WHAT A READ - Dinesh D'Souza: Obama did teach me a lesson

Dinesh D'Souza: Obama did teach me a lesson

President's nemesis gained new insight after serving sentence

NEW YORK – If the aim was to punish him for criticizing the president and his leftist agenda, the Obama administration failed, contends author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in his new book, “Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party.”

D’Souza produced two commercially successful documentary movies that each were accompanied by a No. 1 New York Times bestselling book.
In his new book, D’Souza describes his sentencing last year and the subsequent nighttime detention in a San Diego halfway house after he pleaded guilty to violations of federal campaign-finance law.
He says he turned the experience around to emerge not as the vanquished but the victor.
“I was destined to spend every night for the next eight months sleeping in a dormitory with more than a hundred rapists, armed robbers, drug smugglers, and murderers,” D’Souza writes. “It would turn out to be one of the most eerie, and formative, experiences of my life.
“Here, among the hoodlums, I learned how to see in the dark, and through this “night vision” I began to see politics very differently,” he says. “I got to know the hoodlums and read some of their case files. I learned how they think and how they operate, how they organize themselves into gangs, how they rip people off and crush their enemies. I understood, for the first time, the psychology of crookedness.”
Through the experience, D’Souza says he began to visualize Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and modern liberalism “not as a defective movement of ideas” but as a criminal enterprise.
“And I have to thank Obama, the liberals, and the judge for this learning opportunity,” he says.
“All of them are responsible for putting me in a situation that made this book possible.”
He says they all wanted to teach him a lesson, “and I can now say, with the benefit of hindsight, that their objective has been met.”
“Little did they know what a valuable lesson it would be, even if not quite the lesson they intended,” he writes.
D’Souza has become known for his two popular films critical of President Obama. “2016: Obama’s America” was released during the 2012 presidential campaign and “America: Imagine the World Without Her” came out in July 2014, ahead of the midterm elections.
As WND reported, after pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations, D’Souza was sentenced in September 2014 to eight months in a work-release center, five years of probation, a $30,000 fine and community service. He pleaded guilty in May 2014 to arranging “straw donors” to contribute $10,000 to the failed 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of Wendy Long, a college friend.
‘Scariest gang’
D’Souza explains how his conversations with the inmates affected his political vision:

I got more cynicism in a conversation I had with an African American drug dealer who described the FBI in rather unusual terms.
“Of all the gangs,” he said, “the FBI is by far the scariest, man.”
The scariest what? “That’s what they are, man, a gang, just like the Crips and the Bloods. They got gang uniforms, they got passwords, and they got the best weapons of any gang in the world. They know it, and we know it, and we all relate to each other on that basis.”
Another gang, he suggested, was the Drug Enforcement Agency. “Half the time they are fighting the drug gangs,” he said, “and the rest of the time they are making friends with them.”

D’Souza continued:

I remembered the story of a pirate who was robbing boats off the Aegean coast. When Alexander the Great heard about it he sent for him. “What is your idea,’ he asked, “in infesting the sea?'”
The pirate replied: “The same as yours, in infesting the land and the water. But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate; because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.”
I checked and found this story in Augustine’s City of God. Augustine concludes: “What are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms?”

From this, D’Souza derived the central thesis of his book: “It’s the idea inspired by my criminal compatriots, that the biggest thieves are in the government, that they are still at large, and that what they are stealing is America itself, its wealth and power. My fellow criminals don’t know this to be true, but they suspect it, and I intend to prove they are right.”
How to steal a country
D’Souza believes the objective of the far left under Obama and Hillary Clinton is “stealing the entire wealth of the nation, the value of homes and the lifelong savings of all the people, the sum total of the assets of every industry from banking to electronics to oil drilling, all the funds allocated to health and education and every other service, both private and public; in sum, the entire wealth of America, built over more than two centuries.”
“The thieves I am speaking about want all of it.”
But the Obama-Hillary stealing of America does not stop there, D’Souza explains.
“They want to own your businesses and your savings, how you work and whom you associate with, but they also want to control your education, your faith, your family, and what you watch on TV,” he continued. “They seek to regulate how you feel and what you think and how you love. They want to control your dreams and ambitions, your personal aspirations, your ‘pursuit of happiness.’ They want to own you, and to a considerable degree, they already do.”
D’Souza details the progressive belief that America’s wealth is made up of stolen goods.
“This is a familiar litany,” D’Souza notes. “America stole the country from the Native Americans, the labor of the African Americans, and half of Mexico from the Mexicans in the Mexican War.
“Even today we hear, America’s foreign policy and free market system are forms of theft, because they take what belongs to others and illicitly appropriate it,” he continues. “These contentions come from some of the wiliest figures in the progressive camp: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Nobel laureate and columnist Paul Krugman, investment guru Warren Buffett, and Nobel laureate and economist Joseph Stiglitz. Behind these figures are the great thinkers of modern progressivism, such as John Rawls and Karl Marx.”
The reparations pitch
From there, D’Souza sets forth to expose the far left’s implementation of its agenda to steal America, identifying “pitches” used by progressives to justify income redistribution schemes achieved though government programs such as food stamps.
He points to study by the Cato Institute that found that the Obama administration’s total package of welfare benefits has risen so high that in 35 states it now pays more than a minimum wage job.
“While conservatives find such data dismaying, progressives often respond with delight,” he writes. “They want people not to enter the workforce. Their reason is that progressives see these people as historically deprived; they shouldn’t have to work; the rest of us have a moral obligation to take care of them. This, you may have recognized by now, is the reparations pitch.”
In the final analysis, D’Souza argues, progressives read the history of America as the story of massive theft.
“The white man – read ‘America’ – stole the country from the Native Americans, stole the lives and labor of African Americans over several hundred years, and stole half of Mexico from the Mexicans in the Mexican War,” he continues. “In addition, America allegedly oppressed women, homosexuals, and the poor, stifling the identities of these groups and denying them equal opportunity.”
So, for progressives, D’Souza argues, income distribution is government theft justified by reparation for historical crimes committed by white people, tracing back to the Founding Fathers.
“The descendants of those victims, so the story goes, are still suffering the effects of deprivation caused by that massive theft, while the beneficiaries continue to enjoy its ill-gotten fruits,” D’Souza writes. “Pretty much whatever the government wants to do to take money from whites, or from America, can be justified in the name of reparations, because it constitutes a small down payment on the incalculable sums that are actually owed.”
A Saul Alinsky future
When Attorney General Eric Holder announced his retirement, D’Souza tweeted, “Is there a crime syndicate looking for a boss with government experience?”
D’Souza notes that while 1960s radical Saul Alinsky became a millionaire teaching unions and minorities how to blackmail corporations and governments in his various income distribution schemes, Alinsky remained all his life an “outside agitator.”
“Yet ironically, Alinsky became the mentor to two figures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who would learn from his techniques and then take them into the innermost corridors of power,” D’Souza concludes.
“Their expertise would not be as outside agitators but as inside power brokers,” he stresses. “If Alinsky had survived, he could have taken justified pride for his role in being their guiding star, their Godfather. To a considerable degree, he was the one who taught them how to steal America.”
D’Souza credits Barack Obama with “pulling off” another con game that Hillary Clinton tried but failed to achieve: the nationalization of health care known as “Obamacare.”
“Obamacare is a program designed to shift control of the health care industry from the private sector to the public sector, from doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies to the federal government,” D’Souza concludes.
For progressives, D’Souza observes, Obamacare was “a very big heist” that resulted from the con artist’s “pitch,” a series of deliberate lies that always began, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
D’Souza concludes by characterizing Obama and Hillary as “two Alinskyite con artists, both of whom studied under the Godfather himself.”
“Is it possible we will have two thieves in a row as custodians of the U.S. Treasury?” D’Souza asks, concluding the book by contemplating the possibility Hillary Clinton could be elected president in 2016.
“Unlikely though it seems, this may be the case, and the two, who despise each other, are nevertheless working together to achieve common goals,” he warns. “In other words, we have a situation of two Alinsky acolytes attempting to set up a con man’s regime.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/dinesh-dsouza-obama-did-teach-me-a-lesson/#2jrt8HGFAoAzEW26.99