Dinesh D'Souza and the Decline of Conservatism

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I guess he'll stop doing that, now that it's been pointed out.

WhiteAnxietyHat Retweeted

While @davidfrum does an excellent job tracking the devolution of D'Souza over the decades, he also offers another excellent example of how hackishly clumsy his use of the historical record generally is.

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Also, as I noted here, the Oklahoma Democratic Party in the 1920s was also internally divided between a racist pro-Klan faction that dominated the state legislature and an anti-Klan group led by the governor.

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But read the whole @davidfrum piece here:

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IDEAS

Dinesh D’Souza and the Decline of Conservatism

Under President Trump, the most outrageous and aggrieved polemicists are thriving.

DAVID FRUM
6:00 AM ET

Few have enjoyed quite so spectacular a comeback under President Trump as the conservative polemicist and filmmaker, Dinesh D’Souza. In 2012, D’Souza resigned as president of a Christian college amid charges of adultery and deception. In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty to violating federal campaign-finance laws. He was sentenced to eight months of confinement followed by 52 months’ probation.

Now, as the saying goes, D’Souza is back—and bigger than ever. He has reinvented himself as something like the court intellectual of the age of Trump. Trump pardoned D’Souza on May 31, 2018. At the beginning of August, Donald Trump Jr. cohosted the premier of D’Souza’s latest movie, Death of a Nation. The movie compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln and his Democratic opponents to Nazis. Afterward, Trump Jr. delivered a memorable summation (1) of what he had learned from the film. “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there ... and you look at it compared to like the DNC platform of today, and you're saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it's actually scary.”

If you need a historian’s point-by-point refutation of D’Souza’s grotesque and absurd abuse of history, Princeton’s Kevin Kruse has posted a useful recapitulation.

I find myself pondering a different question as I watch so many people I have known and admired subordinate their talents and their integrity to Trumpism: How has my political generation of conservatives and Republicans laid itself so intellectually and morally low?
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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [e-mail].

DAVID FRUM is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

(1)

[czarjak]

1. OAN?

Say no more!