POLICE STATE BRUTALITY: FBI Agents KICK DOWN the Door

Liz Wheeler Show Episode 451 Take one.

Dinesh D’Souza is with me today. He is, as you know, a bestselling author and filmmaker. And his latest movie is about to hit theaters nationwide. It’s called Police State. And I got to tell you guys, I just finished watching. He sent me a screener to watch before this episode so that I could ask good questions about it. And I deliberately watched it.

I just finished watching it like 10 minutes before we went on air so that my raw reaction and all my questions could be unscripted and unprepared. Then it was it was really good. But I got to tell you, I kept getting chills up my backbone because it was kind of scary to watch. It’s a scary film. And, you know, it’s it’s scary not because I’m using the techniques of cinematography to make it scary.

It’s scary because of what’s happening in the country. I made the remark a few days ago that that this is not a film I actually wanted to make because I’m an immigrant. I’m rah rah America. I wrote a book called What’s So Great about America. So I never wanted America to reach a place where a film like this needed to be made.

But alas, it does. And we’re not. You know, we’re moving toward a police state, lives, in my view, but we’re not a full fledged police state. And that’s really why I made the film, because I think the film can be a powerful wake up call to people to say, hey, look where we’re going. This is not where we want to be.

Basically, if we don’t put a stop to it and I want to talk a little bit later about what we actually can do to put a stop to it, because it’s sometimes startling to see all these different avenues cut off. I know everyone’s going to want to watch this movie, so it’s in theaters on October 23rd and 25th.

You can go to police state film dot net to get your ticket. There’s a virtual premiere on the 27th of October. You can also go to police state film that night will put the URL for this guy so you don’t have to remember it. We’ll put it all over social media anywhere that this is that this episode is posted.

So make sure you get your tickets. But Dinesh, you opened the movie with a scene that maybe it’s because maybe it’s because I am a mother of a young child. But I found particularly startling. It was a live action reenactment of the FBI raiding the home of a young family that lives in the suburbs. They were eating what looks to be a meal together, breakfast together.

And the FBI just burst into their house, scared their children to death, arrested the father, ransacked the home, searching for who knows what, and marched the dad out of the house while the wife and the children were left horrified, stunned and frightened. And I think I mean, this is a conversation I have with my husband frequently, because we work in this.

We work in politics and in media about, you know, who’s going to be the subject of the A targeting by the deep state. Next. We all have this phrase that we say, oh, they’re coming for Trump, but they’re really coming for us. He’s just the one standing in the way. And I think it’s going to be jarring for people to see when they watch, especially the beginning of this movie, that one of the warnings in your movie is, yes, indeed, they are coming for you and not just people that say crazy things, not just people that flirt with the edges of agitation or the law, but everyday Americans who are just patriotically trying to defend

their country. I mean, listen, in classic Liz Wheeler fashion, you have gotten to the heart of the matter, which is to say that, yes, Trump may be the poster boy, the kind of primary target of the police state, but there are going to be Americans who feel immune. They feel, well, I’m not Trump and I didn’t go in the Capitol on January six and I pay my taxes.

So I should be okay, shouldn’t I? And our message is, you know, we’re getting to a point where this this police state is not one thing. There’s not a single Stalinist dictator who just goes, I’m going to stop all my enemies and I’m going to prevent anybody from taking power. This is a massive octopus that stretches throughout the federal government.

Many, many agencies of the government, including some that you would not normally enroll in a police state. Right. The CDC, the health authority or the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency. SISA Some of these pretty obscure agencies actively involved in censorship, actively involved in political targeting. Sometimes people say to me, well, Dinesh, is this a movie about the FBI? Well, it is.

But, you know, the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, is 20 times bigger than the FBI. They have massively involved in censorship. They’re massively involved in political targeting. And then you’ve got a lot of agencies and instrumentalities in the private sector. You’ve got the media, you’ve got parts of academia, nonprofit groups, digital platforms. So in other words, this can come at you from many different directions.

And as you know, in the movie, we feature different types of people just going about their business, in some cases involved in a school board meeting or involved in pro-life activism, and suddenly, boom, they find themselves. They find what Orwell calls the boot stamping on the human face. And they really can’t believe it. I mean, it was hard to believe many of these stories I was at least tangentially familiar with.

You talked to the people involved, which I think makes it so much more tangible to people to feel, Oh, wow, this is a mom who had kids like me. This is a dad who was just doing his best to be politically active while providing for his family. And to hear your conversations with them, to see their emotion brings it to life in a way that I think just reading about it, whether it’s on Twitter or whether it’s in the news, doesn’t always bring to life.

But one of the questions this was actually my favorite part of the film, because you see this and you start to feel I mean, it wasn’t it wasn’t any emotional manipulation on your part. But this you start to feel this like hopelessness, fear. You’re like, wow, they are coming for me. And it doesn’t matter if I’m innocent. It doesn’t matter if I tell the truth.

How do I have confidence in this system if it’s so rigged? And my immediate question was, well, wait a second. Let’s take a step back here. And if we’re going to try to solve this problem, we have to understand where it came from because this tangled web didn’t just get dropped on us all at once. What was the origin then of this?

And I thought you did a brilliant job walking through the different things that happened that allowed the overreach that we’re experiencing now to take place. Can you walk us through some of those? Sure. Well, a good way to start is on something that Hillary Clinton said recently. She talked about the MAGA supporters as cult members, and she said there were maybe they need, quote, formal deprogramming.

And I was like, wait, you know, this whole business about cults and deprogramming, you know, I’ve heard this before. And my mind flashed back to the incident in Waco, and this was back in the 1990s. You might remember Ruby Ridge, Waco. Ruby Ridge was actually under Bush I’m sorry. Ruby Ridge was yes, Ruby Ridge was under George H.W. Bush.

Waco was under Bill Clinton. And when there was this kind of horrific incident in Waco, I mean, buildings incinerated, mothers and children, you know, roasted to death. The idea was and many Americans were, if not supportive, somewhat indifferent, because they thought, oh, you know, those people are kooks, they’ll weirdos, they’re cult members. And so the point is that this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that Hillary Clinton was deploying is not merely overreaction or she is engaging in her typical Clintonian hyperbole.

No, what she’s doing is she is dehumanizing her opponents so as to make them ready targets for criminal incarceration. Of course, in the case of the Nazis extermination, that was the same kind of dehumanization used against the Jews. So this is actually very scary stuff. I think the turning point for the police state in America was the aftermath of 911.

And I have to say that me and others were somewhat complicit in this unwittingly because we were like, okay, we have to give the government these expanded police powers, these expanded surveillance and intelligence powers, because they need the weapons to go after foreign terrorists who are trying to kill us. What we discover is that after doing that for a little while, they decided sometime, perhaps in the Obama years, okay, we’ve got all these great powers now.

What about if we deploy them against our political opponents? So I think, ironically, the origin of the police state, at least the power of it, came in the Bush years. So there’s a bipartisan aspect to it, but it was politically deployed against the right in the Obama years initially, and now in a massive escalation under Biden. Yeah, and I appreciate your humility in the film talking about things you’ve changed your mind on.

That’s been a theme that we’ve been covering on my show the last couple of months is the ability of people on the right to change their minds, you know, whether it was about the Iraq war, whether it was about libertarianism, whether it’s about the Patriot Act. There are a lot of things that even us, not just other members of the Republican Party, we believed in, we supported we even we even advocated for ten, 15, 20 years ago that now we see a mistake and I think that that I have more respect for people who can change their mind based on looking at the data that they have now than people who stick to their guns

just out of stubbornness. So I appreciate that. But the example that you gave in the movie was you were targeted and you were targeted by the Obama administration, ostensibly because you criticize them. I wasn’t aware of that connection, by the way. I remember when the whole indictment of you happened and how unprecedented it was and how it was obvious political targeting.

I didn’t realize it was so closely correlated to your outright criticism of Obama. Oh, yeah. You know, when I speak lives on the campus, you know, students will say to me, you know, Dinesh, you know, what makes you think that Obama, you know, was retaliating against you? What makes you think I even saw your stupid movie? This is my film called Obama’s America.

And I go, Listen, guys, you know, the film was in 2000 theaters, and while it was in the theater, as it was being attacked every single day on a website that happened to be called Barack Obama dot com. So that’s where I got the wacky idea that maybe this guy didn’t like my film because I he was posting daily against the film.

And then five weeks later, two innocuous looking FBI agents show up at my apartment in New York. And so there is a connection. Now, you can say I was a dummy for having exceeded the campaign finance law by $20,000 that I gave to a college friend. But the point is, normally that would get a slap on the wrist, a fine, maybe some community service.

Obviously, I’m a first time offender. I didn’t get anything out of the deal. I wasn’t seeking any quid pro quo. But they went after me with tremendous I mean, the whole power of the federal government. What really was eye opening for me, Liz, was that in the course of that, dealing with the Obama DOJ and the FDNY, the Southern District of New York, it crossed my mind that if those guys could have put me away for ten years for this trivial offense, they would have done it.

And it really made me rethink a little bit of everything I had thought up at that point about American politics. It’s not a debate society between two sides that are just offering rival views to the American people. There’s a gangster ization of one side that’s occurred over the past several years. But even despite all that, in my case, I was went through overnight confinement.

I did not see it as a precursor to a police state. In fact, I thought it was a one off. You know, I pissed off this guy. Obama is a vindictive narcissist. He’s lashing out at me. You know, he told Eric Holder, go get this guy. He found some Indian stooge to be the front man. I mean, you’ve had all day.

It’s all like a movie. But I didn’t see it as a precursor to what would happen to Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn. Now, Trump, You know, the 18 people who are co-defendants in the in the Georgia case. So the rapid expansion of the police state under Biden took me by surprise. Right? And I think sitting here, I can tell you that I felt the exact same way when I saw this happen to you.

I thought, well, that’s disproportionate. Clearly, that’s political targeting. I didn’t recognize the correlation between your movie, Obama’s America and his targeting. And I didn’t see it. And perhaps naively, perhaps we’ve just enjoyed such a prosperous, free nation that we didn’t see this coming, which is both a positive a positive commentary on America and a negative commentary on history education.

But I see it very differently now. When I look back, I say, Oh, okay, they were moving the Overton Window, just like when big tech banned Alex Jones. They banned Alex Jones because of the things that he was saying that people didn’t want to defend. They find this tiny little infraction that you committed that others have committed, not justifying it, not saying it was right, but it but jail really a threat to society, putting you away from your family.

I mean, that’s unheard of for something like that. They’re just moving it closer and closer because they know there are so many laws on the books that even those of us who are squeaky clean have clean records, don’t violate the law. Somewhere, sometime there’s probably some violation they could get us on if they want to, when they want to.

This is a key point. Liz and I have had conversations with people and I play a little game. I say, all right, you know, you’re you’re a straight laced guy. You play by the rules. Why don’t you talk to me for 10 minutes about who you are, what you do, where you live, what your family is like.

And at the end of the 10 minutes, I will tell you three ways in which if I were the police state, I would be able to indict you. And I’m talking about actual criminal statutes. So, for example, a doctor, any doctor can be indicted on prescribing unlawful pain medicine. It’s a classic way to go after someone. All you have to do is find one patient who says, I was given this pain medication and I didn’t really need it.

And then the government will bring in some experts who say under that condition, we would not have prescribed the pain medicine. Now this is a criminal offense. And so what the government does and I actually saw this in the confinement center, I found doctors who had become targets of prosecutors for one reason or another. And the prosecutor comes to them and says, well, listen, you’re facing five years in prison for this offense, but if you agree to pay $100,000 fine, you can serve six months.

You just can never practice medicine again. Now, think about it. It doesn’t matter if you’re completely innocent, facing five years in the ruination of your life, your reputation, cutting off your relationship with your family, or you take the six months and you got to go now sell real estate or do something else. I mean, look at the way this is a legal type of bludgeoning, but to me, it’s still naked police state tactics.

I mean, what makes our police state so unique is it marches behind the banner of law and democracy and fighting for the truth against misinformation and affirming freedom. So as a result, a lot of people are lulled into complacency. They’re like, it’s not happening here because I don’t see any style, an overcoat, I don’t see any Hitler mustache, I don’t see any death camps.

So clearly we’re not a police state. Well, in that sense, maybe we haven’t taken that final step towards it. I mean, I think you lay the argument out in your film that we are on a path towards that, even though there hasn’t been a revolutionary vanguard or a violent overthrow, there has been an infiltration, which I think a lot of us have come to realize with more clarity since COVID, since we’ve seen all of our especially our cultural institutions being infiltrated by not just leftists, not just radical leftist, but actual Marxists.

I want to talk to you, though, a little bit about the entrapment examples that you showed in your film, because those were the examples that I was not familiar with. Some of the other stories we’ve heard on the news, even though you go deeper into the details. But some of these examples of the FBI, not just in not just becoming informants of a plot or buddying up to people they think will commit a crime.

So that they can then stop the crime being committed, but actually encouraging and enabling and funding the crimes, basically creating the criminal conspiracy themselves just to arrest someone who never would have committed a crime. It’s almost hard to believe up until this point in our country that this would happen as often as it does. I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

In fact, you know, just a few years ago, if somebody if someone came to me and said, I’m making a movie called Police State, I would have thought that they were making it about North Korea or some other country. So the very fact that these sort of defining features of police states have now crept into the United States is, I think, a matter of great alarm.

It’s also a matter of great alarm because this is a country explicitly founded on the affirmation of basic rights, which are not open to political negotiation. If you think about our constitutional structure, our Bill of Rights, the key point, the key meaning of having a Bill of Rights is that that’s not up for political negotiation. A majority of people do not have the right to cancel out your right to free speech or my right to conscience that is outside in a sense of politics.

And you just need constitutional amendments and supermajorities that are impossible to get to be able to trample on those rights, except the one way you can trample on them is you start ignoring the Constitution or trying to find ways around it. And so what happens typically in the case of censorship is the government doesn’t want to directly censor.

They don’t want to be busted with their hand in the cookie jar. So they hand off the list of people to be banned to an intermediary, typically a nonprofit. Hey, Stanford Internet observatory. Hey, virality project. We got a list for you. You go give that list to Google or to YouTube or to Facebook and let them ban all these people.

And that way we are censoring one step removed and maybe the courts won’t be able to bust us for doing it. So this is a creepy time in America. I would say. And while we’re not all the way there in terms of a police state, it is incredible how far we have come in such a such a short time.

I mean, look at our basic liberties, free speech, freedom of conscience, the right to assemble, the right to petition the government fearlessly for redress of grievances and equal rights and equal justice under the law. Now, our single one of those rights now completely secure. No, they’re all in danger. They are all in danger. And you talk about January 6th extensively in this movie, and you talk about it differently than a lot of the other coverage.

I mean, there’s been reporting on the right from fantastic journalists like Julie Kelly, who was in in your film as well. But you come at it from a different point. You come at it, you call it you compare January 6th and what the government did to these defendants, the Reichstag fire. And there is an unwritten rule in politics that you don’t compare anything else in the world that’s happening to what happened in Nazi Germany.

And yet the argument that you laid out about why January six is serving the same the same purpose that the Reichstag fire did in Nazi Germany, it makes sense. Can you explain that to us? Sure. Can be an important thing when you do these kinds of analogies is to be kind of precise about them. So typically, when people think of Nazi ism, many different images flowed into our heads the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht smashing of Jewish stores, of course, the Final Solution and the Holocaust.

So the Reichstag fire was at the very beginning of Hitler. He was chancellor, but he didn’t have dictatorial powers. In fact, there were many people who were trying to block him within the government. So it’s possible that the Germany could have gone down a completely different road. But then a foreign communist burned the Reichstag, the parliament, and Hitler was able to use that as a pretext and say, listen, we have deadly enemies.

Some of them are foreign agents. They had their colluding with people inside of Germany. I need to have sweeping powers of censorship, political crackdown. I need to be able to go after these enemies of Germany who are enemies of the state. So all of this stuff, which is actually sounds creepily familiar to us now, was echoed in Germany at the very beginning in order to shut down civil liberties.

And my point is that one can see January six, having served the same purpose. So Jan six was deployed and I think Julie Kelly, it is one who makes a point in the film that’s very subtle but very important because the narrative of the left is that the Trumpster is wanted to stop the count. They want him to stop the count of the election being assigned or being given to Joe Biden.

But Julie Kelly makes the point that, no, the actual proceeding that was going on at that time was not the count itself, but the questioning of the election. There were a number of Republicans, Ted Cruz, many others who are going to challenge Georgia. I’m going to challenge Wisconsin. I’m going to challenge Arizona one by one and it was that proceeding that was stopped.

So obviously, the Trump says didn’t want to stop that proceeding. They wanted that proceeding to continue. Their objective was not achieved, but thwarted. So the point of the January 6th analysis is to try to bring a fresh way to think about January six, because this I think it’s an epical a very important event, but in some ways it’s an event that has not really been clearly understood.

No. And at the beginning, the media did such a good job of of portraying January 6th as a real insurrection that a lot of Republicans even fell for the narrative, too, and either spoke out against it or were so worried about being associated with the Q and on Shaman that they didn’t say anything. It’s only been, I think within the last six months, maybe a little bit longer this year at the at the the at least that most conservative, it’s like, wait a second, something really fishy happened with January six.

This is not what we were told. And these are disproportionate sentences for people who didn’t even commit violence. Most of them didn’t commit violent crimes. Here’s the million dollar question, Dinesh. This is what I this is the thought that I kept having throughout the whole movie. If the and I say Deep State, because I’m just talking about government bureaucrats overreach their authority or abusing their authority.

But if the deep state or one of their intermediaries, big tech or nonprofit targets, anybody who threatens the regime. So use you as an example. Use me as an example. If we become so effective in exposing their corruption and actually rooting out the problem to try to solve it, that they feel threatened and they come after us, how do we actually solve the problem?

Because there are big institutional changes that need to be made. It’s not like playing whack a mole where there’s one person, two people, five people that if we can just fire them, get them out of office, the problem will be changed. How do we successfully address this of everybody who becomes a threat is targeted and targeted, unfortunately, successfully.

You know, my view on this, Liz, is that the safest place to be is out front and on the front line. And so it’s not that easy. So, for example, let’s say they come and smash through my door. It’s a little too obvious. I just made a film called Police Day that opens next week. They’re at my door.

I mean, nothing would ratify this film any more. And also, having studied the police, they’ve made a film about it. I’m kind of savvy. I’m not going to be like the January six protester goes, Oh, FBI agents, come sit down. Let me give you a long statement, an eight hour interview. You know, one of the things we’ve learned is to be rationally distrustful of many of these institutions that we once trusted really implicitly.

So So that’s the first point. The second point is that there needs to be a shift in Republican psychology, because, as you say, many Republicans, because they’re essentially generally deferential to authority, obviously back the blue, they tend to think, I can’t really speak critically of these police agencies of government. Isn’t this stuff Are we supposed to be for these guys?

Well, not really. A police state is inherently lawless now. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use the sort of facade of law. It does. If you look at a typical January six proceeding or even look at this judge is putting a gag order order right now on Trump. You know, the courtroom looks normal and you’ve got a bailiff and you’ve got seats and you’ve got robes and you’ve got, you know, a process underway.

But on the other hand, when the system is corrupted and the people in it are corrupted, you have a facade of legitimacy and not legitimacy itself. Now, we have a Republican House. We have a Supreme Court. We have Republican governors and secretaries of state and attorneys general. There are many ways to push back on the police state, but by and large, our side doesn’t use its power because our side is either fearful or timid.

And so part of the point of this movie and I don’t go into this very much in the movie, but I think it’s the effect of the movie is to tell people, hey, listen, you’re not like Jimmy Stewart in a you know, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where you are in a peaceful, small town. And you can say things like, I’m not going to own a gun.

I’m going to rely on my law books. And if the other side produces guns, I’m going to be better than they are and I’m going to call and report them to the authorities. You’re more like a guy who’s gone out west and covered wagons and there are outlaws who’ve circled around your homestead and they’ve got long guns and they want to burn your homestead and rape your wife and kill your kids.

And if you then say, in those circumstances, I’m not going to go reach for my rifle, I’m better than that. I’m a man of principle. You know, it just shows that you are you have no grasp of the situation. So part of my movie is intended to be, and I think you can affirm it’s done in a very sober way.

At no point am I shrill or shouting or saying, Oh, here comes the police state. I am methodically laying out what is going on in the country. Very often my cinematic recreations are things that are clinically described by people, and I’m just recreating them on the screen. And I hired FBI consultants so that everything is done to the letter, meaning I wanted law enforcement guys to watch this movie and say if that FBI and raid occurred, it would have occurred exactly like that.

Yeah. And that’s that’s actually I’m glad you brought that up because the movie is almost understated. I think that’s why it rattled me more than a dramatic retelling would have. Because drama, I mean, you know, you’re just being emotionally manipulated If people are screaming at you and using all kinds of dramatic music, that’s not what the movie was like.

You were very methodical. It was almost your arguments were almost simple. They were distilled so clearly. But it it made it so clear. I was like, okay, well, that’s exactly what’s happening. What’s going to happen next. So if you had to distill this change in Republican psychology that you think is necessary to save ourselves and therefore our country, would you would you define it as Republicans need to become more skeptical of the institutions, both cultural and governmental in our country, more skeptical, more fearless, more willing to use their own legitimate authority?

So, for example, nothing stops the gangsterism of one side better than the other side, saying, Hey, listen, two can play at this game. And so, for example, if prominent Republican attorneys general start issuing indictments of prominent Democrats, and I’m not talking about bogus indictments, I’m talking about legitimate indictments. So, for example, indict Mayorkas. Why? Because child trafficking is going on in a large way in Arizona, and that’s occurring in that state.

And so an Arizona attorney general indicts Mayorkas and see where it goes. It’s a constitutional crisis. Okay. Let the Supreme Court sort it out. So the point being, if you do this, I mean, remember when Elon Musk banned a group of liberal journalists, maybe five or six of them for one day on Twitter, they went nuts. They rediscovered all the virtues of free speech.

They were quoting John Stuart Mill. I mean, they sounded like apostles of open debate and freedom. So the moment that they themselves are beginning to feel the sting of what they’re doing, they begin to back off, which, by the way, was one of the most fun days on Twitter ever. I’m glad you brought that up, because I had momentarily forgotten about when he punished them, put them in time.

I’ll just hear them squeal and shout and call for no censorship and open debate and free speech. Talk about the role of COVID you mention called it. It’s a very short part of the film here, But I think that you’re correct when you say that it served as an accelerant to what January six had maybe already begun.

I mean, I know the COVID, the draconian COVID stuff happened before January six, but the censorship stuff really happened after in 2021. Yeah, the censorship before was limited to one issue. And by and large, it was like you held many of these digital platforms sort of canonized. Foushee And they said, if Foushee says it, it is science. So there was a kind of a cosmic stupidity to whole the whole thing, but nevertheless it was limited to one issue.

After January 6th, the issues expanded, of course, initially election fraud, but pretty soon there was a long list. And if you go now on the YouTube guidelines, you’ve got the trans issue, you’ve got abortion, you’ve got climate, you know, you’ve got elections. So now it’s basically a censorship across the board. Corbett added a few elements, like restrictions on church attendance, which I don’t think otherwise would ever have been enacted that would never fly.

But COVID allowed people to allow the left to exploit panic, panic and fear are the great friends of the police state. And this is really why the climate issue is so big for the left, because it has the same sort of potential. Oh, they know it’s an apocalypse. You know, the oceans are going to swallow up our coasts.

Now, what’s difficult is no one really believes that. I mean, people are still buying properties out of the ocean. Real estate agents are selling. And so on. So there’s no evidence that the market gets any significance to any of this. So the propaganda has to be really high for it to begin to sink in. But but yes, fear the fear of of a virus allows the left to seek wartime restrictions on people that they would never otherwise consent to.

And as Gavin Newsom pointed out, after COVID, we’re not going back to normal. This is supposed to be permanent. So that’s my last question for you is of of the different people that you interviewed and highlighted in this in this film, was there any one or any one thing that they said to you that really made you feel emotional in a in a different way than just sort of a clinical aspect of putting together a film and a narrative?

Well, I wanted the film to show two types of people. Trump is, of course, in the film, but he’s not a major figure in the film. He is the the sort of main target of the police state and the fact that he’s facing 90 plus indictments, I mean, 90 plus charges. Think about this, Liz. I mean, if they had charged him with one thing and said, listen, he hang on, he held on to those documents, he pugnacious, he refused to return them, You know, we could look at it.

But the fact that they had the shotgun approach of, you know, let’s get him we can get him in D.C., we’ll get him in Georgia, we can get him in Georgia, We’ll get him in New York. If we can get him on the criminal, we’ll get him on the civil ruin. His businesses. I mean, this is classic police state thuggery.

But that being said, I wanted the film to focus on whistleblowers and informants who know how the police state works. So you get a little bit of an insight into the working of the police state, its construction. And then second, ordinary people who have felt the hot breath of the police state on their face. And I think that’s really where my sympathy was the strongest, because it’s like, you know what, your you’re like a defenseless lamb that is being set upon, you know, by a predator here.

And you have no idea that this predator does not care about, you know, because even Solzhenitsyn in the opening chapter of the gulag says, when people come to arrest you, you always land like bleed out. Why? What for? What did I do? Surely there’s been some mistake and sergeants and goes, no, there’s no mistake. But they’re never going to give you a reason.

They’re never going to give you an explanation. Your name is on a list and that’s all that matters. So again, that’s the gulag. That’s the full fledged police state. We’re not there yet, but some Americans have already gotten a preview of that. And those are the guys that are in the film. Yeah. Then they really tore up my heart strings, I’ll tell you to see their how emotional they felt, but also their courage and not backing down and not cowering even as it’s wrapped some of their families.

It’s I I’m excited for everybody to watch this movie. I really recommend it go to police state film dot net. That’s where you can get your ticket. You can either watch it in theaters on October 23rd and 25th or you can watch it at home. There’s a virtual premiere on October 27. All different kinds of tickets go to the same website.

Police State film dot Net denies any final thing you want to have before people watch this film in full. Well, I liken the film to I feel a little bit like an animal that sees a movement in the trees and is trying to alert the herd that, hey, something’s wrong here. We need to take protective action because there are people, you know, antelope style who feel like, Oh, no, Dinesh, that’s just the wind or or, you know what?

They might be a predator, but it’s not going to land on my back. So there’s a Republican and a conservative tendency to be in a little bit of denial. And the problem with police states is that if you let them get too far, once the jaws of the police state snap shot, then your position is much more difficult.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn says, then your only option is to try and run, to get out, get your family out, get your money out. We don’t want to be in that situation, not in America. And so this film, I think, I hope, serves as a warning and a wake up call. And as I said at the very beginning, you sent me a screener.

So I watched this movie right before we sat down for this interview. And I can confirm that people should watch it. And it does all of those things. Dinesh D’Souza, thank you for being on the show today. Thanks for this conversation and thank you for making this film. It’s really important. Guys, go to police, state film, not police, state film that not.

I’ll post that URL everywhere we publish this episode. So you guys can get your tickets before it airs next week. Dinesh, good luck with the prayer. Thank you, ladies. I appreciate it. All right, guys. Police, state film, dot net. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.