Dinesh D'Souza

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 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 an alleged adultery scandal, after he shared a hotel room 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 an illegal campaign contribution. In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.

Early life and career

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 became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He renounced Indian citizenship, as India's nationality law does not recognize dual citizenship.

Career as author, political commentator, and filmmaker

Authorship

The End of Racism

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."