U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 117

A major reason not to take The Big Lie seriously is D’Souza himself. By mainstream standards, D’Souza’s career has been a comical embarrassment. D’Souza first found notoriety while an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where the student publication he edited outed members of the Gay Student Alliance. He became a prominent conservative pundit with his book Illiberal Education, but by the 2000s he had, in the words of Vanity Fair, “eaten away at his respectability in intellectual circles” with extreme and often bizarre claims. He blamed 9/11 on Hollywood liberals, saying that Osama bin Laden was primarily motivated by a hatred of Western sexual decadence, an argument that put off conservatives with its implication that bin Laden shared their values. His The Roots of Obama’s Rage argued that Barack Obama was a conduit for his father’s radical anti-colonial politics, with the “philandering, inebriated, African socialist [Obama, Sr.] now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” Even the conservative Weekly Standard called this “lunacy.” Further embarrassments followed. In 2012, he was forced to resign as president of a Christian college after allegations of adultery. In 2013, D’Souza recorded an infomercial for pop-up Christmas trees. And in 2014, he pled guilty to a felony campaign finance violation, spending 8 months at a halfway house. (D’Souza alleged political persecution by the Obama administration, tweeting: “MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character; I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama.”

WHO ARE THE REAL NAZIS?

Is it the Democrats? No. It’s still the Nazis.

by NATHAN J. ROBINSON