Alex: I should start this with a disclaimer: We did not see a press screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America. We contributed nearly $40 to the $4 million the film made at the box office last weekend by watching it with the people of Times Square, most of whom were over 60. (To be fair, we did see it at 4:30 on a Friday.) Do you feel guilty about that at all?

Jacob: I guess I have to! Or I do vicariously, on behalf of TNR, which bought the ticket. Great shame. $4 million, though, is only a modest haul for a D’Souza joint. 2016: Obama’s America, which, despite its title, came out in 2012, somehow managed to pull down more than $33 million, making it something like the right-wing Fahrenheit 9/11. He’s got an audience now, and it’s not just schlubby journalists indulging in ironic Friday afternoon entertainment. There’s some tranche of conservatives—white baby boomers who remain stubbornly loyal to the GOP, and have a skewed sense of social and cultural tolerance?—that he’s tapped into. I think it also helps that a lot of conservative entertainment, or docutainment or whatever this is, is just bad and unfunny, while D’Souza has refined his shtick into something amiable, conspiratorial, and not too high-brow. (I mean, I was surprised and creeped out at how heartily the audience laughed at jokes like, “What is it with Democratic politicians and vulnerable young women?”—a line that D’Souza delivers as Andrew Jackson forces one of his slave girls into bed with him.)

Alex: I was poking around Barnes & Noble on Monday and came across the book version of Hillary’s America—the novelization—and was struck by the blurb on its front cover, from Exorcist producer William Peter Blatty: “Utterly terrifying and based on a true story.” I thought that was a weirdly accurate description of what D’Souza has done with the historical record, though I wouldn’t exactly say that Hillary’s America was terrifying—the movie was too low-rent to be anything other than amusing.

I suppose a brief summary is in order. D’Souza’s main trick as a documentarian (if you can call him that) is his wide-eyed faux naivete. So the movie begins with him shocked—shocked!—to be going to prison for violating campaign finance laws. Violating campaign finance laws is hard to do in a post-Citizens United world! But this never comes up—instead, D’Souza argues that he is in jail because he made a movie that made President Obama look bad. In the first of many, many reenactments, a judge screams at him and sends him away for eight months. In prison, D’Souza makes a friend. And D’Souza’s friend is a guy who is in jail because he ran an insurance scam in which he sold life insurance to people and then murdered them and took the money. This is presented as being totally believable and realistic, even though it is obviously invented. And this guy’s scam leads Dinesh D’Souza to realize that there’s another, bigger scam out there, and it’s being perpetrated by the Democrats: They want to steal America. (If this sounds vague, that’s because it is.)

Of course his career as a right-wing provocateur is never really brought up. He is but a humble immigrant and truth-teller, locked up for a crime he...well, who cares about his crime?