Background and career
Dinesh Joseph D'Souza (; born April 25, 1961) is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist, author, and filmmaker. He has made several films and written over a dozen books, several of them New York Times best-sellers. Born in Mumbai, India, to Indian Catholic parents, D'Souza moved to the United States as an exchange student and graduated from Dartmouth College. He was a policy adviser in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and has been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. He became a naturalized citizen in 1991. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of The King's College, a Christian school in New York City, until he resigned after a scandal when he checked into a hotel with a woman he referred to as his fiancée; both were married, but had separated from their respective spouses. In 2012, D'Souza released the conspiracist political film 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Barack Obama polemic based on his 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage. He has since released seven other conspiracist films: America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014), Hillary's America (2016), Death of a Nation (2018), Trump Card (2020), 2000 Mules (2022), Police State (2023) and Vindicating Trump (2024). D'Souza's films and commentary have generated considerable controversy due to their promotion of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, as well as for their incendiary nature. In 2014, D'Souza pleaded guilty in federal court to one felony charge of using a "straw donor" to make illegal campaign contributions. In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.
Dinesh Joseph D'Souza was born on 25 April 1961 into a middle-class Goan Catholic family, in Bombay, India, where his father was an executive with Johnson & Johnson and his mother was a housewife. D'Souza attended the St. Stanislaus High School, a Jesuit school in Bandra. He graduated from high school in 1976 and attended Sydenham College in Churchgate for year 11 and 12. In 1978, D'Souza became a foreign-exchange student and traveled to the United States under the Rotary Youth Exchange, attending Patagonia Union High School in Patagonia, Arizona. He went on to matriculate at Dartmouth College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1983 and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. While at Dartmouth, D'Souza wrote for The Dartmouth Review, an independent, student-edited, alumni- and Collegiate Network-subsidized publication. D'Souza faced criticism during his time at The Review for authoring an article publicly outing homosexual members of the school's Gay–Straight Alliance student organization. He also oversaw The Review's publication of "a light-hearted interview" with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan over a staged photograph of a black person hanged from a tree, as well as a piece mocking affirmative action in higher education written from the point of view of a black student and phrased in Ebonics. These incidents caused U.S. Representative Jack Kemp, then a prominent Republican leader and member of The Review's advisory board, to resign from the board. After graduating from Dartmouth, D'Souza became editor of a monthly journal called The Prospect, a publication financed by a group of Princeton University alumni. The paper and its writers ignited much controversy during D'Souza's editorship by, among other things, criticizing the college's affirmative-action policies. From 1985 to 1987, D'Souza was contributing editor for the Policy Review, a journal then published by The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In a September 1985 article titled "The Bishops as Pawns", D'Souza asserted that Catholic bishops in the United States were being manipulated by American liberals in agreeing to oppose the U.S. military buildup and use of power abroad when, D'Souza believed, they knew very little about these subjects to which they were lending their religious credibility. Between 1987 and 1988, D'Souza was a policy adviser in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. He has been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1991, D'Souza naturalized as a U.S. citizen. He renounced Indian citizenship, as India's nationality law does not recognize dual citizenship.
In 1995, D'Souza wrote The End of Racism, in which he claimed that exaggerated claims of racism are holding back progress among African Americans in the United States. He defended the Southern slave owners and said, "The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." D'Souza also called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and argued: "Given the intensity of black rage and its appeal to a wide constituency, whites are right to be nervous. Black rage is a response to black suffering and failure, and reflects the irresistible temptation to attribute African American problems to a history of white racist oppression." A reviewer for The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education responded to the book by posting a list of 16 recent racist incidents against black people. Michael Bérubé, in a lengthy review article, referred to the book as "encyclopedic pseudoscience", calling it illogical and saying some of the book's policy recommendations are fascist; he stated that it is "so egregious an affront to human decency as to set a new and sorry standard for 'intellectual'". The book was also panned by many other critics: John David Smith, in The Journal of Southern History, said D'Souza claims blacks are inferior and opines that "D'Souza bases his terribly insensitive, reactionary polemic on sound bite statistical and historical evidence, frequently gleaned out of context and patched together illogically. His book is flawed because he ignores the complex causes and severity of white racism, misrepresents Boas's arguments, and undervalues the matrix of ignorance, fear, and long-term economic inequality that he dubs black cultural pathology. How, according to his own logic, can allegedly inferior people uplift themselves without government assistance?" He adds that D'Souza's "biased diatribe trivializes serious pathologies, white and black, and adds little to our understanding of America's painful racial dilemma". The prepublication version of the book contained a chapter dedicated to those portrayed by D'Souza as authentic racists, including many paleoconservatives, such as prominent philosopher and The Washington Times editor Samuel T. Francis, to whom he attributed several false quotes at the inaugural American Renaissance conference. A column by D'Souza in The Washington Post containing this material led to Francis being fired. D'Souza's account of Francis's speech was contradicted by video of the event. American Renaissance organizer Jared Taylor took legal action against D'Souza for several false claims, including that speakers had used racial slurs, resulting in publisher Free Press canceling the initial run and forcing D'Souza to rewrite portions of the book. Some observers, such as Baltimore Sun writer Gregory Kane noted that D'Souza's book bore many similarities to Taylor's 1992 work Paved with Good Intentions, despite D'Souza accusing Taylor of racism. Many right-wing critics, such as Lawrence Auster, believed that D'Souza was attacking Francis and others to protect himself from accusations of racism. Paul Finkelman commented on what he called D'Souza's trivialization of racism. In a review article called "The Rise of the New Racism", Finkelman stated that much of what D'Souza says is untrue, and much is only partially true, and described the book as being "like a parody of scholarship, where selected 'facts' are pulled out of any recognizable context, and used to support a particular viewpoint". In Finkelman's opinion, the book exemplifies a "new racism", which "(1) denies the history of racial oppression in America; (2) rejects biological racism in favor of an attack on black culture; and (3) supports formal, de jure equality in order to attack civil rights laws that prohibit private discrimination and in order to undermine any public policies that might monitor equality and give it substantive meaning". The conservative black economist Glenn Loury severed his ties with the American Enterprise Institute over the organization's role in the publication of the book. Loury wrote that the book "violated canons of civility and commonality", with D'Souza "determined to place poor, urban blacks outside the orbit of American civilization."
In the second chapter of his 2002 book, What's So Great About America, D'Souza argues that while colonialism was terrible, it had the unintended consequence of lifting third world countries up to Western civilization. D'Souza writes, "I realize that in saying these things I am opening the door for my critics, and the incorrigible enemies of the West, to say that I am justifying colonialism ... This is the purest nonsense. What I am doing is pointing out a historical fact: despite the corrupt and self-serving motives of [its] practitioners ... colonialism ... proved to be the mechanism that brought millions of nonwhite people into the orbit of Western freedom." He holds up the European colonization of India as an example, arguing that in the long run colonization was beneficial for India, because it introduced Western law, universities, infrastructure, and the like, while effectively ending human sacrifice, the practice of Sati, and other "charming indigenous customs". In a review of the book, economist Thomas Sowell wrote that D'Souza's book exposed the fallacies and hypocrisies of various criticisms of the United States by the Islamic world, "domestic multiculturalist cults," those who seek reparations for slavery, and the worldwide intelligentsia. According to Sowell: "Perhaps it takes somebody from outside to truly appreciate all the blessings that too many native-born Americans take for granted. D'Souza understands how rare—sometimes unique—these blessings are." Sowell also wrote that D'Souza challenges the notion that all world cultures are equal: "D'Souza challenges one of the central premises of today's intelligentsia: The equality of all cultures. 'If one begins with the multicultural premise that all cultures are equal, then the world as it is makes very little sense,' he says. Some cultures have completely outperformed others in providing the things that all people seek—health, food, housing, security, and the amenities of life."
In early 2007, D'Souza published The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he argues that the American cultural left was in large part responsible for the Muslim anger that led to the September 11 attacks. He argues that Muslims do not hate America because of its freedom and democracy, but because they perceive America to be imposing its moral depravity (support for sexual licentiousness) on the world. D'Souza also argues that the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse was a result of "the sexual immodesty of liberal America", and asserts that the conditions of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay "are comparable to the accommodations in mid-level Middle Eastern hotels." The book was criticized in major American newspapers and magazines and described as, among other things, "the worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11" and "a national disgrace". Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times described it as "a nasty stewpot of intellectually untenable premises and irresponsible speculation that frequently reads like a Saturday Night Live parody of the crackpot right." D'Souza's book caused controversy in the conservative movement. His conservative critics widely mocked his thesis that the cultural left was responsible for 9/11. In response, D'Souza posted a 6,500-word essay on National Review Online, and NRO subsequently published a litany of responses from conservative authors who accused D'Souza of character assassination, elitism and pseudo-intellectualism.
The September 2010 book by D'Souza, The Roots of Obama's Rage (published in condensed form in a September 2010 Forbes op-ed), interprets President Barack Obama's past and how it formed his beliefs. D'Souza states that Obama is "living out his father's dream", so that "[i]ncredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s", who, D'Souza goes on to describe as a "philandering, inebriated African socialist". The book appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for four weeks in October–November 2010. Ryan Chittum, in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, described the Forbes article as "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia ... the worst kind of smear journalism—a singularly disgusting work". Commentators on both the right and left strongly disputed assertions made about Obama in the book and article. The left-leaning Media Matters for America wrote that "The Roots of Obama's Rage [was] rooted in lies". Daniel Larison of The American Conservative stated: "Dinesh D'Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written ... All in all, D'Souza's article reads like a bad conspiracy theory." Larison criticized D'Souza's suggestion that Obama is anti-business, citing a lack of evidence. Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard wrote, "D'Souza always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other ... There is, indeed, a name for the beliefs that motivate President Obama, but it's not anticolonialism; it's not even socialism. It's liberalism!". The magazine published D'Souza's letter, in which he expressed surprise "at the petty, vindictive tone of Andrew Ferguson's review".
