Rush Limbaugh Newsletter, Sept. 2012.
2016: "Obama's America" - the movie...
As he published The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010), I spoke to this brilliant researcher and president of New York City’s The King’s College for the November 2010 Limbaugh Letter. Now I’m delighted to revisit him as he releases his new book, Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream, along with a must-see new documentary, “2016; Obama’s America” – now in a theater near you:
RUSH: Hey, Dinesh.
D’SOUZA: Rush, how are you?
RUSH: I’m good. I appreciate your coming back for this. It’s important, because you’ve turned your research into a movie that’s going to be huge. Have you heard about Howard Fineman’s recent “tweet” about the Brits?
D’SOUZA: I have not, but tell me about it, and I can respond if you like.
RUSH: I think it dovetails with what we spoke about earlier, and what your book is about. Fineman tweeted, “Brits long ago lost their empire, powerful currency. They’ve got social strife, but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.”
D’SOUZA: laughs.
RUSH: Isn’t that what we’re doing? Fineman’s saying the Brits are showing us how to preside gracefully over our own decline. Now it’s our turn to decline. Isn’t that basically your theory of what Obama’s doing?
D’SOUZA: Absolutely. The key is to understand that with Obama, decline is not an accident. It is a deliberate move. Obama subscribes to an ideology that sees it as good that American influence shrink, that the American economy be smaller. Obama wants to reduce America’s footprint in the world, because he thinks we are stepping on the world.
RUSH: It is safe to say that Obama thinks that we were founded in an unjust way, and that we became a superpower in an immoral way? If we hadn’t taken from here and appropriated from over there, we wouldn’t have been this superpower. Therefore, we didn’t deserve it.
D’SOUZA: Yes. Obama is like the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers who has decided to call plays for the Lakers to lose, because he thinks it’s really bad that the Lakers keep winning. He thinks it makes the Lakers arrogant and aggressive. It’s bad for the Lakers and bad for everyone else. So we’re in the remarkable position of having a President who’s been chosen to lead our country, who most people think is fighting to protect America’s position as No. 1 in the world, but who is actually actively working to bring America down a notch, both economically and in terms of our power around the world.
RUSH: Is he comfortable with the economic misery that is the byproduct? He’s not affected by this? These are real people, Dinesh, whose lives are being destroyed.
D’SOUZA: Right, and someone might say, “Wait a minute. The middle class is getting hurt, and even poor Americans are suffering as a result. Doesn’t this give Obama pause? Here I think we need to ask, “When Obama talks about ‘the 1% and the 99%,’ who is he actually referring to?” Most people think he’s referring to the 1% and the 99% in America. But if you know anything about Obama, if you read his book and listen carefully to what he says, Obama’s a global guy, and he thinks in global terms. I’m convinced that he means the 1% globally and the 99% globally. So America is the 1%,” Most Americans, middle class Americans for sure, but even poor Americans, are rich by world standards. For this reason I think that in the global reparations that Obama wants to see, he doesn’t really mind if middle class and even lower middle class suffer, because he’s redistributing income, not just within America, but away from America to the rest of the world.
RUSH: When we previously spoke, you assigned a lot of this to his father and anti-colonialism. I detected that there was something more than an ideology that you thought was behind this. You thought that Obama was cutting this country down to size because he didn’t like it very much.
D’SOUZA: He certainly doesn’t like what could be called traditional America. He doesn’t like the dream of the Founding Fathers. I would argue that Obama has a very different dream than the American dream that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had.
His father is a critical figure, because throughout his early life, Obama had this mythic image of his father. He literally thought his father was a kind of Gandhi or Mandela, sort of a freedom fighter on the front lines. It wasn’t true. His father was either philandering at Harvard or getting into drunk driving accidents in Nairobi. He was not, in fact, this great figure Obama thought he was. But Obama got that idea from his mother – who was also, by the way, a kind of Third-World-oriented leftist. She was the one who cultivated in Obama’s mind this kind of imaginary father.
Now, interestingly, throughout his life, Obama didn’t have his father, and what he did was he sought out mentors. I call them Obama’s “founding fathers,” kind of surrogate fathers who could teach him, if you will, chapter and verse of the father’s Third World anti-American ideology. Who are these guys? There was Frank Marshall Davis, the communist in Hawaii. There was Edward Said, the Palestinian radical at Columbia. There was Roberto Mangabeira Unger at Harvard Law School. We know more about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but let me say just one word about this Roberto Unger fellow. I’ve researched him pretty extensively, and in my new book coming out, called Obama’s America, I have a section on Obama’s “founding fathers.”
Roberto Unger has called for an alliance of Russia, China, India, Brazil to, as he puts it, gang up on the United States. He says that America’s being No. 1 is bad for the world, and all these other countries need to make a single team and overthrow the United States from being No. 1, and this he thinks is a good thing. Obama took a number of courses from Unger at Harvard, and the two stayed in close, although secretive, contact for years – until the 2008 Presidential campaign. When Unger’s name surfaced, he disappeared, and later told David Remnick, Obama’s biographer, that he’s a leftist and a revolutionary, and he didn’t want his connections with Obama to be exposed because it would hurt Obama.
These are the guys Obama hung out with, and these are the guys whose ideology helped to frame Obama’s mind.
RUSH: You’ve been able to uncover this. Others have endeavored to learn this. Why hasn’t this knowledge of Obama become mainstream? It’s not that hard to understand. It makes perfect sense once it’s explained.
D’SOUZA: Rush, I think two things are going on. First, Obama is not only un-covered, and by that I mean un-vetted as a President, but when damaging information about Obama surfaces, lots of people actively try to block or suppress it. They do it either by denying the facts or by trying to discredit the messenger.
When we were filming in Hawaii, in Chicago, in Indonesia, in Kenya, we’d interview all these guys, and they knew Obama’s dad. They knew his mom. They knew young Obama. They had important things to say about Obama’s formative influences, and yet when I’d ask them, “When was the last time you’ve been interviewed,” they’d say, “Never. No one’s been down here.” There’s a massive un-covered story here. I’m no master sleuth, but it gave me the great advantage of having these guys willing to talk and not having been talked to before.
A second factor worth mentioning is that there is a tendency even among some Republicans and conservatives to try to fit Obama completely into American history. The idea is, he’s a socialist, or he’s being manipulated by some cabal, or he’s a civil rights guy who’s sort of gone off the rails. But trying to fit Obama into American history, we can miss Obama’s own history. Obama is a global guy who sees America from the outside. Very weird, because I believe he was born in America, but nevertheless he has this sort of double vision. I think I stumbled onto it in part because I grew up in India. I see America a little bit from the outside and the inside. Maybe that’s helped me to get Obama in a way that other people haven’t quite done so.
RUSH: He just had a fundraiser at Harvey Weinstein’s place in Connecticut, 35 grand a head. He does these things in Hollywood and everywhere he goes. I ask myself – sometimes I go nuts asking myself this question – do these people, who are out raising money for him, the people who also supported Bill Clinton and will support any Democrat that comes along, have any idea what they are facilitating by supporting this guy and raising money for him? Are they also on this same page, that America needs to be cut down to size, or are even his rabid supporters in the dark about who he is?
D’SOUZA: Rush, here I think we have to distinguish between the hard left and mainline liberals. Both of them support Obama, although I think in a somewhat different way. For the hard left, I think American decline is a virtue – and, by the way, there’s an analogy to British decline. In the late 19th century, there was a great debate between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was a Tory. He was the champion of Empire, and basically said to the British, Let’s be a great country. Let’s project our influence around the world.” Gladstone said no. Gladstone said, “We should be” – and this is his phrase – “little England.” He said, “Lets forget about Empire. It’s too much trouble. Let’s just go back to tending our vegetable gardens. Let’s grow our petunias. Let’s just live a local comfortable life.” And there were lots of people who supported that idea.
Now Gladstone was in no position to actually carry this out, and it took two world wars to break the back of the British Empire. I believe Obama, in the same mode, supports, not “little England,” but you might say “little America.” He wants to shrink American influence because he thinks that’s good morally for us, and obviously good also, he thinks, for the world. There are many people on the left who secretly agree with him. They know Obama is promoting decline, and they want decline. So there’s a kind of pact between Obama and this group of supporters. But it’s not the majority. I believe that if most Democrats actually knew Obama’s agenda, they would be horrified, and oppose him relentlessly. One reason I think our movie will get ferocious attacks is precisely because its thesis, if believed, would undermine Obama – not just on the right, but even among mainline liberals.
RUSH: I want to talk to you about the movie in just a second, but we’ve mentioned British Empire a couple of times. You’re from India. You’re a perfect person to ask this question. Conrad Black wrote a piece in National Review that I don’t think caused a ripple, which surprised me. He basically, in his unique way, made the case: say what you want about colonialism, but every nation under British colonialism was much better off then than they are now, and he included India, African nations. He was speaking relatively, regarding the lifestyle circumstances for citizens in these countries, that when the Brits pulled out and when the culture pulled out, everything deteriorated almost uniformly throughout the British Empire. What’s your take?
D’SOUZA: I think colonialism was, indeed, the transmission bell of Western civilization, and many countries got the ideas of the West – including, by the way, the idea of self-determination. Even national liberation movements in countries like India were influenced by Western ideas, and British ideas in particular. I would put it this way, Colonialism may have been hard and often was hard for the people who lived under it, but it has nevertheless proven to be beneficial to their descendants. So if you were to ask my grandfather, he did suffer some of the wounds and injuries of colonialism. The British set a very low ceiling, above which no Indian could rise, and so a whole class of Indians felt, if you will, pushed down or unable to rise up to their ability by colonialism. But, nevertheless, I would say that my own life is vastly better, and India’s future prospects are vastly better because India was, in fact, ruled by the British and ruled for so long, allowing Western ideas to really sink in. So colonialism is a mixed bag on balance, but it has certainly enabled India to enter modernity in a much stronger position.
RUSH: That was essentially Conrad’s point. One of the things you and I spoke about last time was colonialism as an animating aspect of Obama’s life. We believed at the time – well, I believed at the time – the story he told that his grandfather was taken prisoner by the British in the Mau Mau rebellion and tortured. We come to find out, via David Maraniss’ book, that none of that happened. Would you agree that a lot of these tales that Obama wrote about in his book were exposed as falsehoods? Does that change any of the perception of what’s motivating Obama, as this globalist? Has he been lying to himself about these stories? Or has he been lied to about them?
D’SOUZA: This is a bit tricky, Rush. There’s clearly a lot of sleight of hand and deception in Obama’s book. For example, Obama had an eight-year close mentoring relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, but he never names Frank Marshall Davis. He never mentions some of his other “founding fathers” at all. He talks about relationships that he either never had or were actually quite different than he describes. So there is a lot of manipulation in Obama’s book. Whether or not his grandfather was interned and tortured, I believe it’s debatable. The grandmother, Sarah Obama, is convinced it happened. Maraniss says it didn’t happen because he can’t find any records of it, but it is known that the British destroyed a lot of the records of the Mau Mau revolt. Maraniss also quotes some local guys, including a local policeman, saying they would know if this guy was interned. So it’s a debate, and I can’t settle it, but I do think that the grandmother relayed to Obama harrowing tales of the grandfather being tortured. Whether or not it actually happened, Obama heard that it did when he went on his month-long trip to Kenya in 1987 – so I think it has been part of the furniture of Obama’s psyche. It did influence him, whether or not it actually happened in that way.
RUSH: Now the movie is basically your book, is it not? Your book made into a documentary.
D’SOUZA: Yes, the movie’s based really on two of my books: The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which came out in 2010, and my new book, Obama’s America. The earlier book looks back at Obama’s roots, and the new book looks forward at what the next four years would be like if Obama is reelected. The movie combines themes from both.
RUSH: You traveled to Kenya. You met the brother who lives in the now infamous hut. I have a hearing problem, so I’ve only seen the video, and read the excerpts of your conversation. What have you learned from him?
D’SOUZA: George Obama is an interesting case. Here’s a guy, 30 years old, living in Huruma, a slum of Nairobi, and Obama has not lifted a finger to help him in any way. He’s living not just in poverty, but in Third World poverty on a few dollars a month, with no assistance from Obama. By the way, he’s not the only one. Obama has an aunt, his father’s sister, Hawa Auma. This woman is selling coal on the streets of a village in Kenya. She says she wants to get her teeth fixed but has no money. Here’s Obama, who’s not only a multimillionaire but the most powerful man in the world. The interesting question is, why won’t he help?
This is even more puzzling because Obama has been traipsing around the country saying in Biblical cadences, “We are our brother’s keeper.” Well, wow, here’s his actual brother living in Third World destitution, and Obama evidently feels no obligation to help. That’s a mystery. In the film, we sort of unravel the mystery by showing what George’s true heresy is. George’s heresy is twofold. Number one, he doesn’t worship at the shrine of Barack Obama, Sr. In other words, to him his dad is nothing. He abandoned him. George couldn’t care less about him. Second, George is actually – and I hesitate to use this term, but it’s true – a conservative.
George says things like, “I’m not going to blame the British for the problems of Kenya. We’ve been independent since 1963. Other countries like Malaysia and South Korea, and even South Africa, all these other countries have gone way ahead of Kenya and developed much more than Kenya even though Kenya was ahead of them at the time of independence.” I think the reason Obama hates George is because George is, in a sense, ideologically the polar opposite of the President. So, Rush, I chuckled and said we may have elected the wrong Obama.
RUSH: Here you have a brother living on nine dollars a year, or whatever it is, and you have an animus for the guy because he may be ideologically different. That’s amazing, So small.
D’SOUZA: Rush, Obama is not a unifier, contrary to what he said. That was one of his most misleading statements, because Obama divides people, in kind of a Manichean way, into those who are on his side and those who are enemies or sellouts. If you read Obama’s book, there’s only one person about whom he uses the N-word. He actually uses the term “house n---er,” amazingly, directed at his own grandfather, Onyango Obama. It’s incredible that there hasn’t been more comment on it, that Obama would describe his own grandfather in such an appalling way. Why does he do it? He does it because, according to his granny, Sarah Obama, the grandfather, Onyango Obama, became very pro-British in his later years. Onyango would say things like, “The British really had to be really remarkable in order to gain this worldwide empire. The British are very organized, and they know how to get things done. Africans really don’t.” There’s all this politically incorrect stuff attributed to Obama’s grandfather, which makes Obama fume, and that’s when he begins to call his grandfather an Uncle Tom, a sellout, and then the N-word.
RUSH: Obama’s entire political existence is a political cover-up. Now, how did the movie come about, Dinesh? Why did you decide to do it?
D’SOUZA: A book has a limited audience. People doubted my conclusions, asking, “How could Obama be so influenced by his father?” I thought, “Gosh, if you’d just read my book – or even read Obama’s book – you wouldn’t be saying that.” Surfing on Amazon, I noticed that Obama read his own book in audio books. As I began to listen to the audio, I thought, here’s the key; we have Obama speaking in his own voice – if I can just get that out there. That’s when I got the idea for the documentary. I remembered that in 2004 Michael Moore made “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a terrible movie but beautifully timed, and he dropped it right in the middle of the election debate. So I got the idea of kind of taking a page out of the Michael Moore approach, and making a documentary film.
I was lucky to find Gerry Molen, a major Hollywood guy, a long-time partner of Steven Spielberg, a guy who made movies like “Jurassic Park,” “Minority Report” with Tom Cruise, and of course “Schindler’s List.” The two of us got together and said let’s do this, let’s make a film that doesn’t look like a TV documentary but looks like “Out of Africa,” a real movie, a beautifully shot film with an original musical score that’s shot all over the world, and we’ll let Obama speak at critical points in the film in his own voice, and that will settle the argument. People will see directly for themselves and be able to make up their own minds about who this guy really is, and that’s a story that’s not out there. I don’t believe that Romney will put it out. I don’t think the RNC will put it out. So we feel we have an aspect of this story that desperately needs to be told, and if America could find out about it, I think even a liberal will walk out of this movie shaking his head and saying, “Wow. I know a whole lot about this guy that I didn’t know 90 minutes earlier.”
RUSH: The movie raises the question, what would a second Obama term be like? Without giving anything away, could you tell me if America survives as founded in Obama’s second term?
D’SOUZA: I think if Obama had a second term, we could reach the tipping point on debt. The highest deficit of George Bush was under $500 billion. Obama has had deficits every single year in excess of $1 trillion. He’s added $5 trillion of debt. Imagine if he added another five in the next four years. America would be $20 trillion in debt. That’s twenty thousand billion dollars. At that point, you’re not talking about decline. You are approaching collapse. You might say, any American President would find this utterly reprehensible, but, no. In some ways debt can be a way of settling global scores. If you think that America has gotten rich and powerful by ripping off the world, then you can see debt as a way of settling the account. Our children, our grandchildren, are going to have to pay it off. They’re going to owe the rest of the world.
RUSH: Exactly right! That is exactly right!
D'SOUZA: So it's a very scary prospect. Then look at what's happening in the Middle East, Rush. There are three crucial countries in the Middle East. There is Egypt, there is Saudi Arabia, and there is Iran. Iran has been in the hands of the radical Muslims since 1979. Egypt is heading there as we speak. What's left? Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia falls, the radical Muslims are in the position to realize their century-old dream to unify the Muslim world into a single caliphate - what in the movie we call the United States of Islam. No small country would be able to resist this, not Jordan, not Iraq, no one, if Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia were all in the radical Muslim camp.
RUSH: Where does Obama fit in with that? Because of the books and the movie, you probably are asked frequently about Obama's religion.
D'SOUZA: I think Obama is what I would call a subscriber to Third World liberation theology. He's really not a Muslim. His father was an atheist. His mom was an atheist. His step-father, Lolo Soetoro, was an atheist. He was raised without religion. He kind of found Christianity, but it was not mainstream Christianity. It's not the Christianity of the Pope, or of Rick Warren. It's not traditional Christianity. It is a brand of Christianity that is subscribed to by some radical activists in South America, by some guerillas in Latin America, and also by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. What appealed to Obama about Jeremiah Wright was nothing to do with race. It was the phrase, and all it embodies, "God damn America" - because what does "God damn America," mean? It means that America - not Iran, not North Korea - is the rogue nation in the world. We are the bad guys, and that is the key to Third World liberation theology, It sees Christ a a kind of guerilla revolutionary fighting to overthrow, if you will, the capitalists, the imperialistic powers that be.
RUSH: So it is incorrect to assign excessive racial motivation to Obama? For example, are we to ignore when he approvingly quotes Wright in his book, "White man's greed runs a world in need," or what have you?
D'SOUZA: Colonialism did have a racial aspect. The white man conquered the world, and it didn't escape the attention of the British and the French that the guys they conquered were black and brown, and that they were white. There was a sort of racial hierarchy that crept into it, but fundamentally colonialism was not about race. The British didn't go to conquer India because the Indians were brown-skinned. They went because there was land, and they wanted to rule, and it was a project of power. So there is a racial element here, but fundamentally I think Obama's not motivated by race. Look at the disinterest that he shows, the open lack of interest in the inner city, in black issues in America. There are lots of black leaders who are just appalled and are critical of Obama, but they have to keep it under wraps, because Obama has such broad support, for symbolic reasons, within the African-American community.
RUSH: The Hollywood Reporter has declared, unsurprisingly, that your film will have no impact whatsoever. They reviewed it, saying, "The film already opened in the friendly territory of Texas and will be released in the rest of the country this month, where it will make few waves at the box office or at the polling booth." But then the clowns at Daily Kos are warning their readers about the potential impact of the movie. What is your expectation? And what's your reaction to the Hollywood press, "Doesn't have a chance. He didn't even take it to the Cannes Film Festival like Michael Moore did. Doesn't have a prayer."
D'SOUZA: (laughs) I think that's sort of wishful thinking on the left. Rush, I've sat at the back of theaters and watched people watch this film. Usually, when the credits roll - and this is a typical reaction - there's stunned silence for about 60 seconds, and then the whole crowd stands up, and there's a standing ovation. People come out of the theater in tears. We have shown the film to a focus group of "undecideds," many of whom voted for Obama in 2008. Some of them voted Republican in 2010. People who watch the film who are on the fence see a massive shift in their view of Obama by the end of the film. Some who voted Obama a positive 8 dropped down to 2. Others who rated him a 7 dropped down to a 0. We've got Obama people for Obama going in, who are done with Obama when they come out.
So we feel we've got a film that's a real stimulus to debate, one that's not just for conservatives. Conservatives will find it inspiring and exciting and should tell their friends about it, but it's a film that also has the ability to shake people in the center and sow some seeds of doubt, even among people who see themselves as pro-Obama.
RUSH: Dinesh, this is very serious and hard work you've done with your books, and I really appreciate your giving your time again.
D'SOUZA: Rush, I appreciate it very much. I honestly feel that you can help us immensely.
RUSH: We'll be plugging it and do what we can to get people to see it. It's important, and I wish you the best with it.
D'SOUZA: It's fun to talk to you as always. I look forward to the newsletter. We're advertising on your show, but if you can push us, I think you will create a sensation. The way for us to get independents in the theater is to make this a conservative sensation and get the liberals screaming. That's going to get a lot of guys in the middle saying "Gee, I've got to go find out what this hubbub is about."
RUSH: We'll have fun with it. We'll see if we can make that happen.
D'SOUZA: I appreciate it. Thank you, Rush.
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To read another review of Dinesh D'Souza's 2016 "Obama's America," click here.
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To read another Rush Limbaugh article, click here.
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