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Dinesh D’Souza is a high-profile conservative writer whose books and films have gained notoriety for their diatribes about the “culture wars” and fear-mongering narratives about liberals. A former fellow at several rightist policy groups, including the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, D’Souza is perhaps best known for his controversial 1991 bestseller Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, as well his 2012 documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which sought to raise fears that President Barack Obama’s re-election would spell doom for the United States. D’Souza’s resume also includes working briefly as a policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and as an editor of Policy Review, a journal originally published by the Heritage Foundation.

D’Souza served as president of the evangelical King’s College from August 2010 to October 2012, when he resigned in the wake of a scandal over purported marital infidelities, as well as after months of increasing pressure from the college’s board of directors. According to one report, “It was not immediately clear whether the board’s decision was driven by the allegations of the affair, or by dissatisfaction with D’Souza’s leadership that had been building at the college for months. … According to several sources at the college, members of the King’s faculty and board alike had grown unhappy with D’Souza’s presidency over what they saw as a failure to earn his salary. D’Souza has spent much of the past few months promoting his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, and his high profile in the media was seen as rarely benefitting the college.”[1]

Originally founded in 1938, King’s College closed in 1998 due to financial problems. It was revived in 1999 under the auspices of the Campus Crusade for Christ International, a right-wing Christian group notorious for its efforts to evangelize Iraqis in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion and to provide training courses for U.S. soldiers aimed at making them “government-paid missionaries,” as one Campus Crusade representative put it.[2] Describing the King’s College mission, Campus Crusade stated in a 2010 press release that the school “exists to challenge broadly accepted ideas in higher education through a rigorous education—guided by Christian principles—that equips and empowers students to successfully assume significant leadership positions in society.”[3]

D’Souza’s 2012 documentary, 2016: Obama’s America,was widely panned by mainstream observers. However, it became a major hit on the right-wing circuit, and according to press reports “trails only Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 as the highest-grossing U.S. political documentary.”[4] After the film’s release, D’Souza became embroiled in a lawsuit over assets from the production of film, with a partner accusing D’Souza of using assets for personal reasons, which D’Souza denied.[5]  

The documentary is based largely on D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which argues that Obama has been shaped by the anti-colonial “Third World collectivism” purportedly espoused by his father. Regardless of the fact that his father abandoned Obama shortly after birth, wrote Washington Post film critic Michael O’Sullivan in August 2012, the film “trots out a professional psychologist to speculate on how the senior Obama’s absence reinforced his influence, rather than weakened it. D’Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you’re predisposed to believe that Obama hates America.” Added O’Sullivan, “D’Souza’s one-sided argument ultimately stoops to fear-mongering of the worst kind, stating in no uncertain terms that, if the president is reelected, the world four years from now will be darkened by the clouds of economic collapse, World War III (thanks to the wholesale renunciation of our nuclear superiority) and a terrifyingly ascendant new ‘United States of Islam’ in the Middle East. These assertions are accompanied by footage of actual dark clouds and horror-movie music.”[6]

In The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza claims that his theory about the impact of Obama’s absent father accounts for the president’s choices better than any “rival theory can even begin to do." However, according to a review of the book by the liberal Media Matters for America, D’Souza’s entire argument is “premised upon a series of false and misleading claims.”[7] Among the falsehoods and inappropriate characterizations Media Matters identified are the claim that Obama's push for a "nuclear-free world" is evidence of his "anti-colonialism" (if true, than Ronald Reagan was also an anti-colonialist); that Obama initiated the auto and financial industry bailouts (both efforts were begun by President George W. Bush); and, inter alia, that Obama supported the release of the Lockerbie bomber (the Obama administration publicly opposed it).[8]

Despite the book’s bizarre claims and theories, it nevertheless received enormous press and was endorsed by several conservative heavyweights, like Newt Gingrich, who called the book “brilliant” and the “most interesting insight.” Commenting on both D’Souza’s book and the attention it received, Slate.com’s David Weigel wrote, “D’Souza’s book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, is a mess. His most memorable previous books were messes, too. Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press. That's had basically no effect on his ability to get published or his ability to get onto the stage at conservative conferences. But it is good for liberals. D'Souza was the first modern conservative author to discover—the hard way—that if you want to be a pundit, there is no downside to making a reprehensible argument. The downside comes for the people who may agree with your politics but not your argument.”[9]

D’Souza’s first major work was Illiberal Education, published in 1991 (Free Press), which helped inaugurate a backlash against political correctness at U.S. universities and became the center of a growing debate at the time about multiculturalism and affirmative action policies in higher education. D’Souza argued that the trend in offering preferential treatment to minorities and other marginalized groups (like homosexuals), as well as efforts to diversify curriculum so that non-Western cultures received more attention, ultimately resulted in a dumbing down of higher education. Although credited with shedding light on some of the more notorious effects of PC education, like the promotion of harsh censorship policies, Illiberal Education was criticized by many observers for being tendentious, facile, and disingenuous. In a review published by the New York Review of Books, Louis Menand wrote that the tone adopted by D’Souza in the book is “of a man who is curious about the reports he has been hearing of campus strife over issues involving race and sex, and who, as a friend to liberal learning, is sympathetic to all the parties involved (or nearly all, for he cannot find a good word to say about homosexuality).” However, Menand pointed out, the truth is that D’Souza has never been a friend of liberalism, having been associated with a number of rightist projects since has undergraduate days at Dartmouth College.[10]

Commenting on the string of similar “New Right” critiques of higher learning that appeared at the time and of which Illiberal Education was merely the most notorious, Janet McNew, an English professor at St. John’s University Minnesota, wrote in 1992: “To me, the analyses of higher education put forward by [William] Bennett, [Lynne] Cheney, [Roger] Kimball, and D'Souza suggest a shared political ideology. I have even wondered whether the New Right intellectuals swept into power by the Reagan revolution have identified universities as the last institutional bastions of anticonservatism and targeted them for ‘reform’ that would put them in step with the rest of the nation. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., a conservative disciple of Leo Strauss like Allan Bloom, reveals the mentality and motives of this group when he defensively says that the reason so many Straussians came to Washington to work for Reagan was that they couldn't find jobs in universities where their brand of ideology had become unfashionable. It sometimes seems that everywhere we look nowadays in the media, there is some manifestation of the conservative agenda that aims to snatch universities away from liberal loonies, and a mobilization of the same massive resources that packaged and sold Reagan and Bush may have the power to do it.”[11]

A more recent D’Souza book is The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday, 2007). As its title suggests, the book is a harangue about how the “appeasement” policies of liberal leaders—beginning with the Carter administration in the late 1970s and continuing through the left's purportedly "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family"—helped set the stage for the radical Islamic antipathy toward America that ultimately led to 9/11. Many commentators and public figures pointed out the irony of D’Souza’s sympathetic treatment of Osama bin Laden in a book dedicated to blaming his work on the left. Bin Laden is described in the book as “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person” who “has not launched a single attack against Israel.”[12]

According to Publishers Weekly, D’Souza argues that much of the ire directed at America by the likes of bin Laden is because people like Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton, and Noam Chomsky have “teamed up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture—epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives—on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al-Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home.”[13]

Wrote Alan Wolfe in the New York Times, “I never thought a book by D’Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in The Enemy at Home, D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be ‘highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.’ Islamic punishment tends to be harsh—flogging adulterers and that sort of thing—but this, D’Souza says ‘with only a hint of irony,’ simply puts Muslims ‘in the Old Testament tradition.’ Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, ‘even better than polygamy.’ And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while ‘pooh-poohed by Western commentators,’ was ‘undoubtedly accurate.’”[14]

Pointing to D’Souza’s plea for “decent liberals” to join with him in a crusade against the American left, Wolfe’s quips at the end of his review: “So let this ‘decent’ liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. … I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.”[15]

The Enemy at Home also had critics on the right. Andrew Stuttaford, a writer for the New York Sun often cited by the neoconservative advocacy group the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, took D’Souza to task for his efforts to identify “moderate” Muslims whom America should woo. Writes Stuttaford: “In his fawning, flattering portrait of a supposedly ‘traditional’ Islam, he offers Americans possibly the most misleading depiction of an unfamiliar way of life since Margaret Mead returned breathless and babbling from Samoa. The reason that such a smart writer has chosen to take such a strange tack is, alas, all too obvious. He's more interested in fighting the culture wars at home than confronting the global ideological challenge posed by Islamic extremism. In The Enemy at Home, Osama bin laden is reduced to little more than another stick with which Mr. D'Souza can beat those he considers to be our naughtier, more godless citizens: so not only is same-sex marriage a bad idea, but it will also bring the wrath of Al Qaeda crashing down upon our heads, and as for that pesky separation of church and state, well. …To say this line of reasoning is somewhat unconvincing is to be very polite.”[16]

D’Souza is the author of a number of books, including The End of Racism, a 1995 national best-seller that criticizes the “civil rights industry,” arguing that racism is largely a Western creation and that achievement gaps between races is due mainly to cultural differences.  Other titles include Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (Free Press, 1997), What's So Great About America (Regnery, 2002), Letters to a Young Conservative (Basic Books, 2003), and What's So Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007).

Discussing the series of books D’Souza wrote between 1995 and 2010, Slate’s Dave Weigel writes: “The start of the D'Souza phenomenon came in 1995, when he published The End of Racism. Written to ride the wave of books and articles that called for white America to get over its racial guilt, it included lines like the ‘American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.’ It was so sloppy and unconvincing that it killed the genre for a few years; it's a 700-page doorstop by a one-time AEI scholar that no one cites today. The next D'Souza implosion came in 2007, with the publication of another book that killed its genre. The Enemy at Home consisted of an argument that the ‘left’ was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That was an irresistible hook for a publisher, especially after the public had turned on the Bush administration and the war on terror. But D'Souza made such a hash out of it that the people who had danced around the left-and-9/11 idea realized how deeply stupid it was. Victor Davis Hanson joined the mob and pointed out, as politely as he could, that D'Souza's enemies list was ‘nonsensical.’ So The Roots of Obama's Rage is D'Souza's third pseudo-academic swing for the fences. In the book … he strikes out.”[17]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.