Police State Review
Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary offers a searing case study of how the United States is well on its way down the road to totalitarianism.
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Police State, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary, offers a searing case study of how the United States is well on its way down the road to totalitarianism. The film begins with a portentous quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “In our lives we go by many high walls and tall fences, never thinking of what lies beyond them. But that is where the gulag country begins.” The Soviet dissident-turned-writer and philosopher, had been driven from his homeland to the United States, warning his adopted country’s citizens of the atrocities of the Gulag system that had transformed his beloved Russia into maybe the most famous police state of the twentieth century. The quote is harrowing — less today because of the situation it described with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 70s, when Gulag Archipelago was first published — but more because of how uncannily it matches our situation in modern America.
Indeed, the early signs of the mindless and creeping conformism that powers every tyranny must have already been evident on the Harvard campus of the late 1970s, when Solzhenitsyn who was by that point living on these shores as an expatriate, delivered a famous address in 1978. This he did, a few short years after Gulag Archipelago was published, wherein he warned about the dangers of the society he was forced to leave. It was coincidentally the same year Solzhenitsyn delivered his now famous remarks at Harvard that a foreign exchange student from Bombay, India, first arrived in America; in that sense, there is a spiritual kinship between Solzhenitsyn and D’Souza’s missionary work as artists. They each use their respective mediums – literature and film – in pursuit of a common goal: to warn Americans of the prospect of tyranny, perhaps from the perspective of an outsider, which is no longer a faraway danger, but a flesh and blood reality.
Police State depicts how in the fifty years since Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic work, the latent embers of tyranny have erupted into a society-wide conflagration. In particular, D’Souza homes in on the past three decades, beginning with the Waco massacre in 1993, and underscores how law enforcement has been weaponized by government agents to target peaceful American citizens exercising their constitutional rights with greater and greater zeal. In this vein, the film tells how the last thirty years may be read as a stampede, one event after another, over the rights of everyday Americans – from Waco to the Patriot Act to January 6th. These events have culminated in the Police State now in our midst. Our police state is one that still goes unrecognized by millions of Americans living under it, who have forgotten the cherished rights and liberties their present government has confiscated with the promise of safety in return. And therein lies our crisis that D’Souza seeks to expose, and the particularly insidious nature of the tyranny that has now arrived on these shores, which still goes unrecognized by many millions.
The portrait of modern American life D’Souza paints is bleak: an illegitimate regime, presided over by a corrupt geriatric “President” who may well be described as a tinpot dictator if not for his administration’s seeming pathological need to adopt the playbook of some of the most autocratic police states in history, both past (i.e., Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) and present (i.e., Communist China and North Korea).
The Biden regime is bolstered by Silicon Valley-types, as well as their media allies, who both indoctrinate and instill fear into the wider population, reinforced by the brainwashing techniques of education and social media. This effectively erodes any meaningful distinction between the government and big business, where the former mobilizes the latter’s arsenal into doing its bidding, branding itself the institutional vanguard of “our democracy,” while scapegoating its enemies (read: Donald Trump and MAGA supporters) as “domestic terrorists” along the way.
Police State’s achievement is that it does not confine America’s sleepwalk into tyranny to a particular crisis (i.e., the September 11th attacks, or the stolen 2020 election), event (i.e., the January 6th demonstration), or policy (i.e., the crackdown on parents for exercising their rights to petition school boards). Instead, D’Souza takes a holistic and incrementalist survey of the political landscape, using history as a helpful gauge (but not infallible barometer) for evaluating the present moment – which, in significant respects, through the advent of modern technology, dresses age-old problems up in unprecedented garb. But in another way, and maybe most ominously, poses the threat of global tyranny that is truly without historical precedent. Police State raises this question of history and precedent, but allows the viewer to decide the final answer.
It is the rise of the surveillance state – and the underlying technology that makes that state possible – which is the common denominator that is the genesis of – or, at least, exacerbates – the various crises highlighted throughout D’Souza’s film. The surveillance state is fueled by a cooperation between public and private actors. While it may be true that intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA always depended to some extent on private companies – and particularly, technology companies – to receive tips on problematic actors and potential agents of terrorism throughout their long histories, that changed with the outbreak of covid and the fraud that permanently undermined the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. These events finally brought to the surface problems that had been long percolating beneath for many years.
Donald Trump’s unceremonious ouster from his presidential office at the hands of deep state actors was the straw that broke the camel’s back for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans. This figure even includes many Democrats, especially older ones, who saw the weaponization of the justice system here and were reminded of the banana republics of the recent past, like in Cuba and Venezuela. The 2020 election was the point in which the Justice Department and intelligence agencies abandoned all remaining vestiges to neutrality, as explained in the film by FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin. Now, the system has become openly vindictive in its administration of “justice,” a two-tiered approach that promotes friends and allies, while punishing and silencing enemies – including the man it perceives to be its greatest political adversary in the 45th President.
Indeed, D’Souza’s film is like a chapter of an anthology still playing out in real time, whose ending remains unwritten. The news cycle each day is teeming with stories of the political persecutions of the 45th President and January 6th victims by rogue district attorneys like Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg, and malicious judges like Arthur Engoron and Tanya Chutkan, who dutifully carry out the deep state’s orders with the veneer of legitimacy granted by the justice system.
D'Souza sheds light on these abuses of the rule of law by the DOJ and its puppeteers in the intelligence agencies. The film also does a great job in putting a visual to how intelligence agents and other high-ranking government officials coordinate with mainstream media apparatchiks to craft a narrative that would deceive half the population into thinking the democratically elected Donald Trump, rather than the unelected deep state bureaucrats, is the true insurrectionist.
But the real insurrection is the one being waged on the Constitution behind closed doors. This, D’Souza personifies in the acting performance of Nick Searcy, who plays the role of a high-ranking FBI official, hellbent on doing whatever is necessary to preserve the deep state’s power over and against a democratically elected president. Searcy’s depiction particularly resonates because “his dialogue is lifted from modified FBI statements,” according to the director, lending an authenticity to the role that weaves seamlessly with the broader composite of interviews and archived footage that comprises this latest installment of D’Souza’s filmography.
Another component of America’s police state that the film exposes is the abuse of the First Amendment by allegedly “private” companies located in Silicon Valley – i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Distressingly, the film recounts, through revealing tell-all’s with Big Tech whistleblowers how these companies monitor hundreds of millions of citizens at once. They accomplish this through algorithms that create predictable digital footprints for virtually anyone who owns a Smartphone and makes use of their search engines. These companies think of themselves less as service providers and more as social engineers. Their operators believe they have cracked the code on how to manipulate human behavior to conform user behavior to culturally liberal worldviews. In short, Silicon Valley conceives itself as a secular god. Its omnipotence is made possible by the data harvesting and information gathering from the smartphones it has swindled hundreds of millions of Americans to place in their pockets.
While Silicon Valley might think of itself as a newfound deity that can transform the behavior of millions with the flip of a switch, in reality the kind of social engineering recurrently done by these companies is akin to brute-force. D’Souza illuminates how Twitter and Facebook used censorship to cover up major stories. Notably, the film highlights Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, which D’Souza explores in depth through archived footage and interviews, including pivotal moments from Tucker Carlson’s recent groundbreaking interview with Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. These ploys by Big Tech chronicled in Police State would have had an outcome-determinative impact on the results of the 2020 election, constituting another kind of election fraud.
D’Souza investigates how that information is then used by nefarious public agencies, including the Department of Justice, FBI, and other intelligence agencies, to kowtow the populace into submission. On the chance occasion someone may get out of line, such a rowdy January 6th protestor, that is where the full force of America’s police state becomes unmistakable. The film provides heartbreaking portraits of how the legal process and justice system – in other words, deep state agents operating under the pretext of constitutional procedure and “rule of law” – abuse its constitutional prerogatives by exacting psychological warfare upon citizens “deemed out of line.”
What is more, Police State shows how, despite operating under the pretext of neutrality, far from being independent, these so-called “private companies” stealthily work in tandem with one another. Further evidence of this is seen in how every major tech giant de-platformed Donald Trump within minutes of one another after the January 6th, 2021, demonstration.
The examples of autocratic exhibitionism by Big Tech discussed in the film are myriad, each account more jarring than the last. The film also tells the case of Douglass Mackey, known under the alias “Ricky Vaughn,” whose story reveals just how far-gone free speech rights have been gutted by the police state. Simply for having posted several jokes on Twitter during the 2016 presidential election about how Hillary Clinton voters can “vote” via text message and other fanciful methods was enough, according to a federal district court, to sentence Mackey up to 10 years in prison for “election interference.”
Mackey’s case might be the death knell of free speech rights in America. The fact that he was convicted merely for posting funny memes on social media could prove to be the fatal blow to American freedom. But Mackey’s case is also illustrative, and D’Souza does a stellar job at showing this, of how America’s police state incorporates elements of show trials that were popular in other autocratic regimes like the Soviet Union and modern-day North Korea to silence the rest of the population. All tyrannies require a fearful and submissive population to remain empowered. Police State demonstrates, through explainers with Julie Kelly, how legal process is abused by nefarious actors to demoralize Trump or Mackey copycats from ever committing wrongthink again.
The soul of the film is when D’Souza interviews two January 6th victims. Both Joseph Bolanos and Matthew Perna, whose heartbreaking stories are featured, may be described as real-time casualties of America’s police state.
Bolanos is a New Yorker who attended the January 6th protest, who never went inside the Capitol building. Nevertheless, he was unceremoniously visited by the FBI, without warning, after the intelligence agency received a tip from a meddlesome neighbor. The FBI raid left his small apartment in tatters, a condition he preserved for the film. Bolanos, an older, Hispanic man with preexisting health issues, was, at the time of the raid, also caring for his dying mother. Fortunately, his mother, who has since passed away, was not present when Bolanos was handcuffed in his long johns and tee-shirt and immediately forced into an hours-long interrogation process. The process was so stressful and inhumane that it caused Bolanos to have a stroke on sight. The tragedy of the story was that the FBI never had any intention of locking up Bolanos, who did not commit a crime, or even slapping a misdemeanor on him. Rather, the desire was to send a message – to use legal processes to torture an innocent American citizen, which it accomplished to near-fatal success.
But at least Bolanos lived to tell his tale. The same unfortunately cannot be said of the other January 6th victim featured in the movie. Geri Perna, the aunt of the late Matthew Perna, has become an outspoken advocate for her deceased nephew as well as the broader coalition of January 6th victims and their families, after witnessing what the Police State did to one of her closest relatives. Matthew was a fairly apolitical young man, who actually started as a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2015 before turning into a fanatic of the 45th President. Perna visited the nation’s capital on January 6th and participated, along with hundreds of thousands of other patriots, in the demonstration.
Despite not committing so much as a misdemeanor, Perna nevertheless appeared on an FBI watchlist shortly after the event. This drove Perna, a sensitive soul already, into depression. The most gut-wrenching line of the film came from Matthew’s aunt, who, through tears, explained the events that precipitated Matthew’s suicide: he was told that the judge in charge of his case was considering an additional sentencing enhancement, which was to be added to his other charges. This was enough to put Perna over the edge. To make things worse, after Perna’s suicide, Geri Perna spoke to the judge over the phone, who said that it was very unlikely the sentencing enhancement would have stuck had Perna waited out the additional month. It is difficult to watch Perna’s emotional testimony, in which she repeats her reproach to the judge – “I hope you remember Matt’s name, and the role you played in killing him” – without getting chills.
This is psychological and spiritual warfare at its most ruthless form – and D’Souza’s documentary, which features the stories of Bolanos, Perna, Ashli Babbitt, and of course, Donald Trump – relays in visceral terms how individual lives have been destroyed at the hands of our Police State. This, in a nutshell, is why D’Souza’s latest documentary is a genuine masterpiece – not only does it capture this tumultuous moment in history and do so with a rare stroke of humanity that is stridently absent in our mercilessly bureaucratic politics. But the film also serves, much like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, as a brutal wakeup call to Americans who may still not be fully aware of their government’s rapid descent into tyranny.
That may be Police State’s lasting achievement, and who better than D’Souza, the master at synthesizing art with political advocacy, to deliver another outstanding product.
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Paul Ingrassia is a Law Clerk at The McBride Law Firm, PLLC. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club. He is also a two-time Claremont Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, and Rumble.