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How would you demolish Dinesh D'Souza's arguments in his movie America: Imagine a World Without Her?
As a child and young adult, I spent most of my time in bowling alleys: I learned many life lessons there.
I also learned a great deal while expending hours and days at pool halls, bars, arcades, and working for my father's small and short-lived janitorial company.
One of those lessons was that you win or lose because of your own merits and effort.
For example, I was a “scratch” bowler in my later years, meaning there is no “handicap” or extra points given for being mediocre as a means of making a match “competitive”. Although it is unfortunately all too common today, in the United States, the life lessons of competition, winning, losing, and thus, learning how to handle such experiences with grace, have been destroyed and subverted by a cultural norm of giving every kid a trophy for effort, not keeping score during sports competitions, and putting bumpers in the gutters at the local bowling alley.
What a shame it would be if little Jane or Johnny learned that they are not great, special, wonderful, and capable by virtue of “effort” and breathing oxygen. Oh, the horror! How unimaginable are the consequences!
Every snowflake is not special or unique.
Once again, there is no liberal media; there is only a corporate media. If there was in fact a liberal media, the nonsense and intellectual quackery offered up by Right-wing hacks such as Dinesh D'Souza would not be given a national platform from which their infection could be spread.
Moreover, if there was a “liberal media” Dinesh D'Souza would not have been interviewed by MSNBC and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson about his Right-wing propaganda movie “America” earlier this week.
I have met and talked to Michael Dyson on several occasions. He is smart and good people. I have no doubt that he could have destroyed, with minimal effort, Dinesh D'Souza during his interview on MSNBC. Propriety and the informal rules of being a good host dictated that Dyson hand off D'Souza to the panelists. Unfortunately, they were too nice, polite, and careful in their criticism of a Right-wing professional liar and thug.
The slavish devotion to “fairness” and “balance” by supposed “liberals” in the mainstream media means that equal time is given to foolish and specious claims about the nature of truth and empirical reality by conservatives. Consequently, myth and fantasy are then debated and engaged by serious people as worthwhile and rigorous propositions instead of the alternative where such claims are rightfully rejected as childish nonsense. In this exercise, the Right wins every time.
In all, Dinesh D'Souza's discussion with Dr. Dyson and his guests was the equivalent of evolutionary biologists “debating” creationists. The latter cannot lose because the former have legitimated their absurd premises.
D'Souza's Right-wing propaganda disinformation film “America” could be easily dismissed by basic questions such as the following. America is an “exceptional” country is it not? Then why excuse-make for its crimes? What about pointing out how chattel slavery and the Maafa were a singular and unique crime against humanity? In a sickening display, D'Souza lies, distorts, and willfully misreads the history of First Nations peoples in order to claim that white European genocide against Native Americans was somehow similar to interstate conflict between those communities.
Dinesh D'Souza and the cabal of Right-wing propagandists (who are routinely given time by the “liberal media”) are raping the truth. I worry that my personal ethics and values would not allow me to sit silent while such a crime occurs in front of me on TV, radio, or some other venue. In that moment, I would burn bright. Would I be allowed to burn bright again?
Liberals, progressives, and reasonable centrists in the media who host and entertain Right-wing propagandists are legitimating the latter's fictions and lies. Why accept the specious premises of the debate?