Dinesh D’Souza
last updated: October 24, 2016
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Affiliations
- King’s College: Former President
- Hoover Institution: Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow
- American Enterprise Institute: Former John M. Olin Fellow
- Policy Review: Former Managing Editor
Government
- Reagan Administration: White House Policy Adviser, 1987-1988
Education
- Dartmouth College: B.A.
Dinesh D’Souza is a rightwing writer and conspiracy theorist whose books and films have gained notoriety for their diatribes about the “culture wars” and fear-mongering narratives about liberals. His resume also includes working briefly as a policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, an editor of the former Heritage Foundation journal the Policy Review, and fellow at several rightist policy groups, including the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. In 2014, he was convicted on federal charges related to an illegal campaign fundraising scheme.
D’Souza is perhaps best known for his controversial 1991 bestseller Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, as well his 2012 documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which sought to raise fears that President Barack Obama’s re-election would spell doom for the United States.
In 2016, D’Souza—a vocal “defender of Donald Trump’s right to access beauty pageant contestants’ dressing room,” as a writer for Salon puts it—released “Hillary’s America,” a documentary that purports to tell the “sordid” secret history of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party’s plan to take over America. Along the way, writes one critic, D’Souza manages to “sneak into the basement of some Democratic museum to discover the Democrats’ spooky, evil hidden history and agenda, and then he sneaks into Hillary Clinton’s ‘headquarters’ to discover that she is a secret evil Democrat.” The filmed managed to earn more than $5 million at the box office in less than two weeks.
D’Souza’s recent past has been notable for the large number of scandals he has been embroiled in. D’Souza served as president of the evangelical King’s College from August 2010 to October 2012, when he resigned in the wake of a scandal over purported marital infidelities, and after months of increasing pressure from the college’s board of directors. According to one report, “It was not immediately clear whether the board’s decision was driven by the allegations of the affair, or by dissatisfaction with D’Souza’s leadership that had been building at the college for months. “… According to several sources at the college, members of the King’s faculty and board alike had grown unhappy with D’Souza’s presidency over what they saw as a failure to earn his salary. D’Souza has spent much of the past few months promoting his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, and his high profile in the media was seen as rarely benefitting the college.”[1]
In 2014, D’Souza was convicted on federal charges for an illegal scheme aimed at raising funds for a friend’s failed Senate election campaign. His sentence included serving eight months in a halfway house, five years probation, and a $30,000 fine. The incident “may be the low point of D’Souza’s life and career,” wrote D’Souza critic and Salon editor Elias Isquith, adding that D’Souza’s earlier exit from King’s College had been “the symbolic end of his career in the institutional conservative movement.”[2]
Numerous rightwing activists and political figures defended D’Souza, arguing that the Obama administration was persecuting him because of his work criticizing the government. “We’ve seen multiple filmmakers prosecuted and the government’s gone after them,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). “Whether it’s the poor fellow that did the film that the president blamed Benghazi and the terrorist attacks on—turns out that wasn’t the reason for the attack but the administration went and put that poor fellow in jail on unrelated charges. Just this week it was broken that Dinesh D’Souza, who did a very big movie criticizing the president, is now being prosecuted by this administration.”[3]
Reporting on the conspiracy theories—which he called a “conspiracy of dunces”—Slate reporter David Weigel noted that actual election reporters who reviewed the contested donations “say they match up neatly” with the allegations made by federal prosecutors.[4]
Several months after being released from a halfway house in early 2015, D’Souza published the book Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party (HarperCollins). The book was purportedly inspired by his time in the halfway house and his criminal prosecution. According to the book’s cover, D’Souza’s “prolonged exposure to the criminal underclass provided an eye-opening education in American realities.” From this experience, D’Souza purportedly realized that American liberalism “is not a movement of ideas at all but a series of scams and cons aimed at nothing less than stealing the entire wealth of the nation, built up over more than two centuries. … And who are the leading figures in this historically ambitious scam that has turned the federal government into a vast and unprecedented shakedown scheme? Why, none other than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”[5]
Pushing Obama Conspiracies
Through his writings and films, D’Souza has propagated a number of conspiratorial right-wing talking points about the Obama administration.
Although it was widely panned by mainstream observers, D’Souza’s polemical 2012 documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, became a major hit on the right-wing circuit. According to press reports, the film “trails only Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 as the highest-grossing U.S. political documentary.”[6]
The documentary is based largely on D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which argued that Obama has been shaped by the anti-colonial “Third World collectivism” purportedly espoused by his father. Attempting to reconcile this claim with the fact that Obama’s father abandoned him shortly after birth, noted Washington Post film critic Michael O’Sullivan in August 2012, the film “trots out a professional psychologist to speculate on how the senior Obama’s absence reinforced his influence, rather than weakened it. D’Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you’re predisposed to believe that Obama hates America.” Added O’Sullivan, “D’Souza’s one-sided argument ultimately stoops to fear-mongering of the worst kind, stating in no uncertain terms that, if the president is reelected, the world four years from now will be darkened by the clouds of economic collapse, World War III (thanks to the wholesale renunciation of our nuclear superiority) and a terrifyingly ascendant new ‘United States of Islam’ in the Middle East. These assertions are accompanied by footage of actual dark clouds and horror-movie music.”[7]
In The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza claims that his theory about the impact of Obama’s absent father accounts for the president’s choices better than any “rival theory can even begin to do.” However, according to a review of the book by the liberal Media Matters for America, D’Souza’s entire argument is “premised upon a series of false and misleading claims.”[8] Among the falsehoods and inappropriate characterizations Media Matters identified are the claim that Obama’s push for a “nuclear-free world” is evidence of his “anti-colonialism” (if true, than Ronald Reagan was also an anti-colonialist); that Obama initiated the auto and financial industry bailouts (both efforts were begun by President George W. Bush); and, inter alia, that Obama supported the release of the Lockerbie bomber (the Obama administration publicly opposed it).[9]
Despite the book’s bizarre claims and theories, it nevertheless received lots of press coverage and was endorsed by several conservative heavyweights, like Newt Gingrich, who called the book “brilliant” and possessed of the “most interesting insight.” Commenting on both D’Souza’s book and the attention it received, David Weigel wrote, “D’Souza’s book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, is a mess. His most memorable previous books were messes, too. Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press. That’s had basically no effect on his ability to get published or his ability to get onto the stage at conservative conferences. But it is good for liberals. D’Souza was the first modern conservative author to discover—the hard way—that if you want to be a pundit, there is no downside to making a reprehensible argument. The downside comes for the people who may agree with your politics but not your argument.”[10]
After the film’s release, D’Souza became embroiled in a lawsuit over assets from the production of film, with a partner accusing D’Souza of using assets for personal reasons, which D’Souza denied.[11]
Writings
Over the years, D’Souza’s writings have offered right-wing viewpoints on a range of cultural and political issues.
D’Souza’s first major work was 1991’s Illiberal Education, published in 1991, which helped inaugurate a backlash against so-called “political correctness” at U.S. universities. D’Souza argued that academic efforts to accommodate students of color and members of other marginalized groups, as well as efforts to diversify curriculum so that non-Western cultures received more attention, ultimately resulted in a dumbing down of higher education. Although credited with shedding light on instances of academic censorship, Illiberal Education was criticized by many observers for being tendentious, facile, and disingenuous. In a review published by the New York Review of Books, Louis Menand wrote that the tone adopted by D’Souza in the book is “of a man who is curious about the reports he has been hearing of campus strife over issues involving race and sex, and who, as a friend to liberal learning, is sympathetic to all the parties involved (or nearly all, for he cannot find a good word to say about homosexuality).” However, Menand pointed out, the truth is that D’Souza has never been a friend of liberalism, having been associated with a number of rightist projects since has undergraduate days at Dartmouth College.[12]
In 2007, D’Souza published one of his most controversial works, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. As its title suggests, the book is a harangue about how the “appeasement” policies of liberal leaders—beginning with the Carter administration in the late 1970s and continuing through what D’Souza called the left’s “aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family”—helped set the stage for the radical Islamic antipathy toward America that ultimately led to 9/11.[13]
Many commentators and public figures pointed out the irony of D’Souza’s sympathetic treatment of Osama bin Laden in a book dedicated to blaming his work on the left. Bin Laden, one reviewer noted, is described in the book as “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person” who had “not launched a single attack against Israel.”[14] According to Publishers Weekly, D’Souza accuses liberals of “team[ing] up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture—epitomized by Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives—on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al-Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush’s war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home.”[15] The book apparently gave little treatment to the role of U.S. foreign policy itself.
Wrote Alan Wolfe in the New York Times, “I never thought a book by D’Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in The Enemy at Home, D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be ‘highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.’ Islamic punishment tends to be harsh—flogging adulterers and that sort of thing—but this, D’Souza says ‘with only a hint of irony,’ simply puts Muslims ‘in the Old Testament tradition.’ Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, ‘even better than polygamy.’ And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while ‘pooh-poohed by Western commentators,’ was ‘undoubtedly accurate.’”[16]
Pointing to D’Souza’s plea for “decent liberals” to join with him in a crusade against the American left, Wolfe’s quips at the end of his review: “So let this ‘decent’ liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. … I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.”[17]
D’Souza is the author of a number of other books, including The End of Racism, a 1995 national best-seller that criticizes the “civil rights industry” and argues that racism is largely a Western creation and that achievement gaps between races are due mainly to cultural differences. Other titles include Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (Free Press, 1997), What’s So Great About America (Regnery, 2002), Letters to a Young Conservative (Basic Books, 2003), and What’s So Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007).
Discussing the series of books D’Souza wrote between 1995 and 2010, Slate’s Dave Weigel wrote: “The start of the D’Souza phenomenon came in 1995, when he published The End of Racism. Written to ride the wave of books and articles that called for white America to get over its racial guilt, it included lines like the ‘American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.’ It was so sloppy and unconvincing that it killed the genre for a few years; it’s a 700-page doorstop by a one-time AEI scholar that no one cites today. The next D’Souza implosion came in 2007, with the publication of another book that killed its genre. The Enemy at Home consisted of an argument that the ‘left’ was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That was an irresistible hook for a publisher, especially after the public had turned on the Bush administration and the war on terror. But D’Souza made such a hash out of it that the people who had danced around the left-and-9/11 idea realized how deeply stupid it was. Victor Davis Hanson joined the mob and pointed out, as politely as he could, that D’Souza’s enemies list was ‘nonsensical.’ So The Roots of Obama’s Rage is D’Souza’s third pseudo-academic swing for the fences. In the book … he strikes out.”[18]
[1] David Sessions, “ Dinesh D’Souza Resigns Presidency of The King’s College,” The Daily Beast, October 18, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/18/dinesh-d-souza-resigns-presidency-of-the-king-s-college.html.
[2] Elias Isquith, “The rapid decline of Dinesh D’Souza,” Salon, January 24, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/01/24/the_rapid_decline_of_dinesh_dsouza/.
[3] David Weigel, “Conspiracy of Dunces,” Slate, January 27, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/01/dinesh_d_souza_conspiracy_theories_conservatives_blame_the_obama_administration.html.
[4] David Weigel, “Conspiracy of Dunces,” Slate, January 27, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/01/dinesh_d_souza_conspiracy_theories_conservatives_blame_the_obama_administration.html.
[5] Harper Collins Publishers, “Stealing America What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party,” http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062366719/stealing-america.
[6] Matt Reynolds, ” Dinesh D’Souza’s Laundry Aired in Lawsuit,” Courthouse News Service, October 25, 2012, http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/25/51644.htm.
[7] Michael O’Sullivan, “2016: Obama’s America,” Washington Post, Augsut 24, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/2016-obamas-america,1230760/critic-review.html.
[8] Media Matters for America, “D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage rooted in lies,” October 4, 2010, http://mediamatters.org/research/201010040030.
[9] Media Matters for America, “D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage rooted in lies,” October 4, 2010, http://mediamatters.org/research/201010040030.
[10] David Weigel, “Newt is Nuts,” Slate.com, September 13, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2267179/.
[11] Matt Reynolds, ” Dinesh D’Souza’s Laundry Aired in Lawsuit,” Courthouse News Service, October 25, 2012, http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/25/51644.htm.
[12] Cited in Janet McNew, “Politicized Polemics: Who Names the Controversies?” ADE Bulletin, Fall 1992.
[13] Quoted in Alan Wolfe, “None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html?_r=0.
[14] Quoted in Alan Wolfe, “None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html?_r=0.
[15] Review of Diensh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2007, http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-51012-7.
[16] Alan Wolfe, “None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html?_r=0.
[17] Alan Wolfe, “None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html?_r=0.
[18] David Weigel, “Newt is Nuts,” Slate.com, September 13, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2267179/.