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Exploitative Money-grubber - Dinesh D'Souza, America's greatest conservative troll, explained

Here's how he went from being a respected conservative intellectual to a conspiracy-minded felon.

By Dylan Matthews [e-mail] Updated May 31, 2018, 11:30am EDT


Dinesh D'Souza, speaking at the "United We Stand" rally in Phoenix. Gage Skidmore

On May 31, President Donald Trump, one of America’s premiere conservative trolls, decided to pardon Dinesh D’Souza .. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/31/17413134/trump-dinesh-dsouza-pardon-conservative-filmmaker , a conservative writer and documentarian whose penchant for trolling and needling liberals, and embracing conspiracy theories in the process, rivals that of Trump himself.

If that comparison seems unfair, just watch the trailer for D’Souza’s 2016 film, Hillary’s America:

It references D'Souza's past conviction for violating campaign finance law (for which Trump is pardoning him), portraying his prosecution as a politically motivated witch hunt, and seeks to tie the current Democratic party to the Ku Klux Klan and slaveowners (Democrats were historically the pro-segregation, pro-slavery party until the parties flipped on race around 1964).

It features a cameo from Jonah Goldberg, the National Review writer best known for his universally discredited attempt .. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122231 .. to equate New Deal liberalism with European fascism. It's peppered with over-the-top voiceovers by D'Souza — "What are these Democrats hiding?"; "What if the goal of the Democratic party is to steal the most valuable thing the world has ever produced? What if their plan is to steal America?" — over an ominous, melodramatic score.

This kind of silliness and purposeful provocation on race is D'Souza's bread and butter. See this tweet from 2015:

Tweet

After people on Twitter pointed out that this is extremely racist, D'Souza replied with the most tepid of quasi-apologies:

Dinesh D'Souza
@DineshDSouza·
I know Obama wasn't actually raised in a ghetto--
I'm using the term metaphorically, to suggest his
unpresidential conduct
3:19 AM · Feb 19, 2015 Link

Someone with only a light exposure to D'Souza's oeuvre might be tempted to dismiss this and Hillary's America as ludicrous attention grabs from a fringe criminal, and perhaps they'd be right to do so.

But D'Souza was for decades a member in good standing of American conservative intellectual life, who served in the Reagan administration; was affiliated with serious, respected conservative think tanks; and was a big player in the campus right's 1980s rise to prominence. In 2007, that suddenly started to change, and his work took on a more conspiratorial, hyperbolic tone, culminating in stuff like the Obama selfie stick tweet.

At the same time, D'Souza's work has become more popular, and arguably even more influential. And throughout, he's expressed same attitude toward race displayed in that tweet. And now, with Trump as president, D’Souza is finally being welcomed back into the conservative mainstream, as a pioneer of the kind of politics our president has brought to the national stage.

Here's a basic primer on who D'Souza is, and how he got to this point.

1) Who is Dinesh D'Souza?

[...]

7) How is D'Souza still so popular, if even many conservatives reject him now?

If D'Souza is no longer accepted by most conservative intellectuals, then he's more than made up for it by making inroads into more conspiracy-oriented conservative circles. His theory of Obama has been embraced by Glenn Beck; InfoWars' Alex Jones brought D'Souza on his show to lament his political persecution by the Obama administration. "Viewed through the lens of the intelligentsia and the media elite, D'Souza has suffered a tragicomic fall from grace, undone by some combination of conspiratorial thinking, pseudo-academic posturing, and hubris," Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote in a 2013 profile for National Journal. "But in a separate, larger universe, the onetime rising star is ascendant once again."

That’s even truer now, with Trump leading the conservative movement.

Zuylen-Wood notes that this new era in D'Souza's career has been rather profitable, with both of his documentaries earning tens of millions of dollars, and he's been able to generate sales by targeting enemies perceived to be trying to sabotage him. "D'Souza has mastered the art of turning perceived slights into commercial gain," Zuylen-Wood writes. "When Costco pulled America the book a few months ago, citing poor sales, D'Souza claimed that he was being targeted for political reasons. (Costco's CEO is an Obama fundraiser.) An AM radio scandal was born. Costco backed down, restocked the title, and D'Souza's books were suddenly more popular than ever."

[...]

For his part, D'Souza told Zuylen-Wood that he didn't think his approach changed any from when he was an AEI or Hoover fellow: "What you should do, Simon, is go back and read Illiberal Education .. http://www.amazon.com/Illiberal-Education-Politics-Race-Campus/dp/0684863847?ots=1&ascsubtag=[]vx[p]6700758[t]w[r]google.com[d]D .. and its tone, and then read the America book and its tone. I don't think there's a fundamental difference in my approach then and now … Illiberal Education has been baptized into a sort of pathbreaking, sort of sober, responsible book. It was a bomb when I dropped it in 1991!"

D'Souza has a point. He's been provoking people for provocation's sake since he published an interview with a Klan member accompanied by a doctored photo of a black classmate being lynched. Sometimes he'll even admit that's what he's doing:

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https://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6936717/dinesh-dsouza-explained

Anything for a buck. Just like so many others of the Trump-driven bullshit alternative American universe.