‘Hillary’s America’ and ‘Clinton Cash’

In July, two conservative documentaries were released that try to explain the Clintons: Hillary’s America (rated PG-13, 1 hour 40 minutes) and Clinton Cash (unrated, 60 minutes). Hillary’s America makes an incoherent attempt to paint today’s Democrats as the “real racists,” while Clinton Cash convincingly unmasks Bill and Hillary’s shameless money-grubbing.

Hillary’s America is the latest documentary by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. He promoted it heavily on conservative talk radio, Fox News, and with paid advertisements. It is in 1,066 theaters and ranks 11th in revenue for the year as of this past weekend. This is a very good record for a political documentary.

Mr. D’Souza has had some unfortunate tangles with AR, but I wanted to come in liking Hillary’s America. After all, it could have focused on the Democratic Party’s promotion of anti-white racial quotas, its indifference to black crime, its soft-pedaling of jihad, and its promotion of open borders (though it could have accused the Republican Party of nearly the same faults).

Instead, Mr. D’Souza takes us on a tour of the Democratic Party’s “sins” from 150 years ago and tries to blame today’s Democrats for them. For example, he claims Andrew Jackson was cruel to his slaves and even implies he slept with them. Mr. D’Souza then offers Jackson’s infamous “Trail of Tears” as proof of what Democrats really think about minorities.

The next Democratic president Hillary’s America goes after is Woodrow Wilson. His crime is liking the movie Birth of a Nation (1915) for its pro-Southern views and sympathetic portrayal of Klansmen. Mr. D’Souza then clumsily tries to link these two presidents to Hillary Clinton. It would be as if Michael Moore made a movie called Trump’s America and tried to blame him for the “Teapot Dome” scandal.

Mr. D’Souza should know better. In his own book, The End of Racism, he acknowledges that American slaveholders were not behaving any differently from people around the world for thousands of years. In Hillary’s America he is saying, “Democrats practiced slavery long ago, therefore they’re bad. Today they will impose economic slavery on you.”

Mr. D’Souza also explains that Democrats are the party of eugenics, by way of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. He claims Sanger wanted to “exterminate” blacks, though there is no record of her ever saying that. Indeed, even black leader W.E.B. DuBois was in favor of eugenics.

Mr. D’Souza tells us about the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision of 1927, which upheld a state statute permitting forced sterilizations. The movie uses actors in a lurid depiction of plaintiff Carrie Buck screaming as doctors hold her down to be sterilized. Viewers are somehow supposed to associate this with Hillary Clinton.

The heroine in the movie is a black woman named Ida B. Wells (1862 – 1931). She was a reporter, early feminist, and black racial activist and–otherwise she would not have been in the move–a Republican. In the topsy-turvy world of Hillary’s America, American heroes like Andrew Jackson are villains because they were Democrats while a nonentity like Wells is a hero because she was black, a woman, and a Republican.

If there is one immense disaster Democrats really can be blamed for, it is the 1965 Immigration Act. Championed by liberal Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, passed by a Democratic Congress, and signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, it opened the country up to mass Third-World immigration. Hillary’s America skips over the act entirely. When Mr. D’Souza does mention immigration, it is to say that America is just an “idea,” and that we are all enriched by foreigners. This is what passes for conservatism today.

There is one interesting part of Hillary’s America: its coverage of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a left-wing agitator, noted for his book, Rules for Radicals (1971), which is still worth reading in order to understand today’s “social justice warriors.” Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky and knew him personally. The film notes that Mrs. Clinton thought it was possible to change the system from within; Alinsky didn’t.

Mrs. Clinton is no longer a starry-eyed idealist from Wellesley. She has, instead, learned to work the system from within. Hillary’s America catalogs some of her more notorious financial shenanigans, such as the way she turned $1,000 into $100,000 in shady cattle-futures trading. Mr. D’Souza compares Mrs. Clinton to the Eva Peron, noting that Mrs. Peron also had a charitable foundation that became notoriously corrupt.

Hillary’s America’s frequent use of actors raises the question of historical accuracy. Don Taylor portrays Abraham Lincoln convincingly, and delivers lines about slavery that thrill liberals, but never says a word about sending freed slaves back to Africa.

Interestingly, the actors who play criminals in a jail scene are also convincing–many are black or Hispanic. Mr. D’Souza had to spend some time in the pokey because of election law violations. Maybe that’s where he found out what criminals look like, but he claims it was where he learned the similarities between conmen and Democrats.

Hillary’s America is geared towards white, racially unconscious, Tea Party people. It is meant to reassure them that they aren’t racists–it’s the Democrats. Still, I give it a “C” rather than an “F” because it covers Saul Alinksy and the Clintons’ venality.

Clinton Cash, written and narrated by Peter Schweitzer, has a hard-boiled, “just the facts, ma’am” style. As a result, it is a much better documentary, and focuses on what the Clintons are like today. Aside from a few silly detours, the movie “follows the money.” This movie had nothing like the promotion Mr. D’Souza’s film got, and did not make it into theaters. However, it has been viewed nearly 1,000,000 times on the Breitbart YouTube page.

But aren’t all politicians corrupt? The New York political boss George W. Plunkitt (1842 – 1924) liked to distinguish between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft.” In his view, stealing from the public treasury, or taking bribes in exchange for direct policy favors was “dishonest graft.” “Honest graft” was pursuing the public interest and personal interest at the same time, such as by a politician buying land that he knows will be needed by the public soon in the future.

Mr. Schweitzer makes it clear that the Clintons go in for “dishonest graft.” For example, the Clinton Foundation was ostensibly set up to do charitable works, and the movie shows Mr. and Mrs. Clinton reciting its lofty goals. It rakes in about $200 million a year for a total so far of more than $2 billion. Only 10 percent has been distributed to the needy.

The Clinton Foundation accepts donations from foreign governments. Awkwardly, many governments donated while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and dealing with those very governments. Mr. Schweitzer notes that one of the worst things a politician can do is be on the take from foreign interests.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake was, for the Clintons, an opportunity for corruption. The earthquake killed approximately 200,000 and was the largest humanitarian crisis Secretary Clinton faced. The Haitians wanted their roads and buildings rebuilt, but the Clintons had other ideas: helping enrich their cronies.

The largest single project for Haitian relief funded by US taxpayers was a textile factory called Caracol that cost $124 million. It was supposed to create 60,000 jobs but hired only 5,000 people. Worse, it was set up in the northern part of Haiti, which was unaffected by the earthquake. The factory mainly benefited companies such as Wal-Mart, which has given $1.2 million to the Clinton Foundation.

After the quake, the Haitian government issued its first gold mining permit in 50 years. It went to VCS Mining, a company that had little gold-mining experience but had Hillary Clinton’s brother Hugh Rodham on the board.

Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien owns Digicell, a Haitian cell phone company. He has given an estimated $5 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Just when Digicell was applying to Hillary Clinton’s State Department for grant money for Haiti relief the company paid Bill Clinton $225,000 for a speech. Four months later, Digicell started getting grant money. Bill has pocketed $100 million from speeches, much of it coming from the same people who fund the foundation.

If Hillary’s America was meant to stir up Tea Party supporters, Clinton Cash seems meant to stir up the Left. It highlights the hypocrisy of the many Clinton flip-flops on such key liberal issues as the environment, poverty, the Keystone pipeline, fighting Third World corruption, etc. Once the donations and speaker fees started rolling in, the Clintons switched sides.

Mr. Schweitzer succeeds in showing that the Clintons are nothing more than greedy politicians happy to use their foreign policy connections for their own gain. They are not for non-whites any more than they are against whites. They are in politics for no one but themselves.

The Clintons are masters at saying exactly what liberals and minorities want to hear, which keeps them in power, and power is what made them rich. They are what Wilmot Robertson called “trucklers” in The Dispossessed Majority:

These are the Majority members who are not born rich . . . . If they are men of wealth–and many are–they made their money themselves . . . or in the not unusual case of Lyndon Johnson, in politics. . . . They know from long experience that minority coddling will boost their prestige and respectability, give them a more favorable image in the press and . . . bring them more financial support and more votes.

If the movie has a fault, it is that it tries to cover too many cases of the Clintons’ “dishonest graft.” It’s hard to keep up with all the corruption. I give the movie a B+ overall, and would have marked it higher except that it was sometimes hard to keep track of all the different players. It is still a very sobering portrait of the couple who could move back into the White House next January.