D’Souza’s “Police State” Sounds Alarm on Government Tyranny—and How to Stop It

Restoration News caught up with famed conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in an interview about his latest upcoming documentary, Police State, which reveals the totalitarian threat currently destroying our nation’s civil liberties. Americans should heed his warning.

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza worries that political escalation by the Left is turning America into an authoritarian nightmare. That’s why his next film, Police State, aims to “scare” audiences into realizing how much our physical safety and personal freedoms have diminished.

Having worked on this project as a researcher and adviser—and on D’Souza’s previous film 2000 Mules—this reporter sees it as a potential turning point and one of the most important documentaries to date.

Sounding the Alarm Against American Tyranny

D’Souza said his mission is to highlight how recent leftist tactics have resulted in a “serious encroachment on our basic liberties” unlike any we’ve ever seen before.

“The political majority is not allowed to override or squelch certain rights,” he explained. “One is the right to free speech and freedom of expression. Number two is the right to conscience or religious freedom. Third is the right to petition the government for grievances, and fourth is equal rights or equal justice under the law.”

D’Souza felt these basic tenets are being destroyed by institutions controlled by the Left, putting the nation on a fast track to becoming a third world dictatorship.

The writer behind 2016: Obama’s America and America: Imagine the World Without Her described what a modern police state looks like and how the United States is riding dangerously close to the edge:

Police states have mass surveillance of citizens. . . They also have censorship. . . They have mass indoctrination in the schools and in the media. They are one party states. It doesn’t mean they don’t have elections. . . but the opposition is fake. It’s token. It’s subordinate to the regime, so a one-party state is a defining feature of a tyrannical or a police state. They also have political prisoners, and they criminalize political differences. . . Isn’t it amazing that not one, not two, not three, but all these defining features of tyrannical societies–and of police states–are now evident here in the United States? That’s why it’s relevant to ask the big question: Are we becoming a police state?

D’Souza likened himself to an animal, alerting other members of the heard to a hidden predator amidst the trees.

“The movie gives people a real understanding of the mechanics of the police state,” he said. “This is important because when people don’t know—and a lot of people have very little exposure to the inner workings of government—they fall prey to wild theories that don’t make any sense.

“Even the term ‘deep state’ is one I don’t really like because it implies the whole thing is in hiding,” he warned. “Some of it’s in hiding, but a lot of its right out in the open.”

Censorship, Political Prisoners, and the Death of American Exceptionalism

D’Souza spoke about how American censorship dominates topics related to election integrity, COVID, abortion, and climate change. He also described how fictional warnings from the past have metamorphosized into modern-day nightmares:

It’s right in front of you, out in the open. Media propaganda is fed to you in the open, right there through the airwaves every single day. Orwell, when he discussed 1984, he talked about Big Brother. He says Big Brother has two parts. There’s an inner party, that’s the hidden part, and an outer party. That’s the part that’s visible to the public. I think our police state is the same. One of the things the movie does is, it shows you people who are whistleblowers, informants, people who know the inner workings. It’s important for people to see that. And the second part of the movie is ordinary people who’ve come face to face with the police state.

The film strives to highlight that the America of the past no longer exists today due to government overreach.  

“There are people who have a sense of safety which is not real,” Dinesh said. “They believe the police state will never come for them. They’re like the wildebeest who keeps grazing and says ‘No, that movement in the trees is nothing. It’s just the wind. It’s not a predator that’s going to come jump out of the trees and onto my back and that’s the end of the story for me.’ I want to show people that this isn’t just about Trump and it’s not just about January 6th.”

He then outlined what average people can do to fight back against these evil tactics:

There are only two things you could do. One is to help spread the word and the other is to put pressure, as best you can, on your elected representatives to act. Because ultimately, we need a lot more than that. We need action from elected leaders, but we also need action from our courts, including the Supreme Court. We need action from Republican governors and attorneys general and secretaries of state.

What Would a Conservative Counterculture Movement Look Like?

“We need Republicans to build legal institutions to combat the lawfare of Left,” D’Souza explained, “[and] media institutions to provide an alternative to the kind of hegemony or dominance of the Left. This is not a short-term project. But there are many things that can be done, even in the short term, to trip up the police state.”

He added, “A conservative Hollywood is something that needs to be done. I think in some ways, there is an attempt to do it. Not just by me, but by many others who are now on the other side of Hollywood. But it’s more difficult for our side.”

D’Souza said his counterparts can raise money, setup marketing and garner support from the various industries with ease, while the Republican National Committee (RNC) won’t even return his calls.

Michael Moore would get massive help from the [Democratic National Committee] when he made Fahrenheit 9/11 . . . Unions are buying tickets and distributing them to union members. I make a movie and I never hear from the RNC. My efforts to reach them . . . are absolutely hopeless. The Left, when they do a project like this, is rolling the stone down the hill. Anyone on our side who does it is rolling the stone up the hill. So, it’s doable, but it’s not easy.

D’Souza believes the RNC worries about being labeled “election deniers” or “conspiracy theorists.” He also accused many Republicans of being content with their piece of the Swamp.

“Even the minority party gets to drink at the water hole,” D’Souza emphasized. “They believe their institutional interests are aligned with hanging in there and playing by the rules, even if the rules are set by the other side . . . Maybe they watch [my movies] in secret, but this is not something they want to be publicly seen as helping me with.”

Escalation Will Help Save the Country

D’Souza chose this topic for a film because the nation is becoming like the rest of the world: A dark, brutal, and uncertain place devoid of freedom.

He said it’s vital for conservatives to push back against persecution, or risk losing everything for the sake of an imagined civility. He gave the example of a family traveling west in the 19th century who refuses to fight back even when attacked by outlaw Indians.

Imagine if you said, ‘These guys all have guns, but I’m not going to go for my gun because I believe in law and order. I’m not going to do to them, what they’re doing to me. I’m going to respond with a strongly worded op-ed, or a call to civility.’ This would be deranged. This would be utterly unresponsive to the situation in which you find yourself. When you have the other side showing no respect for your basic liberties, and they are trying to establish a police state, you’ve got to deploy pretty much any means necessary to stop them.

What Will Happen to Donald Trump?

D’Souza alludes to his own confinement and persecution in this film, dating back to his movie about Barack Obama. Yet he maintained his motivating factor for making Police State was seeing ordinary Americans facing prison—or worse—for exercising their liberties under our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

“My case in 2013 when it first came about, I thought of it not in terms of a police state, but really in terms of a personal vendetta . . . I did not recognize it as a prelude or precursor to what would happen later with Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn, and of course now Donald Trump.”

When asked if he thought Trump would be jailed—or even killed—due to this level of persecution, D’Souza said the Left is unlikely to pass up a chance to wipe him off the board.

“I think they are clearly going all out to get this guy, and I don’t think they will shrink from jailing him if they can. Now what are their chances of doing it? I would say pretty good, but not 100 percent. It seems like it should be 100 percent because there are so many charges . . . In some cases, you have very left-wing judges [and] very left-wing juries. So the chance of getting a conviction on at least one, or some counts is really high.”

“I think all of this will be appealed and at the end of the day. I’s probably the Supreme Court that’s going to have to weigh in on all this,” he continued. “We’re heading into very uncharted waters for next year but yes, I think that if the Democrats could jail Trump and keep him off the ticket, they will do it. Why Trump? I think it’s because the Left thinks–rightly or wrongly–that he is the most mortal threat to the police state. And they won’t be able to build it if he is reelected . . . He is the primary target.”

What’s the Endgame?

D’Souza believes the tide can be turned but said it will take the rise of independent media to combat censorship and classroom propaganda, along with an effort to expose third parties acting on behalf of the government.  

“The government takes lists of people that it wants to get banned, but it doesn’t directly hand it off to the digital platforms,” he explained. “It hands off to an intermediary. The Stanford Internet observatory, or it hands off to the Virality Project and these nonprofits then turn around and drop these names into the portals of these digital platforms, and then they ban and censor people to the cheering of the media.”

Dinesh closed with a message of hope though, saying an American turnaround is “doable” and that he “wouldn’t have made the movie if the police state was so far advanced, that nothing could be done about it.”

The film has a unique distribution method, as hundreds of theaters have been bought out for October 23rd and 25th, but moviegoers can also purchase tickets at PoliceStateFilm.net