I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that being a convicted felon wouldn’t stop a far-right extremist, whose recent writings have been condemned by “traditional” conservative voices, still can find a home among the conspiratorially-inclined, and of course Fox News. A few years back Dinesh D’Souza spent nights in a cushy “community confinement” facility for a few months after he was convicted of campaign finance fraud, in which he secretly “reimbursed” two husband-and-wife teams a total of $20,000 for campaign donations that they made, but apparently didn’t want to do themselves, to a former Dartmouth classmate of D’Souza who was running for the U.S. Senate from New York. One of the wives also happened to be his “mistress.” It is illegal for an individual to donate more than $5,000 to a political campaign, and what D’Souza essentially did was (including his own donation) was make a personal $25,000 political campaign donation. But D’Souza attracted Donald Trump’s attentions by his incendiary, racist diatribes aimed at Barack Obama, and Trump found in it his “heart” to pardon him.
D’Souza is an immigrant from India, born in Bombay. His surname is derived from a period of Portuguese colonial control of the area, and its Catholic missionary work. Although Christians in India regard themselves outside the Hindu caste system, they are nevertheless effected by it, and many Indian Christians do not identify themselves as Christian but as Hindu in official documents, because only Hindus receive special “protections” and “privileges” due their particularly “caste” position. But just because D’Souza was raised a Roman Catholic doesn’t necessarily mean he believes in “Christian” tenets--in fact, his social views tend toward the “caste” system.
The very dark-skinned D’Souza--one suspects that his ancestors were lower caste if not “untouchables,” thus their willingness to convert to Christianity--is one of those self-conscious types who because they are not “white” but do not want to be lumped in with the “others,” must out-racist the racists to be “accepted” into the “superior” white “caste.” People like D’Souza are little more than tolerated by the racist right because they are foolish enough to employ many of the same racist tropes (particularly of the anti-immigrant variety) that many racists use to attack the “others” that D’Souza would normally be lumped into. We should remember that organizations like The Association of German National Jews advocated for the denial of Jewish self-identity and the expulsion of non-German Jews from Germany to “purify” the country along nationalist lines--but this did not save them from the same fate of their co-religionists wherever the Nazis held sway.
Dylan Matthews in Vox pointed out D’Souza’s disturbing history of far-right sophistry that had a mostly racial slant. In his book Illiberal Education, he attacked campus “political correctness” and affirmative action, using arbitrary and cherry-picked anecdotes he scrounged up here and there to “prove” his claim that “traditional Western canon” was being abandoned “through the inclusion of more modern female, non-white, and non-heterosexual writers.” D’Souza also bizarrely argued that ballet and chess lessons were sufficient reason to give his daughter an “upper hand” in admission to the “best” schools over other qualified students--and certainly over any minority applicant.
And then in his book The End of Racism, D’Souza claimed that slavery was not a racist institution, ignoring the fact that slavery in the U.S. did have a “distinctly” racist flavor to it--as proven by subsequent Jim Crow laws. Slaves were also treated like “property”--meaning they were treated “well.” Like Rand Paul, D’Souza opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act, since “private” discrimination should be “lawful.” He also claimed that segregation was meant to “protect” blacks, and other such head-scratching numbskullery that we thought was left behind long ago.
While D’Souza discounted Charles Murray’s claim of black genetic “deficiency,” he nevertheless claimed that blacks were “deficient” in other ways, such as having “destructive and pathological cultural patterns of behavior.” D’Souza, apparently not foreseeing either his own racist attacks on Obama or that of the Trump presidency (which he now supports full-throatedly), also insisted that “old discrimination has declined,” but now replaced by what he called “rational discrimination.”
D’Souza explained “rational discrimination” in an op-ed in USA Today. Although he opposed “public discrimination,” such as racial profiling by police--mainly because it turned law-abiding blacks against “the system”--he fully supported “private” discrimination:
In the private sector, we should be more flexible in dealing with rational discrimination. I think the campaign to go after cabdrivers for alleged bigotry is especially foolish. Of course, as a “person of color” myself, I’d be annoyed and indignant if I could not get a taxi. Yet my right to get a cab, which is the right not to be inconvenienced, seems less important than the cabdriver’s right to protect his life and property. In cases such as this, it is better for the government to do nothing.
Instead of questioning discrimination by cabdrivers, apartment renters, restaurants and businesses, D’Souza asserted that “we should recall that their only offense is using common sense. Shouldn’t African Americans who are legitimately outraged at being victimized by discrimination direct their anger not at cabdrivers or police officers but at the black thieves, muggers, and crack dealers who are giving the entire group a bad name?”
D’Souza has made some enemies in more ”traditional” circles on the right, mainly for publishing even for them too outrageous slanders, like his 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, in which we “learn” the following:
In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage.
D’Souza argued that it isn’t because the U.S. provided arms to Al-Qaeda during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan that they would then use against us, or the U.S. continuing to maintain a military force in Saudi Arabia well after the first Iraq War, angering Islamic militants and convincing them to do something “big” to drive the “infidels” out of Islam’s “holy land,” it was all the fault of “liberals” from every corner, publicizing things this country was doing that made it “look bad.”
But the book also alienated some on the hard right, particularly since D’Souza made some admissions that were embarrassing for them, For example, he claimed that “when it comes to core beliefs,” he felt more at home with a radical Islamic fundamentalist Imam than “radical leftists” like Michael Moore. Critics of the book at a symposium held by the conservative National Review were particularly disturbed that D’Souza seemed to be “encouraging” those on the right to embrace the “rantings of Islamic terrorists” as their own, or at least on social issues.
Thus when D’Souza called in to Fox News this past Sunday, what he had to say was fairly typical coming from him:
The problem is that you respond [to rioting] through the lawful authorities, which is through the police; if things escalate beyond a certain point then you call in federal assistance. If things escalate beyond that point you call in the military. Local governments and state governors are calling down the cops and licensing their own private gangs. If the cops won't protect us, then you're going to see the rise of citizen militias around the country. I'm not advocating this. I'm predicting it. It is a natural and inevitable response to the militarization of one side.
He then launched into some bizarre defenses of far-right Christianity and Catholic ideologies, but then reloaded his far-right social extremist pop-gun:
The left is looking to create a coalition of minority victims that equals 51 percent so they can loot and oppress the other 49 percent. Our model is, one way or the other stop them from doing that... We will be essentially undoing 200 years of development of Western civilization. And commerce and culture will have to go elsewhere.
D’Souza, of course, slanders “liberals,” repeating his own well-worn racist views of society, and the desire for a “peaceful” world based on the usual white-flight justifications:
If the Democrats want to try the approach that's called 'license the criminal gangs and start setting fires to businesses' that's their model. Our model is peace and prosperity and commerce and civility -- then let people choose if they want to live in burned-out Milwaukee or burned out Portland, or if they'd much rather live in a nice Republican suburb where it's really nice and there's good stuff to be found in stores.
Naturally, D’Souza and most on the far-right ignore the fact that “war zone” cities like Seattle and Portland have heavily white and Asian-majority populations that is not likely to change, mainly because blacks and Hispanics can’t afford to live in them. Other cities that have experienced “white flight” in the past have seen “reverse” white-flight from the suburbs, because for many younger people there is nothing to do in the suburbs, and because of low property values, cities are becoming cheaper to live in; this is why most of the people you saw in the Seattle CHOP “war zone” were white people with too much time on their hands because of the lockdown.
D’Souza wasn’t finished making more outrageous claims, like Democrats “relying” on “force,” which is actually more the Trump game plan, bullying and unleashing his racist pit bulls on the country. He asserts that the left and the right have two entirely different views of the world, and he doesn’t have any idea of how they should “coexist,” which is typical of a far-right fanatic who thinks only in term of “us” against “them” instead of just “all of us”:
Ultimately, they (Democrats) can only win if they can force us to live their way. Now, I don't think we're going to. We are no more going to submit to them and change our ways then perhaps they are going to submit to us. This raises the deeper question of how do we find a way going forward... We don't want the America they want and they don't want the America we want. The real question is, how do we coexist with each other. That's the real question of the future.
Being a conspiracy theory nutjob, D’Souza just couldn’t leave it that:
I think that the Democratic plan is to swap out Biden after the election. They don't want Biden to keel over before the election. The reason they picked him is they think they needed a white male to camouflage the racial radicalness of their party. It's not like some chaotic process produced these horrible candidates. They chose him.
It has to be terribly frustrating for “progressive” Democrats to know that Fox News viewers are being fed this kind of garbage. Neither Biden nor Kamala Harris are particularly “progressive,” and calling them “radical” should only be understood in terms of the extreme radicalism of Trump and his supporters. D’Souza’s racism, of course, is also evident here; if anyone deserves to be called a “horrible” candidate, it is of course Trump, and yes, he is a white man who sees the world through the prism of white nationalist, nativist privilege. If D’Souza thinks this is the man to “unite” the country, then no wonder he is so clueless about how people are to “coexist,” when he himself has demonstrated time and again that he doesn’t not even believe that social “coexistence” is even possible.
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