One-time Libertarian presidential candidate and Rude Awakening auteur Aaron Russo has some very good news for you: You don't have to pay income taxes anymore! Congrats! Don't spend all that extra money in one place! According to Russo, at least, there's no law on the books forcing individuals to pay any kind of graduated income taxes. In fact, according to Russo's documentary America: Freedom To Fascism, income taxes are downright unconstitutional. Now the bad news: any day now, jackbooted thugs will break down your door, seize your belongings, and insert a computer chip inside you so you can be monitored at all times by the looming one-world international government. Yes, America: Freedom To Fascism gives the Michael Moore muckraking-underdog treatment to the kind of delirious conspiracy theories generally associated with mentally ill homeless people screaming at passersby to stop stealing their brainwaves.
Forget The Da Vinci Code: Russo's rambling, bizarre op-ed piece of a movie posits a conspiracy so sweeping and far-reaching that it makes Dan Brown's revisionist take on Christian history seem positively modest by comparison. In his wildly digressive quest to uncover the (supposedly nonexistent) law forcing Americans to pay income tax, Russo unconvincingly indicts a rogue's gallery of scoundrels and heavies from both sides of the political divide.
From the IRS to the greedy bankers behind the Federal Reserve to The Patriot Act to globalization and multinational corporations, Fascism rails semi-coherently against bogeymen on the left and right, employing public-access production values and a world-changing sense of purpose wildly disproportionate to its paltry resources and amateurish direction. The film somehow manages the formidable task of being far more paranoid and hysterical than even its screaming tabloid-headline title would suggest.
