President Barack Obama is remaking the world according to his vision of a less influential America, and one result is chaos abroad that leads to disasters like the apparent shootdown this week of a passenger jet over war-torn Ukraine, conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza told
Newsmax TV on Friday.
"This downing of the airplane is a small indication of what happens when American power is subtracted from the world," D'Souza told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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It's an argument that coincides with the theme of D'Souza's new docu-drama movie,
"America: Imagine the World Without Her," and companion book of the same title.
In print and on screen, D'Souza contends that the progressive moment's relentlessly downbeat portrait of America emphasizes past failings, portrays national strengths as liabilities, and shuns the country's essential contributions to global peace, prosperity and freedom.
D'Souza said President Obama, in withdrawing from the international stage and conceding management of global affairs to others, is helping to make the movie's point.
"For the past 60 years, we have been living in the American era, in which nothing important can happen in South America, in the Middle East or in Asia without America having a big say-so, if not actually determining the outcome," said D'Souza. "People all over the world — from Somali pirates on the high seas to Iranian mullahs to Russian separatists — have always had to worry, 'If we do this, what will America do?' Except now, under Obama."
According to D'Souza, that suits the president.
"He has an ideology that is opposed to an active American presence in the world," he said.
"He is assertive in asserting America's inaction.
"In other words, he doesn't want to lead," D'Souza continued. "He doesn't America to be a dominant force in the world. He wants America to go down so that other countries can come up. The world that we are moving into now is the world that Obama actually wants."
While D'Souza campaigns for a renewal of American pre-eminence, he's also fighting secondary battles over the promotion of his movie and book. On the latter score, at least, he appears to be winning in his skirmishes with a pair of giants of two industries, Costco and Google.
Big box retailer Costco ordered "America," the book, from its shelves on July 1 — just days before the movie's premiere in theatres nationwide,
World Net Daily reported, noting that Costco's co-founder is a Democratic donor who spoke at the party's 2012 convention.
Costco said slow sales were the reason but
after an uproar by D'Souza supporters, the company restocked the book.
D'Souza
also complained to Google that "America," the movie, was mysteriously buried way down in the company's critical search-engine page rankings, leaving a mistaken impression for anyone searching online that the movie was not yet in theaters. Through his lawyers, D'Souza asked Google to investigate.
He called the Costco episode "inexplicable" but thankfully brief.
"Here I am, an immigrant, who has written a book celebrating America, and Costco makes a decision on the weekend of the fourth of July to pull the book," he said. "They claim it's a business decision, but they make that decision on the eve of releasing this major film, which is in over 1,000 theaters nationwide.
"Happily, there was a huge public outcry and Costco makes a U-turn — they put the book back," he said. "In fact, they've ordered more copies of the book. They are trying to make amends."
He said Google is another matter.
"We are still fighting with Google," he said, adding, "[t]he strange thing … is that Google says they are having 'technical problems' in properly listing our film. But they are a technical company. If Burger King was having technical problems, I would understand. Google has built a reputation on supposedly running an effective search engine."
D'Souza said he just wants people Googling "America" and "movie" to be able to quickly and easily find his film.
"America," the movie grossed more than $8 million in its first two weeks of release to become the seventh highest-grossing partisan political documentary of all time, surpassing liberal filmmaker Michael Moore's 1989 debut, "Roger & Me," according to
trade reports.
As of Friday, the book is at #1 on
Nielsen BookScan, #3 on
Amazon's bestseller list.
One skeptical pundit,
Dave Weigel at Slate, said all those numbers prove is that whining gets results.
Movie critics, meanwhile, have enjoyed themselves shredding "America." But D'Souza has no complaints about that.
Arguing mainstream-media film reviewers tend to be politically liberal, he said, "I can understand why the left is upset. I'm glad they are upset. I set out to upset them, and if I got better critical reviews from these people, I would be upset."