Donald Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza today. Who is he? Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative commentator, film-maker and author. Ever since his student days at Dartmouth in the 1980s, he has been an enthusiastic participant in America’s culture wars.
D’Souza has advocated the conservative movement’s fusion of religious conservatism and free-market economics, and has vigorously attacked Democrats, liberals and the left. Critics have said that some of his attacks on his political opponents cross the line into racism.
D’Souza commenced hostilities against the left as a collegiate editor of the rightwing Dartmouth Review. He had a short stint in government during the Reagan administration.
D’Souza has spent most of the intervening period as a full-time provocateur, though a stint as the president of a Christian college ended in 2012 amid allegations of marital infidelity. His various activities have delivered him money, fame, and influence in conservative politics.
Conservative pundits are a dime a dozen. What makes D’Souza different? His success, and his shamelessness.
D’Souza is a familiar talking head in conservative media and on the right’s peculiar speaking circuit. He regularly pens op-eds for conservative media outlets. Nothing particularly unusual in that.
But the meat of his work has been in producing a long series of bestselling books and, lately, documentary films. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on mounting polemical attacks on the Democratic party and its leaders, especially Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He has also developed alternative readings of American history that cast Democrats as national villains.
His attacks on Obama were particularly strident and controversial. His critics called them racist. In 2010, in a widely discussed Forbes article and a book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza claimed that Obama’s true ideology was the anti-colonial socialism that had been passed on to him by his father. (Some rightwing commentators suggested that D’Souza’s argument was hysterical, and little more than a conspiracy theory.)
A subsequent film, 2016: Obama’s America, repeated D’Souza’s case that Obama was under the influence of his father’s alleged anti-imperialism, and that his politics had been shaped by other communist intellectuals. The film remains one of the highest-grossing documentaries in recent American history.
Critics said that D’Souza, though himself a person of colour, nevertheless couched his conspiratorial case against Obama in anti-black racism. D’Souza’s subsequent performances in print and on social media confirmed his willingness to mobilize racist stereotypes against the president.
During the 2016 election campaign, D’Souza produced another film which mounted a similarly hyperbolic attack on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In Hillary’s America, the film used the civil war, Jim Crow, Japanese internment and other racist elements of America’s past to argue that it was the Democrats, and by extension the left, who were the real racists. He then tried to lay all this perfidy at the feet of Hillary Clinton.
The film was part of a wave of anti-Clinton books and films released during the election. D’Souza buttressed Trump’s message that Clinton was corrupt, and even criminal, and elaborated on the rightwing messaging on Clinton that has followed her throughout her public life.
Since Trump’s election, D’Souza has been one of Trump’s most stubbornly vociferous supporters. Some of this support has taken the form of further attacks on Democrats – his latest book, The Big Lie, draws tendentious historical parallels between Democrats and fascists. The book’s publication led one commentator to call him “the perfect propagandist for Trump’s America”.
D’Souza also found time this year to denigrate the survivors of the Parkland shooting on Twitter, which saw him uninvited from the annual conservative CPAC conference.
That all sounds bad, but not exactly criminal. Why does Trump need to pardon him? D’Souza was convicted, fined, and received probation and an eight-month stay in a community detention facility after he pleaded guilty to making political donations in someone else’s name. D’Souza and his allies have claimed that the prosecution was politically motivated, and possibly revenge for the success of his film about Obama.
What are other conservative outlets saying? So far, many are seeing it as a vindication of D’Souza. Breitbart noted conservatives’ efforts to petition the White House for a pardon. WND portrayed D’Souza’s prosecution as part of an Obama-era effort to shut conservatives down. The Daily Caller celebrated the restoration of D’Souza’s “American Dream”. Twitchy did Twitchy, and mocked liberal anger. Only RedState sounded a skeptical note, and speculated that Trump was preparing the ground to pardon Mike Flynn.
