The Conservative Breakfast Group (CBG) will watch “2016: Obama’s America” at our meeting on Thursday, November 29. This movie is particularly relevant to the current political scene, given Barack Obama’s reelection.
The CBG meets every Thursday at 7:30AM at the Holiday Inn Express in Chestertown.
2016: Obama’s America takes audiences on a gripping visual journey into the heart of the world’s most powerful office to reveal the struggle of whether one man’s past will redefine America over the next four years. The film examines the question, “If Obama wins a second term, where will we be in 2016?”
Across the globe and in America, people in 2008 hungered for a leader who would unite and lift us from economic turmoil and war. True to America’s ideals, they invested their hope in a new kind of president, Barack Obama. What they didn’t know is that Obama is a man with a past, and in powerful ways that past defines him–who he is, how he thinks, and where he intends to take America and the world.
Immersed in exotic locales across four continents, best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza races against time to find answers to Obama’s past and reveal where America will be in 2016. During this journey he discovers how Hope and Change became radically misunderstood, and identifies new flashpoints for hot wars in mankind’s greatest struggle. The journey moves quickly over the arc of the old colonial empires, into America’s empire of liberty, and we see the unfolding realignment of nations and the shape of the global future.
Larry Schroth says
This work has been discredited, even among conservatives. See the following from Newsweek:
Long before he resigned the presidency of The King’s College, a small evangelical school in Manhattan, over his engagement to a 29-year-old woman while still married to his wife of 20 years, Dinesh D’Souza’s star in the conservative intellectual world had faded. Forsaken by the think tanks that groomed him, the precocious conservative scholar of the ’80s was hard to recognize in the bomb-throwing filmmaker of 2016: Obama’s America, which argues that Obama absorbed anticolonial hatred of America from his father.
But almost from the moment D’Souza arrived on American shores from Mumbai in 1978, the firebrand lurked not far from the surface. He became “radicalized,” in his words, at Dartmouth College, where he believed his colleagues at the right-wing Dartmouth Review were harassed for their views on race, gender, and sexual orientation. The National Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page praised the political stunts of D’Souza and his friends, catapulting them to national attention.
D’Souza came of age in institutions—the Ivy League, elite think tanks—where he was expected to show his facts. His first two books were treated as serious work even by critical reviewers. The New York Review of Books declared The End of Racism, which argued against affirmative action, “the most thorough, intelligent, and well-informed presentation of the case against liberal race policies that has yet appeared.”
But the mid-1990s brought Fox News and the culture wars, and D’Souza discovered an audience for popular polemical writing on moral issues and religion. He rapidly published a hagiographic biography of Ronald Reagan and a series of other books that rehashed—in some cases verbatim—his previous work. Despite his escalating hucksterism, and the fact that he had never obtained a graduate degree or published a scholarly article, he continued to hold posts at top conservative institutions.
D’Souza’s relationship to the establishment right, however, could not survive his 2007 book, The Enemy at Home, which argued that Islamic terrorism was a justified response to American moral decadence. It was savaged by conservative critics; National Review writer Roger Kimball wrote, “The problem with The Enemy at Home is … well, everything.” By the end of the year, D’Souza had resigned his post at the Hoover Institution. When he returned in 2010 with The Roots of Obama’s Rage, he was greeted as a laughingstock on the left and right alike.
D’Souza’s exit from The King’s College will provoke plenty of schadenfreude in right-wing money circles, where his phoning-in of his professional posts has dented his reputation. The sordid circumstances of his departure may prevent him landing another prestigious perch. (His invitation to the Heritage Foundation’s donor convention was rescinded after the alleged affair broke.) But D’Souza’s excommunication isn’t likely to keep him down. Obama’s America is already the second most successful political documentary ever. D’Souza long ago cast his lot with political entertainment, and at the right-wing box office, a lack of scholarly qualifications may be the best qualification he could have.
mary wood says
Why are our local conservatives allowing this discredited person to speak for them via this film ?
Fletcher R. Hall says
I hardly know where to begin this response.
The election is over, we have to get on with life.
Conservatives and Republicans, like myself, need to reflect, think and strategize on how to
make a moderate conservative message acceptable to many ethic groups, including Latinos, Asians, African Americans (especially the middle class) and younger unmarried women.
The control of Congress is one way to instill some modicome of moderation in Washington, but the battle that will rage will leave a long row to hoe.
Ronald Reagan said, ” Immigrants are all Republicans , they just do not know it yet” Immigrants have a much better chance to reach the “Amerivan Dream” rather that the American handout, in the Republican Party. Refreshed ideas with new methods of delivery are essential to the Republican Party.
As Moses found out, it can be a long, lonely in the wilderness, even the polotical wilderness. Republicans cannot function as a permanent minority party as happened after the election of FDR.
Now is time to think and think hard.
Joe Lill says
When you refer to handouts are you refering to Tax Shelters, Low Capital Gains rates, and Deregulation or something else?
Sheila Walker says
Seriously? Showing a movie like this tells me that you don’t have a moderate conservative message. I spent 20+ years in the military and frankly find the Republican attitude towards women condescending and mysogynist. It’s not just young unmarried women that don’t like your message. If the Republicans would start acting like a political party instead of a Christian version of the Taliban, I might actually vote for more of their candidates.
Petey S. Bestmom says
This is not to be regarded as a news story. Note in the lead the use of the “our” pronoun adjectival.
This is no more than a canned press release put out to the media by a special interest group (CBG) It is unfortunate the byline here is identified as “Spy desk” which implies that is was written by Spy reporting staff.
Pay no mind. Leave the breakfast folks to their Cheerios or Froot Loops, as the case may be.