Dinesh D'Souza is featured on
Dinesh D’Souza deliberated on America’s ideological and spiritual climate during an interview with Houston Baptist University’s Dr. Jerry Johnston on July 27.
From the time he came to the U.S. as an exchange student from India in the late 1970s, D’Souza has witnessed significant cultural shifts. D’Souza graduated from Dartmouth College, and worked in publications before becoming a self-described Reaganite and policy advisor for the Reagan administration. In succeeding years, the author and filmmaker has stepped further into the fray as an influencer.
“Little did I think when I came to America at the age of 17 with a couple of bucks in my pocket that I would become a noisemaker,” he said.
He is known for making apologetics points and writing patriotic manifestos and political tell-alls. D’Souza’s well-known books include, What’s So Great About America, What’s So Great About Christianity and The Roots of Obama’s Rage. His film documentaries include 2016: Obama’s America as well as Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. Hillary’s America depicts in part D’Souza’s 2014 sentence, including punitive prison confinement, psychological counseling and a hefty fine, seemingly stemming from a ruffled Obama administration.
Despite being branded with a federal conviction and remaining on probation— all for violating red tape in giving a modest donation to a campaigning republican— D’Souza says he didn’t learn the intended lesson of going silent. He visited HBU as he kicked off a tour of his latest book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. He spoke with Dr. Johnston about the most important platforms of social manipulation today.
“The left has these big megaphones: academia, the media and Hollywood,” D’Souza said. “Even if someone else were to know differently, they don’t have a big enough megaphone to be heard.”
Johnston noted that media companies such as Amazon and Netflix are spending billions of dollars on new content, and young minds are inundated with material that often perpetuates a one-sided and even depraved worldview.
“It’s kind of like the wild west out there,” D’Souza said of media technologies. “Normally it’s alarming, but there’s also, in that alarm, opportunity. It creates new channels of information. Today, you can create a web channel and let the market decide and begin to counter (the messages) and cultivate the talent that needs to be cultivated.”
D’Souza said he’d like to see a growth in feature films with wholesome messages made in Hollywood as well to compete with the common Tinseltown offerings.
Higher education institutions play an imperative part in providing balanced information to young adults. They too have a technological opportunity to provide education in new ways, going beyond the classroom and run-of-the-mill online course formats, he said.
“I don’t think that (traditional) higher education will be obsolete, but I do think that disruptive technology and new ways of thinking will change it,” D’Souza said.
Regarding the American political landscape, D’Souza said, “In the 80s and early 90s, American politics was kind of a gentlemen’s fight. We agreed on goals like prosperity and strong communities, but disagreed on means. All of that really broke down.”
Since then, D’Souza has experienced and witnessed retribution and monitoring comparable to those of communist societies for openly criticizing figures including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“The government began to deploy the instruments of the state against their critics. This represented a breakdown in civility that created a declaration of war between the two sides. That’s how we got Trump,” he said. “The left is operating like gangsters, so we kind of need a mob boss on our side. I see Trump as the necessary response to this kind of craziness that’s going on.”
Alignment with the views of the left has become the stock of much journalistic messaging, he said.
“The media is only too willing to subordinate themselves to the climate,” he said. “They’re not really journalists. These are partisans masquerading as journalists. Twitter is the only unfiltered way to reach the American people uninterrupted by the interpretive lens put on.”
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