Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh Joseph D'Souza (born April 25, 1961) is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist.

He has written over a dozen books, several of them New York Times best-sellers.

Dinesh Joseph D'Souza was born in Bombay in 1961.

D'Souza grew up in a middle-class family; his parents were Roman Catholics from the state of Goa in Western India, where his father was an executive with Johnson & Johnson, and his mother was a housewife.

D'Souza attended the Jesuit St. Stanislaus High School in Bombay.

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.

He graduated in 1976 and completed his 11th and 12th years at Sydenham College, also in Bombay.

In 1978, D'Souza became a foreign exchange student and traveled to the United States under the Rotary Youth Exchange and attended the local public 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; and 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 US 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 the 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 a contributing editor for 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.

He became a naturalized citizen in 1991.

In 1991, D'Souza became a naturalized United States citizen.

In 1995, D'Souza published 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."

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.

In 2012, D'Souza released the documentary film 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Barack Obama polemic based on his 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage; it earned $33 million, making it the highest-grossing conservative documentary of all time and one of the highest-grossing documentaries of any kind.

In 2012, D'Souza contributed $10,000 to the Senate campaign of Wendy Long on behalf of himself and his wife, agreeing in writing to attribute that contribution as $5,000 from his wife and $5,000 from him.

He directed two other people to give Long a total of $20,000 in addition, which he agreed to reimburse, and later did.

At the time, the Election Act limited campaign contributions to $5,000 from any individual to any one candidate.

Two years later, D'Souza pleaded guilty in federal court to one felony charge of using a "straw donor" to make the illegal campaign contribution.

He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house near his home in San Diego, five years' probation, and a $30,000 fine.

He has since released five other documentary films: America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014), Hillary's America (2016), Death of a Nation (2018), Trump Card (2020) and 2000 Mules (2022).

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.

Born in Mumbai, 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.

In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.