In the film, which is narrated by Mr. D’Souza and blends cherry-picked facts and historical falsehoods with an apocalyptic portrait of the left, progressives are deemed to be solely responsible for worst evils of the 19th and 20th century, including slavery, the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, Benito Mussolini’s rise in Italy, the persecution of Native Americans, the Holocaust and more.
The liberal megadonor George Soros is, at one point, falsely depicted as a possible Nazi collaborator, and chattel slavery is described as a byproduct of socialist economic policy.
Other contradictions include sections where President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, is said to have inspired the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, and Southern confederates are portrayed as treasonous. These parts leave out that Mr. Trump, the film’s hero, has cited Jackson as an inspiration, and that Mr. Trump’s chief of staff has defended Confederate general Robert E. Lee as an “honorable man.”
In Mr. D’Souza’s film, the president is a liberator blessed with Abraham Lincoln’s “inner toughness,” currently “saving America” from the “new Democratic plantation” of “black ghettos, Latino barrios, Native American reservations.”
Mr. D’Souza pleaded guilty to charges of making illegal campaign contributions in 2014, but was fully pardoned by Mr. Trump in late May.
“The stakes could not be higher,” Mr. D’Souza says at one point in the film. “Read the Nazi platform at the Democratic convention and it would most likely receive thunderous applause.”
Such inflammatory rhetoric has not stopped “Death of a Nation” from reaching the upper echelons of the Republican Party. Mr. D’Souza recently held a glitzy reception for the movie in Washington, complete with celebrity red carpet appearances from Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, and Housing Secretary Ben Carson. The re-election campaign of Representative Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, held a watch party in Woodlands, Tex., in July.
The movie has thus far grossed about $4.5 million, and several of Mr. D’Souza’s previous films rank among the highest-grossing American political documentaries of all time. (His conspiratorial 2012 film about President Barack Obama made more than $30 million, and is one of the highest-grossing domestic documentaries in the United States in decades.)
Lynda Bowers, the affable president of the Medina County Republican Women group, prepared goody bags for audience members that included a pocket constitution, some prewrapped popcorn, and copy of one Mr. D’Souza’s previous movies — which include a 2016 film targeting Hillary Clinton and the 2012 movie, tagged “Obama’s America: Love Him. Hate Him. You Don’t Know Him.”
Medina County voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, and the screening’s all-white audience largely matches the community’s homogeneous demographics (the latest census statistic say about 5 percent of Medina County residents are racial minorities).
Ms. Bowers said she chose to show the movie because she’s a self-proclaimed history buff, but the movie has been roasted by actual historians and film critics, who point to the many misrepresentations and falsehoods littered throughout the film.
The Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse recently took to Twitter to debunk one of the movie’s central arguments: that anti-black Southern Democrats did not defect from the party once it began supporting civil rights for African-Americans. Some did.
“I suppose, as the current Republican Party is experiencing a surge in candidates who are openly white supremacist, it might seem easier to try to rewrite the past than it is to reckon with the present,” Mr. Kruse tweeted recently. “But it’ll take someone better than D’Souza to do it.”
After the film, Ms. Bowers led a 10-minute discussion. Though some attendees began the evening skeptical of Mr. D’Souza’s comparisons between Mr. Trump and Lincoln, those who spoke during the post-movie conversation seemed thoroughly convinced by Mr. D’Souza’s argument. Some bemoaned the fact that the themes in “Death of a Nation” were not presently taught in elementary schools.
“A group of individuals in our government sought to rig the presidential election — they stole the 2012 election — and they tried to steal the 2016 election, and now they’re trying to overthrow a duly elected president,” said Tom Zawistowski, a Tea Party activist from Portage County in Ohio.
“The ruling class and the deep state have been telling this lie, and people have been believing it,” Mr. Zawistowski said. “We need to start getting ahead of these things and fight them before it’s too late. And it’s almost too late.”
No person who spoke during the discussion voiced any disagreements with the movie. Their only complaint: The scheduling conflict with the county fair, and its uber-popular “Rough Truck night,” had stopped more of their neighbors from attending.
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