America: Imagine the World Without Her is a 2014 American political documentary film by Dinesh D'Souza based on his book of the same name. It is a follow-up to his film 2016: Obama's America (2012). In the film, D'Souza contends that parts of United States history are improperly and negatively highlighted by liberals, which he seeks to counter with positive highlights. Topics addressed include conquest of Indigenous and Mexican lands, slavery, and matters relating to foreign policy and capitalism. D'Souza collaborated with John Sullivan and Bruce Schooley to adapt his book of the same name into a screenplay. D'Souza produced the film with Gerald R. Molen and directed it with Sullivan. The film combined historical reenactments with interviews with different political figures.
America: Imagine the World Without Her was marketed to political conservatives and through Christian marketing firms. Lionsgate released the film in three theaters on , 2014 and expanded its distribution on the weekend of the U.S. holiday Independence Day on July 4, 2014. The film grossed , which made it the highest-grossing documentary in the United States in 2014, though D'Souza's previous documentary 2016: Obama's America had grossed over . Most professional film critics called the film poorly-made and partisan. Political commentators analyzed D'Souza's rebuttal of Howard Zinn's criticisms, the filmmaker's treatment of Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and D'Souza's depiction of his own criminal prosecution. Conservative commentators expressed a mix of full and qualified support for the documentary and D'Souza's intentions.
Synopsis
Setting the stage for a presentation of their views, D'Souza and Sullivan provide counterfactual histories in which George Washington is killed during the Revolutionary War, or the country is divided following civil war, creating a world without America that would be vastly worse off. D'Souza identifies himself as an Indian immigrant who chose America, and has been impressed with what a unique force for good it is, something Americans have traditionally agreed with. He claims modern leftists are “telling a new story”, however, contradicting traditional veneration for America in order to “convince a nation to author its own destruction” and “unmake the America that is here now.” He then challenges several "indictments" made against the country and American exceptionalism, including sociology professor and activist Michael Eric Dyson's claim that “Thievery" was the “critical element” for “American empire” and historian and activist Ward Churchill's assertion that the US is the world's new evil empire, and says that 1960s Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, historian Howard Zinn, and others have promoted guilt and resentment regarding wealth inequality that has helped shape the political careers of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
D'Souza argues that America's wealth has been created, not stolen. He says the $700 used to purchase colonial Manhattan from American Indians could buy many desolate parcels globally today, but that individual industry has made New York real estate worth billions. He states that in Europe, India, and elsewhere most countries have been founded on conquest, and observes that the American pattern of wealth creation hasn't been the universal norm. He cites examples like Arab historian Ibn Khaldun preferring looting to trade and says that merchants form Hinduism's second-lowest social caste.
The film argues that American Indians exhibited this "conquest ethic" among themselves, and that most of the American Indian depopulation that occurred during European colonization resulted from the accidental transmission of plagues (which had earlier devastated Europe), not from an intent to wipe out a people. The film argues that modern American Indians have little interest in returning to their hunter-gatherer past. In an interview, Senator Ted Cruz compares the Texas Revolution to the American Revolution. Professor and Reconquista advocate Charles Truxillo is contrasted with an interviewed Tejano who says he has no desire to return to a poverty and crime ridden Mexico and instead wants to live the "American Dream".