With The King’s College president Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s America a runaway success after its first weekend in nationwide release, UrbanFaith sent yours truly to the theater to see why people are flocking to this film. I went with considerable trepidation, expecting a poorly produced Michael Moore style piece of political propaganda. Instead, I got a visually compelling film produced by Gerald Molen, the Academy Award-winning producer of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.
I was surprised when the film opened, not with President Obama, but with D’Souza’s own story of emigrating from India to the United States for college. He highlights cultural influences he has in common with the president to demonstrate an intimate understanding of the anti-colonial forces that he says shaped Obama’s father and explain the president’s policies.
It’s an idea worth exploring, but beginning with the allegation that President Obama returned a bust of “lifelong colonialist” Winston Churchill to Great Britain soon after taking office and ending with a barbed-wire bound Middle Eastern map of what he calls “The United States of Islam,” he oversells his vision.
For example, as ABC’s Jake Tapper deftly explains, there were two Churchill busts in the White House, one that was on loan for the duration of the George W. Bush presidency and another that is on display in the president’s private residency. (For more fact-checking of the documentary, here’s the Associated Press and Slate’s Dave Weigel.)
D’Souza asserts that President Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention would have played well in a room full of Republicans. He says the president was voted in on hope and because Americans wanted to vote for the nation’s first Black president and against our own racist past. “The reason he’s in the White House is because of his race, his blackness,” D’Souza says.
He asks what Obama’s dream is. Is it the American dream, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, or someone else’s dream? Shored up by the armchair diagnosis of a psychologist and conversations with relatives and friends of Obama’s parents, D’Souza concludes that Obama’s dream is the radical collectivist dream of his absentee father, who, in D’Souza’s mind, influenced him more than the Midwestern grandparents who raised him from the time he was 10 years old. Other than a description of Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, as a lefty who hooked his fatherless grandson up with Commie writer Frank Marshall Davis as a mentor, neither his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, nor his grandfather count for anything in D’Souza’s narrative.
While D’Souza quotes liberally from Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father, to sell Barack Obama Sr.’s significance in shaping the president’s worldview, he pulls a motive out of thin air to explain why Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, sent her son back to Hawaii from Indonesia to live with her parents. In D’Souza’s account, she wanted to “separate” him from his step-father’s “pro-Western influence.” But President Obama said in his memoir, which I read, that his mother sent him back to the U.S. for a better education than he could get in Indonesia. Even this is no good. The Hawaiian private school education was rich in “oppression studies” in the 1970s, D’Souza asserts without evidence.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLsSg9wZlE&w=560&h=315]
Perhaps the most compelling and honest moment in the film is when D’Souza interviews the president’s half-brother George Obama in Kenya. He asks George if the president of the United States has been his “keeper,” implying that Barack Jr. is a hypocrite when it comes to caring for his own impoverished family members. George answers that the president has his own family to take care of and says he is a beneficiary of the president’s foreign policy. But then he says Kenyans were better off under colonialism and South Africans prospered because of Apartheid. This, D’Souza asserts in an August 16 column at Fox News, is why the president doesn’t intervene in his allegedly alcoholic half-brother’s life.
George apparently asked D’Souza to send him $1000 to pay for his sick child’s medical bills. The New York Times best-selling author obliged and then wrote the following: “George’s brother is a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world. Moreover, George’s brother has framed his re-election campaign around the ‘fair share’ theme that we owe obligations to those who are less fortunate. One of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: ‘We are our brother’s keeper.’ Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help. So much for spreading the wealth around.” I wondered as I watched the film and read this column if D’Souza was equally concerned when President Clinton’s half-brother Roger was getting himself into trouble? I found no evidence that he was.
In what to me is the essence of this film’s failure, D’Souza concludes that after visiting his father’s grave in 1988, President Obama resolved to not be like him in his failures. “In doing so, perhaps he can become worthy of his father’s love, love he never got,” D’Souza says. In his rendering, the president is entirely a product of this one pain. No other influence ultimately matters, except those that magnify it. No independent development or grappling with ideas counts. Everything is as Freud would have diagnosed it. That’s a stunning perspective for a Christian apologist to advance.
As the film draws to a close, dark clouds, of course, emerge and the music grows ominous. A nightmare scenario of national “debt as a method of mass destruction” and the Mideast transforming itself into an Islamic super-power emerge. D’Souza says, “We did not know what change would look like. Now we do. Which dream will we carry into 2016: the American dream or Obama’s dream?”
This week, William Murchison reviewed D’Souza’s new book on the same theme for The Washington Times. He said, “I want to be as kind as possible, inasmuch as I admire Mr. D’Souza and his reliably intelligent witness over the past two decades to harsh truths about the corruption of liberal thought and praxis. All the same, I see various bones in need of picking. ‘Obama’s America,’ it seems to a pronounced non-fan of Mr. Obama — the non-fan writing these lines — is overequipped with extrapolation and inference, underprovisioned with restraint and delicate judgment.” The same things can be said of the beautifully produced documentary, which, by the way, relies heavily on scenes of abject poverty in India, Indonesia, and Kenya. Why is that? Is it meant to highlight the impoverished worldview to which the president supposedly adheres?
I have a question for Dinesh D’Souza: Which dream does he, as the president of The King’s College, carry into the future? Is it the dream of educating students “to lead with principle as they aspire to make America better” or is his a partisan dream in which it is acceptable for a Christian educator to stretch the truth in order to accuse the U.S. president of fomenting an anti-American nightmare?
You know the question Dinesh D’Souza seems obsessed with about President Obama is “Do we know Him?”. Does anybody know who Dinesh D’souza is and what may be his own hidden agenda? Could it be that just as he claims the President is living out his fathers anti-colonialist ideologies to purge the world from this evil, that D’Souza is living out his fathers dream to reach beyond the limitations of India’s caste system to elevate his family to a superior prominence by aligning himself with the Supremists in America? For a man who names the name of Christ who says we should seek peace and pursue it, D’souza’s glib assessments about not only the President, but about African Americans as well, instead of leading him to a way to help the situation opts instead to fuel the flames of right wing supremist conservatives discontent by giving them a non-white spouter of their venom. Surely D’Souza knows that these inflammatory statements of what he believes may be the answer to the Obama and African American dilemma will be used not to quell what could be a quake of volcanic proportions, but rather almost in a Joe McCarthy frenzy baits it with more of his highly educated, highly biased diatribes. So who do we need to know, who Obama is or who D’souza is? What is his paycheck? Is it to finally prove to his wife’s Dixie’s parents that he should be accepted by them because he is an even more fierce opponent of the Black America they both fear? Or is it simply because he feels his position as an immigrant warrants defending by comparing good minority versus bad? Or does his stance that the government should remain neutral in matters of race and allow businesses to discriminate as they see fit his idea of living the American dream? D’Souza. Who is he? Do we really know him?
He substantiated at least some of his claims, although he sensationalized some others. How are you substantiating yours? Also, D’souza isn’t running for president. My personal belief is both candidates should be laid bare. I agree with his premise that we should know who Obama is, even if he embellished on much of the rest of his argument. I also agree with his assessment of many white people (not all) in the beginning of the movie: that white people in general enjoy being superficially cultured, that they enjoy sampling the proven dysfunction of cultures other than their own simply because it’s exotic without ever seeming to examine whether it’s true, good, or healthy.
Jay, I hear you. But your reference to D’Souza’s assessment of white people as “sampling the proven dysfunction of cultures other than their own simply because it’s exotic without [examining] whether it’s true, good, or healthy” still presupposes that white culture is the only true norm from which to evaluate the validity of other cultures. It’s that kind of privileged thinking on the part of D’Souza and many others that will make it difficult for any honest and meaningful dialogue to occur. We’ll just continue to rage on about the dangers of other side from the intellectual security of our respective camps.
Devon, that’s not what I’m saying at all…
He mentioned the caste system. The caste system is a fixture in Indian culture. Is it bad because it’s Indian, or is it bad because it’s bad? As a white person, I am all too familiar with this phenomenon. There is good and bad in every culture. Every culture has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Every culture has it’s pet vices. But if the criteria for choosing to think or act or not think or act a certain way is simply because it’s exotic (meaning that it is new to me because it’s alien to my native culture), or simply because it’s “privileged” or unprivileged, we’re judging by criteria that doesn’t matter. Nazism is historically white. So am I. Should I judge Nazism on the basis of it’s whiteness (since I am white), or on the basis of it’s right or wrongness? I reject it because it’s wrong. That’s the criteria I want to use to judge anything. Drive-by-shootings may be exotic to some people because it doesn’t happen as often in their culture. Should we judge them by their exoticness ((meaning that it is new to some because it’s alien to their native culture), or should we judge in terms of right and wrong? I’m just saying whites often don’t judge by the right criteria. One could say that about Americans in general as well…
Hi. You might want to have a look at my youtube channel – America’s Wrongest Man: Dinesh D’Souza.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS43aLOKTp8
Grant it I was more than a little warm when I made my post questioning the motives of Dinesh D’Souza. And Jay if you need references as to how I substantiate my claims I’ll provide them. D’souza was asking do we really know the president. I was asking do we really know D’souza. What it all boils down to I suppose is what fires our motives about who or what we believe in. As Christ followers if our motives are driven by anything less than what God enumerates as how we are to live and treat each other, including what He says about the purpose and duty of government, then as Devon says we’ll be hooked on the vicious cycle of accusations.
Knowing and living the truth of God is the hardest thing for Christ followers to do. Compound that with the things that the enemy throws in that distracts us from seeing and living the truth life becomes needlessly convoluted.
Add to that the world’s view of things and the confusion increases exponentially. How can we see clearly to view things such as D’Souza’s 2012 or any other tool by any other group or party that distorts the truth to make their point?
If the truth of what’s being purported is not evident in whole, why should we swallow it in part?
Isn’t part truth untruth?
How do we get past the lies of all?
Wanda, how does one judge motives without playing God? I don’t want to do that to anyone. I want to keep it simple. What did he say? Was what he said accurate? Was it right? Was it wrong? Why or why not? We can question motives till we’re blue in the face and we’ll get nowhere. We have enough to work with to simply ask whether or not it’s correct…
Jay, I’m talking not only about his 2012 movie, but also about the claims he makes about the FACT of statistics that African Americans fall 70% below other minorities, including newer minorities in virtually every category. If he were using these sorts of comments to say we’ve got a problem let’s work on it, that would be one thing. But his use is pandered to help some in their position to discount not just poor , uneducated blacks, but also blacks who were only able, according to him, to reach middle class and higher status because of Affirmative Action which is not true; but again because his statistics are heartbreakingly factual in one sense, his assessments based on those statistics are false.
You’re right, ultimately the purest and absolute judgment is God’s. But just like He placed a judicial system on earth for us to assess guilt or innocence of someone, he also placed within each one of us tools to work with that gives us the knowledge to determine that something is right or wrong, good or evil. Given that He has equipped us with these abilities judging motive is not an impossibility and at times must be done.
Jay it’s not simple, basically because we don’t all agree on what constitutes what’s accurate, right, wrong. We have laws but they change with whoever happens to be in power. For example during the pre-civil rights era, it was considered right that blacks could not drink, eat, even use the same public restrooms as whites and it was perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the law. It was right. Then there was a shift in power and that ceased. But because a permanent standard of rightness is not in place that we all agree upon it will never be a simple matter of is it right, wrong, or accurate. It all depends on who defines right, wrong and accurate and who decides how these standards are carried out. Will it be for all or for the preferred?
I hope you see that I am not just looking at this disturbing film as it is right now, but what in the long run its acceptance will mean for all of us. If you don’t at least try to ascertain motives in this case, like D’Souza, I too shudder to think what 2016 will look like. And when right now in the city that I live in, that thinly veiled sense of entitlement and hatred is slowly beginning to surface in my daily life in the marketplace, in the government, in the medical, educational, and business worlds, yet a second time, it’s time to examine what’s behind it all. Maybe you find it simple to accept D’Souza’s facts without attaching onerous implications, my reality is sooo different from that. I see where this is headed and for me and those like me its not good.
What I want is honesty, and let the chips fall where they may. And I am not talking about cultural relativism. Your examples of unjust laws are obviously wrong. There are laws we can and should all agree upon. If you think we cant, I should stop now. We have no real basis for any meaningful conversation if one of us believes its impossible to locate real right and real wrong. In such a scenario we are reduced to a battle of wills and he who has the most guns wins.
If a group is said to not be performing well it doesn’t have to mean invoking the word “inferior” or anything like it. It can and should simply mean, “This is what’s going on right now”. How groups perform changes over time for varying reasons and to varying degrees. Culture, race, aptitudes, etc, should be seen as fluid concepts. Stats should serve the same function as a mirror. I happen to be bald so I’m low maintenance and have little need for mirrors. However, if my wife just rolled out of bed and I held up her best picture and said it was a mirror, am I doing her a favor by convincing her she looks better than she does? All analogies break down, but I think this is how many, including myself at times, feel we’re supposed to treat black people. I’m allowed to be honest with everyone else about themselves, until it gets to black people. Then I have to pretend its better than it is. I don’t like lying, and eventually, if I am asked to lie by someone, I’m just not going to want to deal with them.
I’m not saying all this as some bumpkin who doesn’t know any black people. I’m a white minority in a majority black and Latino neighborhood. My wife is Latina and I have black relatives as well as black friends. My daughter is also part black. Every culture has its problem with dysfunction to varying degrees and in various forms. It can change, but not if we’re dishonest. I honestly believe, from my own experience and stats such as what you mentioned, that blacks by and large are disproportionately more dysfunctional than other groups in the U.S. I prefer to deal with people case by case. But if I have to see in groups, that’s my honest opinion. Again, these things are fluid, can, and should be changed. That’s not going to happen by patronizing black people.
As for the film, I’ve already said he embellished at times. I don’t buy it wholesale. I would however like to know what you thought of George Obama’s comment about Kenyan’s being responsible for Kenyan problems…
Leaving or staying in this conversation is your choice. It appears that your intellectualism and need to come to logical, rational answers to questions about life, government, politics, religion, flies in the face of reason because these are not subjects that can be neatly logged, categorized, and labeled.
You know I really don’t know if you understood what I meant by who defines right or wrong. There’s really only one Who has placed that knowledge in the heart of each one of us we know this. But when man, with a vote can change something that we all know is wrong and call it right. It becomes right to most. As Hitler once said, …tell a lie long enough…then the lie becomes the truth. We know ultimately that a lie can never be the truth in the purest since, but that doesn’t stop others from seeing lies as truth, and what’s worse acting on them sometimes in apocalyptic ways. And D’Souza with a few key twists on the truth has fanned the embers.
If you want me to address George ‘s response so that I can then say, Blacks in America are responsible for the problems of blacks and they really have no basis to expect anybody but themselves to see them through. Pull ourselves up by our heels.
Part of helping yourself is telling the truth. Truth is we are a peculiar people. Truth is we’re behind educationally by 200 years. Truth is for many education is not a value fostered at home.
Truth is planned parenthood left a heinous legacy by coming into inner city schools. Truth is white men dumped on us the most enslaving thing ever known to us in the form of drugs. Truth is a white man started welfare. Truth is white politicians come to our churches promising jobs, homes, justice and they can’t be found after the election. Truth is most black kids today come from a matriarchal home. And I can go on and on.
Those are our truths that D’Souza implies we can’t rise above. His implications are wrong.
Maybe not responding is a good thing.
This is ridiculous. The president deserves respect
D’Souza makes a great case that what drives Obama is anti-colonialism. He makes a poor case that anti-colonialism is bad. He simply says it’s atypical for an American president.
I also appreciated when he said something to effect of: “There’s no better way to shipwreck the future than by trying to right the debts of the past,” which leads me to this:
D’Souza implies that because Obama has lived in poverty, has seen real poverty, and that he knows how privileged America is compared to the rest of the world, that he is also trying to even the scales which will eventually mean a 2nd or 3rd world America. First, he has to make America poor. D’Souza makes a good case that he is, in way more ways than one.
If that’s true, I tilt my head… How does making us poorer necessarily make other countries richer? To use an analogy a friend of mine used (which also seems to be a cultural phenomenon at the moment), how does making functional families more dysfunctional help dysfunctional families become more functional?
I’m not saying he ONLY is to blame. I also don’t feel the need to try and read his motives. The power structure seems to want our decline based upon the mechanics of their policies. Their policies are conducive to increased poverty for most of us, and increased wealth for some of them. Obama just seems to have a more defining philosophy in why to carry it out. It is being and has been carried out either way, by both parties. Both, whether they mean to or not, play on white guilt, a romanticized view of poverty as somehow being more virtuous by default, and other (what I would call) self-crippling sympathies..
When you’ve done what is right, where’s the need for guilt?
Wanda, I’ve never owned slaves, so I don’t get your point. My family wasn’t even here for that. White guilt can either be rational or irrational. I’m fine with guilt for the guilty. Some guilt is irrational and also deadly…
Who mentioned owning slaves? If you’re referring to the fact of blacks not being able to have access to and participate in what whites freely have for years, you don’t have to go way back there; try the modern and post modern eras. If you have children and you prepare all of them with everything they need to compete educationally, financially, and as a family, then pit them against a black family that lacks the skills to train their children and have little to support even their basic needs, who’s going to come out feeling best equipped to compete. Add to that laws that encourage the one, and hinders the other. Then your kids get angry with the other kids for bringing up their privileged status and say, “You guys are simply lazy and just don”t try hard enough, stop your whining and tell your mama to pull up your pants.”
Not only is this the Catch 22 many blacks find themselves in, but you honestly think we should also to like it and not complain?
That’s why I’m so proud when a young inner city kid makes it, or a small town southern kid makes it academically. Despite what they lack thrive. Most don’t.
Wanda, maybe I shouldn’t respond, but maybe you shouldn’t misrepresent what I’m saying (or D’Souza for that matter). Maybe it would also help if I were black. Since I’m not, I’ll just ask this: if someone from another demographic were to present you with the list of problems you presented here, what would be your advice to them? What solutions would you suggest?
It begins with the family. Any demographic group or nation facing these types of problems must begin here. Fathers should protect their families, provide for their families, lead their families in a healthy respect for them and their authority so that it can, at the proper time, be translated into a healthy respect of God. They should then raise their children by being there with them, in things that build character and strength in their faith in Jesus, in obedience to the principles that God has made known to us, in a developing a work ethic, in helping others, and doing those things with honesty and integrity. Mothers should be there to guide their children, training them in good learning habits, work habits, social habits, home and health habits. The mother is the one who’s usually with children more than anyone and should use her time with them to teach them how to apply these living principles to their lives, teaching them to love and honor each other for how they are alike and respecting and celebrating their differences. Parents are the front line in getting kids of to a good start in life. And it begins at home. Even if it is impossible to have both parents. The parent with children needs to incorporate as much of these roles into their parenting so as to raise well adjusted, responsible, helpful,educated children. It might be hard, but it is not impossible. Once your whole family comes under the covering of God and you live your life as He says you are to do then no matter what the world dumps on you, you will have the love, favor, blessing, protection, of the ruler of all nations on your side, and God takes care of His own.
That’s the simple answer Jay. When a family operates as God would have them to, there’d be little need for laws that make people treat you with justice or mercy or peace.
And Jay we’ve been hammering this thing out with charges and counter-charges, spinning around like a wind up toy, first you, then me; but I have to say thanks for this last question because this is what I feel is at the heart of this discussion, having respect for God and each other and doing what he says. I think that this should not be done just for one’s own group or nation but wherever one group is being treated poorly, it ought to concern other groups, because as history shows, if one group can be treated unjustly, it’s just a matter of time before another, and another, and another group will become victim of some power that is not for justice but dominance.
Since we are all interrelated we must see to the highest good of each other. And this sketch of how things need to go is just that a sketch. I only hope that people through our churches and communities began to catch on to this and begin to see the urgency of now, and begin working this out in their own lives whatever that may look like. If each of us used the giftedness God gave us, this message could be used and is already being used to change the face of families, groups, race.
Now can I spin for a moment? How did I misrepresent what you or D’Souza said?
Wanda, as for misrepresenting: I think we were talking past each other at some points and at others we have actual disagreements. It can feel insensitive because I don’t really know you and you don’t really know me. I don’t want to try to sum you up by the few letters on a screen with your name behind it. I would hope you’d feel the same towards me. I will say it seemed at certain points like you thought I was saying something is inherently wrong with black people that isn’t also inherently wrong with other people. I certainly wasn’t saying that. I don’t have to look any further than the mirror to know there’s something wrong with all of us. I also don’t think that’s what D’Souza was saying either. It seems like you did think he was saying that. Example:
“Those are our truths that D’Souza implies we can’t rise above. His implications are wrong.”
I don’t think he was implying that at all. Neither was I. It may not mean EVERYONE makes it though. Jesus said the poor will always be with us. He didn’t say how many will be black (or white, or anything else). I work in a mental hospital and am well aware that many of our homeless are homeless because of being profoundly mentally sick.
What matters most to me at this point in the conversation is everything you just said. And, by the way, it was said beautifully. If you remember, I said something earlier about identifying real right and real wrong that all of us should abide by. At that point I was talking about laws. Of course, though we should have just laws, just laws can only do so much. We need just people with loving hearts. That’s a real right that we should all agree upon. Your remedy, by the way, is also a real right we should all agree upon… If we all did exactly what you just said, no matter what our ethnic background or background otherwise, the world would be an incredible place. To the degree that we don’t do what you said, no matter what our ethnic background or background otherwise, is the degree to which it will be a horrible place.
Wanda, it’s been a pleasure talking with you. I walk away having learned something. Blessings to you and yours…