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2016: Obama’s America, the U.S.’s second-highest-grossing political documentary, aims to warn of the danger of reelecting Barack Obama to presidency. Naturally, such a goal invites critics and enemies. But the co-writer and co-director of the movie, Dinesh D’Souza, thinks an organized campaign to undermine it has been deployed by some certain covert group.
He claims that the drop in the movie’s box-office by 53 percent this last weekend isn’t part of the normal trajectory of any movie, but part of a concerted effort which has used at least two means of suppression: mass-email disinformation and YouTube piracy.
“Saturday morning I started getting emails from groups and individuals either warning me about the piracy of 2016: Obama’s America or thanking me for allowing the movie to go online,” said Randy Slaughter, the film’s distributor. In fact, the movie was illegitimately uploaded to YouTube without his permission.
But people illegitimately upload movies to YouTube all the time — YouTube fights lawsuits over these matters. What is there to indicate it was a secret plot? Well, there was a second wing of attack: mass emails went out claiming the movie would be airing on Fox News.
“Important. Looks that Fox News is going to air the documentary Obama 2016. Heads up for this Sunday night 9:00 p.m.” The claim is completely bogus and unfounded, but again, so are most mass emails.
Nevertheless, D’Souza says that “The reports of the movie appearing on Fox before the election are completely untrue, and we strongly suspect that they are the result of dirty tricks by our opponents who spread this rumor in order to confuse the general public and keep them from going to their local theaters.”
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It is not certain, however, that D’Souza’s suspicions are warranted. After all, we have heard endless mass-emailed warnings about Coke’s ability to dissolve iron nails, or that it contains pig’s blood, or whatever else, but is such misinformation a secret plot by Pepsi?
Whatever the case, D’Souza strongly encourages viewers to check out the real deal in the theatres. The movie will also be released on Oct. 16 on DVD and Oct. 12 on pay-per-view.
