Florida Set to Force Kids to Watch Radical-Right Propaganda

 

propaganda by dsouza
I guess they couldn’t afford Daniel Day-Lewis. Credit: Screenshot of “America” via The Wrap.

Propaganda, Propaganda Everywhere

Throughout human history, everyone associated with politics has indulged in propaganda of one sort or another. I have no doubt that Sargon the Great had his servants spread rumors throughout the empire that the people of Uruk were all degenerates and defectives, and that the Akkadians should be grateful for the opportunity to wipe them out. Propaganda was used to great effect during America’s Revolutionary War; among other efforts to win the sympathy and raise the blood pressure of the American colonists, Paul Revere circulated a drawing of the “Boston Massacre” that showed grinning redcoats backshooting a horrified crowd of colonists, and the British countered with a lurid sketch of colonists torturing a Boston governmental official under the Liberty Tree. Today, your Facebook feed is groaning under the weight of posts, links and images trying to persuade you that Those Other Guys are villains, criminals and general scum. Sometimes they’re right.

Propaganda in American Public Schools

American public schools have, for the most part, tried with some success (sorta …) to keep the propaganda in their teachings to a minimum, or at least keep it relatively balanced. That has changed in recent years, as textbooks giving a radical-right distortion of history have been promulgated throughout one school district after another and conservative lies about racism, slavery and global warming are being shoved down students’ throats at an alarming rate.

Propangandizing Florida’s Students

Florida may be preparing to ramp up the ideological war for its schoolchildren’s hearts and minds one step further: a Florida legislator wants all public school students to be forced to watch a far-right propaganda “documentary” made by convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza.

Alan Hays, a proud teabagger and member of the Florida State Senate, has introduced a bill that would require all of Florida’s 1,700 Florida high schools and middle schools to show the movie America to their students. (Parents could choose to have their children not watch the film, but as a veteran of the classroom, I can tell you that nobody skips out on watching a film. Moreover, in this case, the kids who did opt out would almost certainly be targeted for mockery and vilification by their colleagues and by some of the more loudmouthed conservatives among their schools’ teaching staffs. I mean, who but a Bloody Red Commie chooses not to watch a film entitled America?) The bill has a good chance of becoming law. Hays says of the film:

I saw the movie and walked out of the theater and said, ‘Wow, our students need to see this.’ And it’s my plan to show it to my colleagues in the legislature, too, before they’re asked to vote on the bill.

Rewriting History to Suit Yourself

Unfortunately for Hays’s colleagues and the children of Florida, D’Souza’s documentary (based on his book of the same name) is filled with lies and falsifications of the crudest sort. That’s not my own personal propaganda: that’s the conclusion of reviewers from around the nation. It also tanked at the box office, only garnering $2.5 million at the box office and pulling in a mere smattering of viewers. (In contrast, 2004’s Fahrenheit 911, a documentary by liberal gadfly Michael Moore that relied on actual facts to propagandize its viewers, grossed almost $120 million in the US and almost that much overseas. D’Souza’s documentary has grossed about a tenth of that, though to be fair, it is still in theaters and will make a bit more before going to BluRay and Netflix.)

D’Souza has a lovely past. He started in the 1980s as an editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, where he gloried in outing gay students and publishing overtly racist and anti-Semitic commentaries. In 2010, he gave the editors and publishers of Forbes Magazine a collective migraine by publishing a screeching polemic accusing President Obama of being an anti-American “anti-colonialist” with communist sympathies; the magazine soon admitted that the column was rife with errors and should have never been published as it stood. Since then, D’Souza has flirted with the birther movement and written a book (based on the Forbes article) predicting that if Obama was elected to a second term, America as we know it would collapse into a — you guessed it, a quagmire of nanny-state socialism and tyranny. And yes, indeed, he made a movie out of that book, too.

D’Souza’s movie starts with the image of General George Washington being killed by a British sniper. Thankfully, that isn’t presented as factual, but instead serves as the setpiece for D’Souza’s argument that liberals would be much happier if America had either never been created, or had become some sort of touchy-feely socialist state where the citizens make chocolate and worship at the feet of Big Government. After ninety minutes or so of revisionist history and polemic from D’Souza’s fervid script (which features actor portrayals of Washington, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass mocking liberal thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, apparently lifting the idea from Glenn Beck, who likes to dress as Revolutionary War figures and spout right-wing drivel that would have driven those figures to line him up in their own rifle sights. I’m surprised D’Souza didn’t include a scene with actor-portrayed Martin Luther King extolling the virtues of slavery.) He also claims that the Native Americans deserved to have their land stolen from them because they never figured out how to make a fat profit from it. And of course, much of the film is made up of fact-free attacks on Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Saul Alinsky, among others, who are apparently all (even the long-since-passed on Alinsky) engaged in a vast conspiracy to turn America into a Marxist dictatorship.

Washington Post reviewer Mark Jenkins writes:

America is less successful as a debate, since it isn’t one. D’Souza controls the conversation, and thus goes unchallenged when he tries to make real-world points with make-believe scenarios.

The Hollywood Reporter writes:

The first problem with the film is its overstatement of these anti-American tenets ostensibly running rampant in our society. D’Souza posits a simmering crisis that doesn’t really exist outside a few college campuses.

And a scathing review in The Wrap states:

The deceptive evidence and straw-man arguments of this conservative “filmmaker” would go down easier if the actual filmmaking wasn’t so inept. … America isn’t a documentary; it’s more like the badly-filmed version of a badly-written, meandering op-ed piece from a paper that lacks fact-checking or proofreading. Or worse, it’s the film version of a dunderheaded hashtag-activism campaign, perhaps #NotAllCapitalists or #YesAllConservatives, all slogans and no thinking. It’s a series of, at best, anecdotes, and the plural of “anecdote,” as it’s been noted, is not “data.”

Wrap reviewer James Rocchi says the movie is intended to be something of a “love letter to America — or rather, to [his] version of America, where superior conservative ideas and narratives about America’s divinely-provided greatness are constantly under attack from what he calls a liberal ‘narrative of shame’ about this country.” He notes D’Souza’s reprehensible efforts to paint America’s history of slavery as almost equally divided, with D’Souza arguing that the statistically and morally insignificant number of black slaveowners (yes, there were a few, and there were a small number of white slaves and indentured servants) making the entire ugly history of slavery racially neutral and therefore just another example of liberals exploiting history to whip “ignorant minorities” into a frenzy of hate and fear. (My quotes, not Rocchi’s or even D’Souza’s.) Since the North won the Civil War, Rocchi writes, Americans need to just forget about slavery because the war to end it was won 150 years ago and it doesn’t matter any longer. Rocchi calls this just one of many of “the multiple failings of fact and argument in America.

Watch Michael Eric Dyson, Eric Boehlert, and Zerlina Maxwell dismantle D’Souza on MSNBC:

Obama Made Me Do It

If that isn’t bad enough (and it is), D’Souza spends a large chunk of screen time defending himself from the felony charges to which he has already pled guilty.

In the real world, D’Souza committed multiple felonies involving campaign finance fraud — pressuring two of his pals to donate $10,000 to the Senate campaign of his old Dartmouth friend, Wendy Long (who failed miserably in her attempt to unseat Kirsten Gillibrand) and then reimbursed them, thus breaking the law. D’Souza admitted his crimes and agreed not to contest any prison term that he would receive (sentencing will be in late September). D’Souza may have been ratted out by his estranged wife Dixie, who didn’t cotton to her hubby making bacon with his mistress, Denise Joseph. In D’Souza’s Bizarro World, he is guilty of nothing but incredible patriotism, engaging in principled civil disobedience against a campaign finance law he hates, and was targeted for retribution by the Obama administration, who apparently spends all of its time planning vengeance against political enemies like D’Souza. Daily Kos author David Nir writes:

Really, considering what’s legal in American campaign financing, the fact he was actually, successfully charged with felony violations of those laws suggests either egregious lawbreaking, utter incompetence, or some mix of both. (Also, let’s be honest: If the Obama administration was targeting conservative money-raisers based on their effectiveness, the Koch brothers and a long list of other similarly stealthy big-money Republican backers would be much bigger priorities than the look-at-me gadfly D’Souza.)

Even Michael Gaynor of the conservative nutfarm Renew America (the crowd that thinks Alan Keyes was chosen by God to save America, and every day without an Obama impeachment is a day without sunshine) thinks D’Souza went too far. The movie is a fine and wonderful thing, he writes, but D’Souza’s attempt to portray himself as a martyr for the cause of American patriotism is a lie that may well come back to bite him when he faces sentencing — especially since D’Souza says in the movie that the judge who accepted his plea deal made “a mistake” in finding him guilty. Gaynor says that D’Souza’s attempts to compare himself to Dr. King, who proudly suffered incarceration for his attempts to achieve justice and equality for all Americans, and a young man who violated copyright law by posting material on the Internet and committed suicide rather than face jail time, are, Gaynor writes, “mind-boggling.”

Note to Dinesh: When the Alan Keyes worshipers think you’ve gone over the edge, you need to rethink what you’re doing.

To no one’s surprise, shortly after pleading guilty to his felonies, D’Souza ran to the warm embrace of Fox News, where he tried to paint himself as a martyr for freedom. Too bad the facts of the case (his attempt to cover up his crimes, his initial not-guilty plea) didn’t support his contention, though facts have never, ever gotten in the way of a Fox News story. He even got some initial support from teabagging yahoos like Senator Ted Cruz, who told a CBS reporter: “Dinesh D’Souza, who did a very big movie criticizing the president, is now being prosecuted by this administration. Can you image the reaction if the Bush administration had went, gone and prosecuted Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn?” D’Souza’s guilty plea seems to have convinced Cruz to shut up and do something else, namely persecute Central American children fleeing the anarchy and violence of their own countries.

D’Souza’s best bet to live with this pantload of a movie might be to claim to be a target of Big Liberal Government. He’s made the same claim about the movie, saying that Google conspired with the Obama administration to make it hard for potential viewers to find his movie’s showtimes online. (He made a similar claim about the sorry sales of his book, saying that Costco conspired with the Obama administration to suppress his book. That’s what’s fun about being a conspiracy nut: every issue can be solved by deciding that they’re out to get me, and it comes with the extra added benefit of “proving” that you’re a very, very important person to be targeted so. I imagine D’Souza’s biggest fear is to realize that he is a flea and not a T. Rex.)

Proudly Filmed in Mom’s Garage

If the schoolchildren of Florida are to be saved from Hays’s attempts to brainwash them with D’Souza’s hysterical, self-serving propaganda blast, it may happen because of the sheer ineptitude of the film itself. The production values are ridiculously bad — some of the staged “reenactments” look as if they were shot in someone’s garage with a smartphone, the embedded film clips are handled poorly, and many of the interviews are difficult to hear. As for the acting … there’s a reason why many actors don’t have full-time employment in front of the camera. It looks as if D’Souza and the film’s producers trolled the local fast-food establishments to find actors that looked like the historical figures they were hired to portray, but didn’t bother to audition them to find out if they had any real acting ability. Kids are routinely watching CGI-heavy SFX festivals, where Captain America clobbers space aliens and dinosaurs chase scientists through steamy jungles in absolutely realistic portrayals. Having kids watch badly done historical reenactments that look as if they were acted and filmed in their own school auditoriums isn’t going to help sell the message of this film.

Rocchi may sum it up best:

In the end, America is just badly made. Michael Moore, D’Souza’s nemesis, may be self-important at his worst, but he actually knows how to cut a sequence, get a shot, and tell a story backed by data, all of which are beyond D’Souza and [partner John] Sullivan. America would be simply annoying if it were merely preaching to a conservative-leaning choir of low-information voters and ax-to-grind Obama-haters; what makes it unendurable is the fact that D’Souza and Sullivan can’t craft a sermon that would keep even the choir awake, interested, and entertained.

Bad Movie, Bad Idea for Schoolchildren

I am an unashamed and unabashed liberal. I also taught in the public schools for two decades. I tried my best to be objective and even-handed in my teaching; one of my proudest moments came on November 4, 1992, when, after spending a month teaching my classes about the presidential election, I polled my students as to who they thought I voted for. Half thought I voted for Clinton, the other half for Bush. That told me I did something right. (The discussions that followed my admission of voting for Clinton were fun, and gave us a chance to sum up the reasons why people voted for each candidate.) It was never my job to “sell” my students on being liberal or conservative, just as it was never my place to sell them on being Christians, or Muslims, or atheists. It was my job to expose them to different viewpoints, help them sort out the facts from the bullpuckey, and teach them to apply their own critical thinking and judgment to the issues they encounter during their lives. I would have never shown my classes D’Souza’s film, except in short clips to illustrate the nature and tactics of propaganda. Same with Michael Moore’s film. And if I showed clips from the one, I would have shown clips from the other one also. It’s all about balance and independence of thought.

Showing them a film like D’Souza’s America would be as bad as showing them Soviet propaganda films and expecting them to swallow that message without question. It is corrosive to the bedrock tenets of American education. It is wrong on every level, and Hays should have his political teeth kicked in for even suggesting it. (It is telling as to Hays’s level of understanding of the role of education, of democracy, and of freedom of thought that he saw the movie, liked it, and immediately thought it would be a great idea to force every child in Florida to watch it.)

I have two hopes for this situation: that a coalition of decent Americans, organizations and individuals, bands together to put a monkeywrench in Hays’s plans to propagandize his state’s children with this piece of radical political dreck, and that the effort does not itself become politicized, with “liberals” fighting to defeat the bill and “conservatives” demanding that it be crammed down Little Jimmy and Little Suzie’s innocent throats. It shouldn’t be based on political slant, but on the very idea of legislating the propagandizing of education.

By the way: is this article itself an example of propaganda? Sure it is, I’m openly pushing a point of view and making a call to action, and not even trying to be “objective.” But mine is based on facts, which sets me worlds apart from historical revisionists and professional liars like Dinesh D’Souza.

Watch the film trailer below. Don’t forget to take your anti-nausea meds.

H/T Think Progress.


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me_tooned Michael has been writing about politics, history and Web development since 2001. His first book is in development.