza covered her history, radicalized by Saul Alinsky—and going beyond him, believing they could get more of their radical ideas realized by infiltrating government at the highest levels.

The Clinton couple, he claims, is a combination of the basic big-talking conman (Bill) and the fixer (Hillary). His flaws, particularly his sexual predatory practices, required clean-up, and that made him dependent on her. That is one explanation of why these two have stayed together. I don’t know if it’s entirely the truth but it fits this narrative.

The players in the Democrat Party do fit the pattern of The Con, as he lays it out. D’Souza has been

Dinesh D'Souza
photo from here

outspoken against Obama first, and now the Clintons, in his movies. Clearly he speaks from a point of view that isn’t likely to see the Democrat Party favorably. But he uses the storytelling of history to make his points. It could be effective—if only the people who have been duped were willing to see it.

Part of his restitution included doing community service, which he portrays as being able to teach ESL classes, and he gladly took that opportunity. He asked the question, “How do you become an American?” At the end of the credits, he answers that question: “You know you’ve become an American when you become a Republican.”

While I was looking up a few details for this post, I came across this review by Chuck Norris, highlighting 10 points made in the movie, which you might enjoy reading. 

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[i] Again, I don’t remember all exact details from the movie, which mentions the data. So I found this data online, which is slightly old, but probably close to current. 

[ii] I didn’t memorize the quote, so I looked it up and found it here.