It’s a familiar trope: The agitated young “transgender” person claims that being “misgendered” left him or her “literally shaking.” I’ve always seen that as a sign of a tragically weak human being. However, last night, while watching Dinesh D’Souza’s Police State, I found myself literally shaking, too. Maybe I’m pathetically weak, or maybe that movie triggered such a strong “fight or flight” response in me that, sitting there in my seat, unable to react to either instinct, all I could do was tremble.

Why is the movie so powerful? Because using a combination of reenactments, interviews, news footage, police body cams, and individuals’ security cameras, D’Souza has compellingly put together things we already know about America in 2023 but don’t want to admit: We have in place a government that is loyal, not to the people but to the government itself.

Our government, especially its security apparatus (aided and abetted through its partnership with Big Tech), has become a separate entity from the American people, and its most powerful members have as their sole responsibility to ensure their continued existence. For them, the Democrat party and the Uniparty are their rock, their fortress, their deliverer, their shield, their salvation, and their stronghold. Anyone who threatens that—and Trump and his supporters did and do—must be destroyed.

The movie opens with a thunderous reenactment of a family having breakfast, only to find a militarized FBI smashing through the door, long guns pointed at the children, dragging away the father, and tearing apart the house. It looks overwrought, like something out of a bad action movie—except that, as the movie continues, we see FBI body cam and home security footage, along with interviews with people to whom this was done, and we understand that this reenactment was entirely accurate.

Image by fxquadro.

This is what the FBI is doing to people who stand outside of abortion clinics, stand up at school board meetings to challenge pornography in school libraries, and once dared to stand on the Capitol grounds on January 6. And once they’re in the federal judicial system, they have entered an unending Kafka-esque and Orwellian nightmare that, in the case of Matthew Perna, led to suicide.

Throughout the movie, D’Souza has reenactors play FBI agents led by an older man (Nick Searcy) who revels in his power and wants to destroy anyone who threatens it or the government that protects him. We get made-up scenes of the FBI’s approach to January 6, the Hunter Biden hard drive, spying on people conservative Catholics, etc.

What was most powerful for me, though, was the interviews with myriad people, whether conservative thinkers or those who found themselves in the government’s crosshairs. The thinkers include Dan Bongino (one of the executive producers), Julie Kelly, Peter Schweizer, Rand Paul, Jim Jordan, Darren Beattie, Troy Nehls, and Kash Patel.

Others whom D’Souza interviews are Yeonmi Park, who escaped North Korea only to find the same mindset, plus transgender madness, in academia; government whistleblowers like Kyle Seraphin and Steve Friend; Big Tech whistleblowers whose names I missed; and ordinary people such as Mark Houck, the subject of a full FBI raid for shoving an abortion clinic worker aggressively harassing his 13-year-old son, Joseph Bolanos, whose entire life was destroyed when he experienced the full FBI raid for standing on the Capitol grounds, a mom raided for speaking out at a school board meeting, and Matthew Perna’s aunt.

Houck’s was a tale of ultimate triumph, but Bolanos’s and Ms. Perna’s stories were heartbreaking. I’m a sympathy crier, and I didn’t fare well during those parts of the movie.

And here’s what every one of those ordinary people caught in the government’s crosshairs says: It happened to me, and they’re coming for you.

The movie felt overwrought, but that’s because the facts are overwrought. Seeing them all in one place—the interviews, the media footage, the body cams, etc.—made clear that America stands on the very edge of an abyss. Our constitutional nation, founded on the principles of liberty, has vanished almost entirely.

People need to wake up and understand that what’s happening in D.C. is not the same government that they remember growing up. This is a government that, thanks to the Patriot Act and technology, has unimaginable power and is willing to use it against anyone who threatens this power. There’s very little time left for Americans to vote in ways that can restore balance to the system. In this case, passivity is a slow march to full police-state hell.