Dinesh D’Souza at the 2013 Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, NV | Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1ISn1fr)
Vanity Fair (dot com) recently reported that conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza requested a “summer break” from his court-ordered confinement. D’Souza, the author of The End of Racism and What’s So Great About Christianity, plead guilty last year to campaign finance violations. He asked two of his friends to give money to his preferred candidate–Wendy E. Long, a former classmate of D’Souza’s at Dartmouth–in the New York Senate race, saying that he would reimburse them. Which, it turns out, is illegal!
His guilty plea seemed to help him avoid jail time, but D’Souza was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house, in addition to counseling and community service. It was the community service that D’Souza wanted a break from, requesting via his probation officer a waiver for that requirement from June 1st through July 13th. “The short explanation is, as all criminal defendants are aware, that we don’t provide ‘summer breaks’ in these circumstances,” Judge Richard Berman wrote in his response.
D’Souza had also asked for a delay in starting his sentence back in October because his schedule was full with “professional commitments.” Berman didn’t allow that, either.
D’Souza has a long and storied history of anti-realistic thinking, and this is just the latest example. He accused the federal government of ‘selective prosecution’–without evidence. He tweeted about President Obama “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO…” for using a selfie stick. He did product placement for his pal who was just trying to sell pre-made Christmas trees.
Personally, I am embarrassed by Dinesh D’Souza. He has been the president of an evangelical college in New York City, was a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, and comes from a Catholic family in Goa, India. His life has taken an interesting path, and under other (saner) circumstances, he could have done a lot of good for the Christian community. Perhaps. But he seems so entirely out of touch with reality that all he can do, at best, is spew vitriol at Democrats. At worst, he defends colonialism and is a public hypocrite of the highest order, blaming the torture at Abu Ghraib on “the sexual immodesty of liberal America” while being engaged to one woman while still married to his previous wife. Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times book critic, called him “the Ann Coulter of the think tank set.”
D’Souza is so loudly obnoxious and partisan that it is hard to actually take him seriously, but it hasn’t always been that way. Some of his earlier books were widely read among the evangelical community, and Ross Benes wrote a great post for Deadspin about how Dinesh damaged his faith. With his typical insensitivity, D’Souza tweeted an insult at Benes after reading the piece:
This poor fellow goes on and on about how I damaged his faith, but without a word on how he lost his intellect! http://t.co/1e1jzxPOcs
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) April 9, 2015
There will be no summer vacation for Dinesh D’Souza. Soon enough he will be done with his community service and his nights at the halfway house, and I really, earnestly hope he will have learned something about humility and listening and owning his mistakes. But in the meantime, I’ve got a calendar full of my own professional commitments–and an upcoming trip to Mexico. I’ll be sure to pour one out for D’Souza while I’m away on my summer break.
