The new movie Death of a Nation, by Dinesh D’Souza, is now out in theaters. Its main premise is that Donald Trump finds himself governing over an extremely divided nation, much as Abraham Lincoln did just before and during the Civil War. Like in his previous movies, the protagonists are the Republicans and conservatives. The antagonists are the Democrats and members of the far-left. The movie asks the question: Can the republic be saved from tearing itself apart yet again? In Lincoln’s America, the dividing line was over slavery, an institution supported, D’Souza points out, by Democrats in the north and the south. In Trump’s America, the dividing line is now between two competing visions for America, one an America true to its founding principles of freedom, limited government, and free market capitalism, and another one requiring a fundamental change away from those principles that would have America less free, with more dependence upon government, one headed toward socialism.

Death of a Nation attributes the division faced by President Trump in part to a deliberate attempt by some in academia and the media to hide the left-wing, socialist roots of fascism, and the Democrat Party’s historical association with slavery and other forms of racism. D’Souza sets out to correct this by showing the history of the Fascist and NAZI parties and their ties to Marxism. He also debunks the notion of racism being a Republican problem by showing the historic ties of slavery and Jim Crow laws to the Democrat Party.

It had some shortcomings, the musical pieces were nice but superfluous. The movie’s title “Death of a Nation” never really gets satisfactorily explained along the way, though it’s clearly a reference to the D.W. Griffith movie “The Birth of a Nation” which was the first movie ever screened at the White House. While it does not spend a lot of time on comparing Trump’s situation to Lincoln’s, D’Souza achieves his other main goal of countering the progressive narrative that Republicans, especially Trump supporters are fascists and racists exceedingly well. Some critics say the movie rewrites history; no, it corrects the fallacious version that’s been pushed by leftists in academia for decades. Casual accusations of racism and fascism by the Left levied at conservatives will never again go unchallenged. Thanks to D’Souza, the spell is broken.