Usually they attack in numbers—after an article has been posted on Rotten Tomatoes, or a review has been linked on some website or message board. I haven't checked our stats today but I assume my review of America: Freedom to Fascism has been posted on some anti-IRS site somewhere, or been circulated around by the film's belligerent director, because my inbox is currently being flooded with hate mail. This is a retread of a similar barrage we received for our Oscar prediction article earlier this year, when trigger-happy members of the Dave Cullen cult mistook our "fag" comment in our Supporting Actor write-up for hate bile, ignoring the Hollywood-is-homophobic context of the piece, who we checked off as our personal pick in the category, and the fact that Oscar punditry is a queer sport. Today, Rose Lear has called me "a hot air wind bag, spewing hateful propaganda against the truth." That was followed by Loma Wharton, who quizzically says that I "have chosen to give up [my] sovereignty to another country and accept the debt of the United States to enjoy the privilege to live here" (unlike the others, I think she thinks I support Aaron Russo's stance), and, most disturbing of all, Bob Minarik of Patriots of Liberty: "You must be a Republican. Can't see, can't read, can't hear, can't think, can't comprehend and can only make stupid statements when their game is exposed. A classic example of the pot calling the kettle black to hide their complicity. Your statement is about as classic a statement as any whacked out anti-American pro-Greed robot can make." (In subsequent emails, the hateful Minarik will also accuse me of supporting the "neo-con fascism which Bush endorses" and, get this, having syphilis.) This will seem immediately ridiculous to anyone who knows me—sees me, reads me, hears me—but indicates, as Armond White proved with his review of the lousy Road to Guantanamo, that it's unsafe to call a film anti-American or you risk being accused of sharing George W. Bush's you're-either-with-us-or-against-us philosophy of the world. But how else do you describe a film that employs such fear-mongering rhetoric, using quotes from Orwell and images of freedom fighters to gain our submission, guilting us into a revolution against a threat that's part phantom and without addressing our protection should we act and be met with resistance? Admittedly, others have done a better job of calling out the film's fuzzy facts—see Brian Ragle's blog or the Mussolini-Google bit from the review in The New York Times, which ends with Nathan Lee eloquently declaring, "The mess we're in never looked so messy"—but it should be clear from anyone who has read my review and seen the film that the issue here is not so much with Russo's belief that the IRS lacks the legitimate authority to collect taxes from us but the crass (dare I say fascistic?) delivery. Dave Wharton writes, "There is no country called America, that is a continent, the country we live in is the United States!" In one full-swoop he forgets the name of the film he's defending and confirms that you might need to be batshit crazy to dig this film without reservation.