Convicted Felon Dinesh D'Souza Is Still Hustling Old White People

Speaking at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Dinesh D’Souza, the nation's leading incendiary conservative documentarian, has resurfaced after what can only be described a series of unfortunate events. The trouble began with his 2012 ouster as president of the King’s College in Manhattan in the wake of a bombshell report in the Evangelical Christian magazine WORLD, which alleged that D'Souza had carried on an extramarital affair with a (much) younger woman. The Board of Trustees summarily terminated his employment, and the former Reagan administration official has since devoted himself more single-mindedly to ginning up anxiety among aging white folk, as highlighted by his immensely profitable anti-Obama book and movie campaign. The conspiracy-laden propaganda film 2016: Obama’s America is now the second-highest-grossing US documentary of all time, D’Souza boasted before a cabal of admirers in New York City on Tuesday night (exact estimates vary, but the film is definitely up there).

A massive hit among the Tea Party crowd, 2016 savaged Obama at his existential core, charging that the president’s entire life and career pursuits have been constructed with the burning desire to destroy America from within. This attack provided much of the thinking that undergirded certain strains of GOP invective during the last presidential campaign: Mitt Romney himself promulgated the “D’Souza doctrine” in his critique of Obama’s tenure, and just this week, Dick Cheney has been accused of doing the same in his fierce denunciation of Obama’s response to the current crisis in Iraq.

D’Souza was in town to preside over the premiere of his follow-up project, America: Imagine the World Without Her. The movie, unsurprisingly, is once again largely centered on Dinesh the man, and features extended close-up shots of him performing uniquely American activities such as visiting Mount Rushmore, patrolling the Mexican border, and eating a hot dog in Times Square. At this point, his sheer megalomania appears unparalleled among the conservative media ecosphere—other fire-breathing pundits and talk-radio-circuit journalists certainly brandish inflated egos, but D’Souza stands pretty much alone in relentlessly offering himself as the product.

The almost entirely white, middle-aged-to-elderly crowd received the film with ebullience, but many later despaired it would not find a wider audience among the general public. It probably can't hurt that federal prosecutors indicted D’Souza for campaign-finance fraud in January. At the time, Matt Drudge—arguably still among the most influential shapers of media discourse in the country—immediately pounced, tweeting his theory that D’Souza and friends were victims of a wildly prosecutorial Obama administration (the tweet has since been deleted). D’Souza later pleaded guilty to one count of violating campaign-finance laws.

I assumed D’Souza would avoid mention of the whole legal imbroglio, but instead it was explicitly discussed in the movie. Fox News clips of well-known anchors covering his indictment were shown during a portion of the film about Obama’s alleged obsession with silencing right-wing critics. I had an opportunity to speak with Dinesh after the screening, and asked if he was alluding to the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the charges, engaging in selective prosecution. “I don’t allude to it,” D'Souza told me. “I’m alluding to a broader point, which is the Obama administration uses the government against its critics. I say nothing about my case.”

Indeed, D’Souza the narrator need not have said anything about the case, because top-flight conservative media personalities did it for him. “I play news reports from Megyn Kelly and [Sean] Hannity talking on the subject,” D’Souza told me.

Here you can start to see how a typical interaction with D’Souza almost inevitably disintegrates into incoherence. Initially, D’Souza said that he did not allege “selective punishment” on the part of the US attorney’s office. Fine. But less than a minute later, in the very same conversation, he told me the following: “I said from the beginning I did exceed the campaign-finance limit, and my defense had to do with intent and selective prosecution.” D’Souza then somehow goes on to deny that showing TV reports on the indictment could lead viewers to suspect the Obama administration of targeting its antagonists for criminal punishment. “That’s a conclusion that people can draw if they want to,” D’Souza said. “I don’t draw it in the movie.”

Um, OK. The amount of pure bullshit that D’Souza can serve up has no apparent limit. To that extent, he is consistently impressive. But in fostering fear, paranoia, xenophobia, and conspiracism among the population, the man also does tangible harm. The central premise of the wildly successful 2016 doc was that America’s downfall was imminent should Obama win re-election that year. Well, Obama won re-election, and everything in America is still basically as it was two years ago—the good and the bad—which would seem to cast doubt on D’Souza’s thesis. Perhaps this helps explain why D’Souza opted for a film that resembles a “a love letter to America,” as one emotional movie premiere attendee put it during the question-and-answer session.

I tried to clarify with D’Souza what exactly he was claiming about selective prosecution. “In the movie I argue that I’m a prominent critic of Obama,” he told me. “I know for a fact that he was personally distressed by 2016—he railed against me personally on his website, BarackObama.com. So I’m a prominent, outspoken critic of him, and you can take that wherever you want.”

At this point a D'Souza handler intervened to cut short our dialogue, which was a shame. But despite his mendacity and criminal record, D’Souza can rest easy knowing that 1,000 theaters will be showing his new film when it opens July Fourth weekend. The checks, one suspects, will keep rolling right on in.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.