Dinesh D'Souza's 'Police State' reveals how the US government has weaponized itself against Americans

Americans don't think of themselves as living under a police state. Americans don't believe, generally, that they are living in a nation in which the government and law enforcement are actively engaged in censoring or suppressing speech and spying on ordinary citizens.

But for anyone who lived through 9/11 and saw the emergence of the Patriot Act, the new forever wars launched by Bush, Obama—suspended by Trump— and relaunched by Biden, the past two decades have given them a social whiplash.

A police state is defined as a totalitarian state in which the political entities leading that nation conduct secret surveillance on civilians and use that as a means of controlling those civilians. The Patriot Act, ushered in after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the government and law enforcement agents the ability to begin the creation of a police state in America.

Dinesh D'Souza's latest film Police State, in collaboration with Dan Bongino, tracks through the past few decades, going further back to the sieges of Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco, Texas in 1993 to dig into how we got to a place where Americans' rights are routinely violated and hardly anyone speaks up about it, while many others barely even register what's happening.

The Patriot Act, however, designed to fight terrorism after 9/11, is what gave rise to so much of the surveillance culture and the level of insidious government control that is currently in effect in the US. That law, passed in 2002, has been called by the Justice Department "a vital and time-honored tool for fighting crime."

The Act was intended to target terrorists using roving wiretaps and delayed notification search warrants. It uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, instead of grand juries, for suspects within the United States. It integrates government agencies to share information, despite previous legal barriers against this, obtaining search warrants in one district for use in another district. It uses enhanced conspiracy penalties, and enables additional workarounds in an attempt to go after terrorists.

But in recent years, as the rhetoric from Obama, Biden, the DOJ and the FBI has ramped up, those tools have turned inward and are being used to go after so-called domestic extremists. Joe Biden, parroted by his DOJ—or maybe it's the other way around—has repeatedly said that the greatest threat facing America are domestic extremists and white supremacy. They have changed the language for who should be targeted from foreign terrorists to "anti-government" Americans, and have used it to target parents who speak out at school board meetings, Catholic faithful who enjoy Latin mass, those who oppose government-mandated mRNA vaccines, those who exercise their First or Second Amendment rights, and so many others.

As Americans, however, being anti-government is our right. We look at the government as an entity that is there to serve us and protect our rights, to do our will. Being anti-government is a healthy way to keep the government in check. We should not blindly trust our government. Yet with only one notable exception, every White House administration since George Bush has penalized Americans for not going along with their peddled narrative.

On Covid, January 6, terrorism, climate change, racism, and many other issues, the White House has insisted that Americans do and believe what they are told, and they've been able to use increasing tools of law enforcement and surveillance overreach to force compliance.

Even the recent lawsuit from the Missouri attorney general alleging that the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to enforce narratives and messaging on Covid, climate change, and other areas shows that the government has entirely lost the plot. Elected leaders are not there to suppress us and maintain their own power, but to uphold the laws, protect and defend Americans' rights and freedoms. That's their job.

What D'Souza's film shows is that Americans have either failed to hold those elected leaders and their unelected cronies in federal agencies accountable, or we have simply been unable to track the persistent assault on our rights.