I stopped yesterday’s post with a description of D’Souza’s 2007 book The Enemy at Home, which blames the American “cultural left” for the 9/11 attacks. Hoo-boy! Fast-forward to 2012, when he released his first film 2016: Obama’s America based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage. By this time in his life D’Souza had become quite a conservative celebrity; in 2010 he had been asked to take on the leadership of King’s College, a historically Protestant institution, an appointment that ended in 2012 after he had been caught in what certainly seemed to be an adulterous relationship. I’m not really all that interested in re-hashing the details of the scandal. To me the most important point of the whole sad story comes with D’Souza’s statement that he didn’t know it was considered wrong to be engaged to one woman while married to another. (And, as it turned out, the woman he was involved with was also married at the time.) He . . . didn’t know it was considered wrong? As I often say, “Wh-a-a-a-t?”
But wait! There’s more! I can hardly believe this, but when D’Souza ended up being indicted and charged for illegal campaign donations, two of his so-called “straw donors” were his mistress and her husband. (I know I’m using way too many italics here, but I can’t help myself.) While D’Souza tried to portray himself as being persecuted by the Leader of the Free World because of his admittedly very successful book and movie against said Leader, it seems clear that he simply couldn’t be bothered to cover his tracks very well and thus his crime was easy to spot. (In one of the most hilarious moments of his new film he says, “I realized that I must be one of the stupidest criminals in America.” Well, yes.) He had been asked to do some fund raising for Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican candidate for Senate from New York. (No pun intended.) The idea was that he would make some phone calls to his well-heeled conservative friends and get them to donate to her campaign. Fair enough. That would have been quite a simple thing to do, and perfectly legal. Or he could have set up some sort of PAC and donated any amount of money through that. But no. From the extensive reading I’ve done I have to say that the whole thing comes across as D’Souza simply not wanting to bother with doing things legally. It was much easier to persuade people to give to Long’s campaign and then write them reimbursement checks.
But D’Souza wants to make his conviction into political persecution. So he then moves ahead with his next film, Hillary’s America, the one that’s still inexplicably playing at the multiplexes. Hey, President Obama! It’s payback time!
Tomorrow I want to take a look at the factual inaccuracies of HA (ha!). We’ll see how long I can keep going on that subject. For now, if you’d like to read a sincere Christian take on the whole King’s College fiasco, I’d recommend the following excellent article:
“Dinesh D’Souza Highlights Marvin Olasky’s Christian Fidelity”