You also talk in the book at length about our experience and the history with Mexico and the United States, and you discuss the appeal of America for immigrants, and how, as confirmed by works which I’m sure your familiar by folks like Thomas Sowell and Amy Chua, certain immigrant groups have come to America and outperformed everyone else within a generation or two generations. Your personal background is obviously consonant with such a history. What is your view on illegal immigrants in America, specifically Mexican illegal immigrants?
D’Souza: Well, I’m very pro-immigrant. And I’m very pro-immigration. But I have no sympathy for illegal immigration. We are a nation of laws, and we are a nation that has a system for taking in immigrants. And it’s a very generous system: we take in about 800,000 legal immigrants a year. Every country has the right to decide what the rules are, and what kind of immigrants it wants. And we’ve done that. We have laws to do that.
Now, the illegal immigrant is the guy who is, in his very first act of coming to America, showing a disregard for that law. Now, I don’t fault the motive of poor people in other countries who are trying to improve their life, but sorry, we do have a set of rules that you need to follow, and there is in fact a line or a queue. So if you try to jump the line and swim across the Rio Grande, you are not playing by the rules. So, on the one hand, my book is a strong defense of America as reflecting the restless, entrepreneurial, hardworking, creative ethic of the immigrants, while at the same time, I would not have sympathy for people who want to come here by flouting the rules.
“I’m very pro-immigration. But I have no sympathy for illegal immigration.”
How can America overcome the spirit of 1968 in light of the dominance of the left in all of our cultural institutions, be it academia, the media, etc? And is there anything that gives you optimism that America will in fact repudiate the progressive ethos?
D’Souza: I believe that the alternative to the progressive ethos, which is a well-reasoned and well-articulated conservatism is an extremely attractive political alternative to the mess that we are in now. It needs to be effectively defended, and it needs a political leadership class that is able to present it as an alternative, come election day. I think that one of the problems on the Republican side is that the Republicans tend to huddle and say, narrowly, “How can we take back the Senate?,” not recognizing that that is only one corner of the battlefield; and that the left has been making a long march through the institutions of education, Hollywood, the media, the mainline churches, so while conservatives are fighting in one corner, the left is shifting the goalposts of the culture and making certain political issues like gay marriage irrelevant by the time they actually come up for a political vote. Part of what I want to do in this book and then in the film is to raise people’s awareness of the whole battlefield. I think if we are aware of it, we can start fighting and winning in territory that has been, I think, very foolishly conceded to the left.
Given what’s happened with the indictment, do you have a message to other dissenters in light of the personal trials and tribulations you have gone through for challenging the government? And related to that, is the country not already, to some degree, fundamentally transformed, when you do have the selective application of the law in terms of targeting political opponents?
D’Souza: I think that with Obama, we’re seeing new lows and new aberrations that did not occur before. I mean it’s to me inconceivable that the Bush administration would go after Michael Moore in that way, or even that Clinton would unleash the IRS against his opponents. Carter certainly would never dream of doing such a thing. So, we’ve in a sense turned a corner in American politics, and I’m worried about it because to some degree politics is a game of adversaries, and if they do it to you, I’m sure there are Republicans who are taking note who say “Well, wait till we have a chance to do it to them.” So we don’t want the politics of putting your critics into handcuffs. It’s a very troubling way for a country to operate. In fact, it’s the way third world countries operate, where they use the army or the police to go after their opposition. We have been thankfully spared from that kind of politics here in America. So, I think if people knew that’s what was going on, there would be a revolt about it.
One of our problems today is that our press has in a sense gone limp. In other words, what’s happened is, we don’t really have a normal press that is a check on the government. The mainstream media has become, in a sense, an extension of the Obama administration and is covering for him. They won’t report information damaging about him, and they are sycophantic to a fault toward the White House. Now Obama knows this, so it encourages people to abuse power when they know that they’re not going to be held accountable. So I think we are at a perilous moment of American politics, but my hope and prayer is that it is a moment, and this is not the new normal.
“The mainstream media has become […] an extension of the Obama administration
If you could speak to President Obama about your indictment or any other issue, what would you say to him?
D’Souza: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never been quite asked that before. Some people said after 2016, wouldn’t it be interesting if you could sit down with Obama and explore in a friendly but probing way, the ways in which your life and his life — which are outwardly so similar – we’re both people of color, we’re about the same age, we graduated college in the same year – how your experiences could be so different. I think that part of it is the fact that I am an immigrant who sees America from the outside. Obama is actually a native-born American, but one that has bought into this idea that America is a force for evil in the world. And so while I am trying to preserve and strengthen America, he is trying to contain America to reduce its oppressive footprint in the globe.
“While I am trying to preserve and strengthen America, he is trying to contain America.”
What can Americans expect to get out of your upcoming movie that they might not see from this book alone?
D’Souza: The book is the intellectual spine of the film, and so the book supplies, if you will, the argument. Movies are not fundamentally about argument. Movies are about showing, rather than telling. Movies are about also an emotional experience that enables you to experience America. So I can do things in the movie — there are things in the book that I can’t possibly do in the film. There’s information, data, footnotes in the book that you won’t get in the film. But on the other hand, the film gives you an experience that is very different from, and in fact impossible to get, from a book. For example, in the book, I can quote people on the left, but in the film, you’ll see them. And the film gives space to some of the most pungent critics of America to rail against America, and then I take them on. So I don’t do the Michael Moore buffoon thing. I don’t jump on my critics before they have a chance to speak, or misrepresent what they have to say, or wake them up when they’re sleeping. I let these people talk, I let them have their point of view, and then I turn the camera around if you will, and begin to ask, “Is this point of view valid?”
[H/T The Blaze]
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