Shortly after the opening of America: Imagine the World Without Her, in which George Washington dies in sniper fire on September 11th, 1777, co-director/writer/producer Dinesh D'Souza makes reference to his last documentary film, 2016: Obama's America. D'Souza claims that every prediction he made in his last documentary has come true. That's bullshit, of course. 2016 claimed that if he won a second term, Obama would transform America into a socialist paradise that eagerly surrenders its power to foreign nations. We are neither a socialist nation nor do we seem to be in the process of handing over power to anyone else. But D'Souza just blithely lies and moves on to the rest of his movie, free from the consequences of his lies. This establishes a pattern that the rest of America meticulously follows: Make an outrageous statement, deliver a mostly made-up "fact," and then quickly move along. D'Souza works his sleight of hand for an hour and a half, and conservative audiences will undoubtedly bask in the obfuscation.

Unfortunately, it's not a very good movie. The aforementioned imaginary 9/11 Washington assassination seems to set up the film's hypothesis: What would the world be like without America? (Never mind that Washington wasn't the only thing holding Revolutionary War America together; this isn't a movie that bothers to linger on, you know, "facts.") The prospect of a conservative It's a Wonderful Life with America standing in for George Bailey is kind of interesting in a nightmarish sort of way, but that's not the movie D'Souza makes. Instead, he steps immediately away from his what-if scenario to investigate the "charges" that liberals like Howard Zinn and Matt Damon levy against America, among them the fact that America stole land from Mexico, the fact that Americans kept slaves, and the fact that the government mistreated Native Americans.

The majority of the movie consists of D'Souza's "evidence" against these charges. The evidence appears to be culled from comment threads throughout the internet. Why should we worry about stealing land from Mexico, D'Souza asks, when Mexican immigrants are trying to come to America all the time and Americans never try to illegally flee to Mexico? Why should we care about slavery when some black people owned slaves and some white people were indentured servants? Why should we care about taking land from Native Americans when Native Americans themselves have a long history of conquest? (You might think I'm exaggerating for comic effect here; you'd be wrong. This represents the quality of D'Souza's arguments.) He "settles" all these arguments and then moves on to a rousing conclusion about how America is the best and we'd better stick to conservative principles if we want to stay the best. Except the conclusion isn't that rousing. And it suffers from two major digressions into ludicrousness.

The first digression involves D'Souza addressing his campaign finance violations in the most disingenuous way imaginable: He tries to tie them in to the IRS scandal. "I made a mistake," D'Souza says, but then he tries to claim that if Obama wasn't targeting right-wingers, he would never have been caught. Or something? I think that's his argument. It doesn't make much sense.

And then D'Souza unveils the monster who's been pulling the strings of the socialist conspiracy behind the scenes all along. It's not Obama, who D'Souza claims is only a product of the conspiracy, not a perpetrator of it. No, the real socialist monster we all need to watch out for is....are you ready?...Hillary Clinton. (Dun-dun-DUUUUUUN!) D'Souza portrays Clinton as a puppet of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, making her a liberal more in the mold of Obama than Bill Clinton. (One of his most important pieces of evidence that Clinton is working for Saul Alinsky? She once turned down a job offer from Saul Alinsky. Compelling!) He says that Obama has made things terrible, but that Clinton would actually destroy America once and for all. I'm sure this warning, in grand Hollywood tradition, is setting viewers up for a sequel to America. It'll probably be released in the summer of 2016, and it'll probably be called 2020: Hillary's America or something like that. That is, if D'Souza isn't rotting in jail by then.