Nine years later, when D’Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus-the Washington Post called him “palpably smart,” “sober-minded,” and a “gentleman”-I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.ĭ’Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.) (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members.
There he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured-without the university’s approval-for a mailing. And at lunch, I had the good fortune to share a table with him. D’Souza was received at this affair as royalty. In 1982, I attended-that is, snuck into-a conference for conservative students journalists held at the New York Athletic Club and sponsored by foundations eager to spread the conservative gospel on college campuses. But he also had trouble with trustworthiness-as I discovered in an early encounter. Decades later, it’s clear that D’Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be up over our ‘fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.”) The “Jive” article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right’s problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review‘s advisory board. While he helmed the Review, it published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader”-accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree-and an assault on affirmative action titled, “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in Ebonics. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D’Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). He…also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members.ĭ’Souza’s extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. It depicts Obama as anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-white.
D’Souza’s movie, 2016: Obama’s America, contends that Obama, driven by the remnants of this anti-colonial rage inherited from his father, had a covert second-term plan to weaken and impoverish the United States of America. More recently, he was the fellow who derived the odious theory that President Barack Obama could only be understood if viewed as the secret keeper of the flame of Kenyan anti-colonialism-a notion that Newt Gingrich giddily embraced and promoted.
After all, for years D’Souza has been a right-wing bad boy spouting the most noxious criticism of the left and being rewarded for his exploits. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York), liberal commentators had trouble hiding their glee-or, what I called on Twitter, Dineshenfreude. On Thursday evening, as the news broke that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had been indicted by the feds for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to an unnamed 2012 Senate candidate (widely presumed to be Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican who was crushed by incumbent Democratic Sen.
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