Dinesh D’Souza sounds amused when told that some of his detractors describe him as a man who is down.
The prominent conservative sees himself as a lot of things these days: public intellectual, best-selling author, big draw on the lecture circuit, auteur behind a widely seen political documentary. But “down” is not a word he uses for himself.
Sure, he did end up resigning last month from the presidency of the King’s College, an evangelical Christian institution, following an uproar over his attending a conference with a woman other than his wife. Yes, he is in the process of divorcing his wife of 21 years.
His life cannot have been made easier by lawsuits that have been brought against him by business associates who claim that he has cheated them, a charge he denies. And clearly, his crusade to deny President Barack Obama a second term did not produce its desired result.
But, all in all, Mr. D’Souza, 52, sounds pleased with the state of things. His career, he says, “has never been stronger.”
A documentary that he co-directed and narrated, 2016: Obama’s America, has grossed more than $33-million in theaters since its release, in July, making it the second-most-successful political documentary ever produced in the United States, behind only Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
His two most recent books, The Roots of Obama’s Rage and Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream, rose high on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. He is popular enough on the lecture circuit to have given more than 40 speeches this year.
“If that is what it means to be down,” he says, “I would be hard-pressed to say what it means to be up.”
In a world filled with scholars who struggle to draw attention to their ideas, Mr. D’Souza, who has no advanced degree, has achieved celebrity status. He has been so successful at reaching wide audiences, and earning money as he does so, that he is helping to redefine the upper limits of success for the think-tank set.
But his success, long a source of consternation to the left, has become a growing source of concern to those on the right as well. His detractors argue that he has entered into a Faustian bargain in his quest to become a public intellectual, sacrificing the intellectual for the sake of winning the public.
Although some leading conservatives had accused him of shoddy work early in his career, the number finding fault with his arguments has surged in recent years. Paul Mirengoff, an author of the conservative blog Power Line, says Mr. D’Souza “is not someone who is read and considered a top conservative thinker any more by the people I know,” even if “in one sense he is a big player because this movie came out that a lot people went to see.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor of the National Review, said in an e-mail, “D’Souza is a very bright guy but I do not find his recent arguments compelling or even plausible. I think their success among conservatives has undermined our ability to persuade nonconservatives that we are right or even reasonable.”
On the more liberal side, Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and a professor of political science at Boston College, says Mr. D’Souza “is pretty much in a class by himself.”
“He is an exponent of propaganda for the sake of propaganda. If that is what he wants to do, that is fine, but I would not use the term ‘public intellectual’” for him, Mr. Wolfe says.
“He makes controversial claims that are designed to draw attention to himself,” Mr. Wolfe says. “It is not what people in the academic world do.”
‘Intellectual Nomad’
Mr. D’Souza, who stands by his work, characterizes much of the criticism directed at him as inevitable for someone who is “independent minded.”
He accepts that many academics do not regard his work as serious scholarship, and argues that his intent has never been to produce scholarship for limited academic audiences. “I always wanted to be in the world between academia on the one hand and the general culture on the other,” he says. “I like that in-between space where I can draw on ideas and then apply them much more widely.”
Describing himself as “an intellectual nomad,” with interests in many fields—including economics, history, philosophy, political science, and theology—he says, “I would not know what to get a Ph.D. in.” He characterizes the chief subject of most of his work as “a very broad one, namely, America,” an interest that he traces to his experience as a native of Mumbai who moved to the United States as a 17-year-old exchange student and later earned citizenship.
Discussion of American identity underlies most of his 15 books. Others are mainly works of Christian apologetics. Raised Roman Catholic, Mr. D’Souza began to attend a nondenominational evangelical church about 10 years ago and has made a sideline of debating skeptics and atheists.
He began fashioning a name for himself at Dartmouth College, from which he graduated as an English major in 1983. There he wrote for The Dartmouth Review, a conservative, independently financed newspaper, founded in 1980, that inspired the emergence of similar publications on other campuses. He has spent much of his working life as a fellow at conservative think tanks, moving from the American Enterprise Institute to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Mr. D’Souza says he “got some advice very early in my career that books are a way to establish a field of expertise.” In writing the first that gained a lot of attention, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, published in 1991, he returned to a subject he felt steeped in from his Dartmouth years: the debate over political correctness and free speech on college campuses. Illiberal Education spent 15 weeks on the Times’s best-seller list. It helped inspire hand-wringing among academic associations and professors who protested that they had been made the target of malicious distortions of their work.
Enemies at Home
Mr. D’Souza went on to attack affirmative action on college campuses with his 1995 book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, which drew fire from fellow conservatives. Although its critique generally won their praise as thoughtful, its discussion of the conditions and attitudes of black Americans was denounced as contemptuous by the black conservatives Glenn Loury, then head of Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division, and Robert Woodson. founder of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.
In a scathing review of the book for The Times Literary Supplement, Stephan Thernstrom, a professor of history at Harvard University and an outspoken critic of affirmative action, accused Mr. D’Souza of seeming to despise most black intellectuals and civil-rights leaders. He slammed the book’s discussion of the history of slavery and the intellectual origins of racism as “pedestrian and crude,” arguing that Mr. D’Souza was “simply out of his depth.”
The fuss over The End of Racism, however, barely compared with how much Mr. D’Souza riled the right with his 2007 book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. In it, he argues that the September 11 attacks happened because segments of the Muslim world has been driven into a rage fueled and encouraged by the left wing of the Democratic Party and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Excesses of American popular culture, and the projection of liberal, atheistic values abroad, he says, are threats perceived in the Muslim world that have triggered a backlash among its radicals. He proposes that traditionalist Muslims and American conservatives join in marginalizing secular leftists in the United States and radical Muslims throughout the world.
The book was roundly attacked by leading conservatives, especially those whose work has focused heavily on support for Israel or criticism of Islam. In a debate waged mainly on the pages of the National Review, Stanley Kurtz, then a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the book’s “seriously misconceived” argument failed to account for radical Muslims’ broader objections to modernity. In a review in Front Page magazine, Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, described The Enemy at Home as “one of the most poorly reasoned books I have ever read” and faulted it for, among other things, neglecting the deep historical roots of jihadists’ animosity toward the West.
Mr. D’Souza defended his book in a series of National Review articles titled “The Closing of the Conservative Mind,” saying his Indian upbringing and his reading of the leading thinkers of radical Islam had given him more familiarity with the topic than his critics had. Among those critics, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, responded by saying that Mr. D’Souza’s “recurring rhetorical excesses belie his boast that he adheres to standards of scholarly excellence.”
Examining Motives
Soon after the publication of The Enemy at Home, Mr. D’Souza left the Hoover Institution. In an account described as accurate by its leadership, he said objections to his book by other scholars there had “created a distasteful atmosphere” for him, and that his new work in the field of Christian apologetics did not fit in well at the conservative but secular think tank.
Mr. D’Souza’s writings on Christianity might have hurt his standing at Hoover, but they made him more appealing to officials at the King’s College, in Manhattan, which named him as president in August 2010.
Andy Mills, a former president of the college who is back in that position in an interim capacity, says its decision to overlook Mr. D’Souza’s lack of an advanced degree was consistent with the trend among colleges to hire leaders from nontraditional backgrounds. Mr. D’Souza, he says, “is a remarkably productive man, and I think his record of scholarship and his record of activity in the public square stand for itself.”
Mr. D’Souza says that the call from the college to discuss the presidency came as a surprise, and that when he visited to discuss the position, he was essentially “offered the job on the spot.” He protested that he wanted nothing to do with higher-education administration—"I don’t think wild horses could drag me in that direction,” he says. But he was assured that his job description would consist of attracting donations, motivating students, raising the college’s profile, and publicly arguing on behalf of Christianity.
He had, however, other business to tend to. A month after he took the job, the first part of his three-shot volley against President Obama, his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, was previewed in a Forbes magazine cover story. In the article, the documentary, and his two recent books on President Obama, Mr. D’Souza argues that what drives the nation’s commander in chief is a deeply anticolonial mind-set derived from his Kenyan father, a view that the United States has been “a force for global domination and destruction” and that its influence must be scaled back. Although Mr. Obama actually spent little time with his father, who moved away when he was 2, and was visited by him only once, at age 10, Mr. D’Souza posits that sons can be more prone to idealize absentee fathers than those who are around.
The Forbes article drew howls not just in liberal journals, but also in the Columbia Journalism Review, which called it “the worst kind of smear journalism.” The Roots of Obama’s Rage was praised by Newt Gingrich as offering “profound insight” but was panned by two influential conservative thinkers, Mr. Ponnuru, of the National Review, and Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, as using a far-fetched theory to explain actions easily attributable to American liberalism. Mr. D’Souza’s documentary has been similarly blasted by film critics, with Greg Evans, of Bloomberg, dismissing it as “nutty” and Variety calling it a well-polished “cavalcade of conspiracy theories, psycho-politico conjectures and incendiary labeling.”
Moving On
“I had been warned when I made the film that I should expect kind of a vicious personal attack because of the credibility of the film in making the case against Obama,” Mr. D’Souza says. But, he adds, he expected the attack to come from the left, and did not expect that fellow Christians would provide his critics a cudgel to use on him.
That cudgel came in the form of an article published on October 16, in the Christian magazine World. It reported that Mr. D’Souza, while still married to his wife, Dixie, had attended a “Christian worldview” conference in September in Spartanburg, S.C., with another woman, Denise Odie Joseph II, whom he introduced as his fiancée.
Mr. D’Souza says he and his wife have been separated for two years, and he has denied the article’s suggestion that he and Ms. Joseph shared a hotel room. He has accused Marvin Olasky, publisher of World, of having opposed his appointment to the presidency of the King’s College and nursing a vendetta against him. Mr. Olasky, a former provost at the college who resigned from that position two months after Mr. D’Souza became president, denies any vendetta, saying he had said nothing critical of Mr. D’Souza or college in the two years following his departure.
Mr. D’Souza has said that he “had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged before being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings.” He nonetheless suspended his engagement to Ms. Joseph until his divorce was final. And he resigned as president of the King’s College two days after the World article came out, saying his resignation would allow the college “to go forward without distraction” and leave him free to take care of his personal life and “pursue new opportunities made possible by the success of my recent book and film.”
He says that he is proud of his leadership of the college, and that he helped it increase enrollment and raise about $17-million.
Mr. D’Souza sees the success of his documentary as a launching pad for a new phase of life in which he will seek to become the right’s answer to Michael Moore, and continue to produce documentaries, books, and speeches that are linked to drive one another’s sales.
“I think my strength is one of being able to take complex ideas and articulate them in a way that is understandable and interesting and timely,” he says. “Film is a great vehicle to do that.”
Looking back, he says, “I have actually been very pleased with the overall trajectory of my career.”
Correction (11/26/2012, 9:22 a.m.): This article originally misstated how President Obama saw his father at age 10. His father visited him; the 10-year-old future president did not go to Kenya. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.