Dinesh D’Souza is a Born Liar, and a Convicted One

By Nicholas Stix

“One’s a born liar, and the other’s convicted.”

Yankees manager Billy Martin on Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner had been convicted of making illegal campaign donations to Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, and spent some time at Club Fed. Steinbrenner later made ample legal donations to the GOP, such that he was able to buy an indulgence from President George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, who in turn granted Steinbrenner a presidential pardon.

Actually, though Martin said the words, they’d been formulated by one of his coaches. Even baseball dugouts have their ghostwriters.

D’Souza was also convicted of making an illegal campaign contribution to failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Wendy Long.
 

Blast from the past
By An Old Friend
Sun, Nov 19, 2017 8:34 p.m.

While looking up something by Christopher DeMuth in the Wall Street Journal, I stumbled upon the following, from November 13, 1995 (copied and pasted because accessed via …, which just gives reformatted text):

In his Nov. 3 Letter to the Editor responding to your Oct. 19 page-one article, American Enterprise Institute President Christopher DeMuth chose to personally denounce me for my resignation from the American Enterprise Institute because of AEI's support of Dinesh D'Souza's book "The End of Racism." The only part of my action that Mr. DeMuth seems to have understood and gotten correct is his claim that "It was a carefully staged political event aimed at anathematizing a book. . . ." That is certainly true.

What Chris DeMuth still does not understand is what the fuss is all about. He accuses me of taking "a few sentences from the 550-page book, wrenched out of context. . . ." In my letter to him following my resignation I sent four pages of quotes asking for instruction from him as to how the meaning of these phrases would contribute to public discourse on race. How did I misunderstand a characterization of low-income black communities as being "irrigated with blood, urine and alcohol"? What context would justify "If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?" I have yet to receive a reply.

Mr. DeMuth also stated that I have had no affiliation with AEI since I left and have not been active in a decade. This is ironic since Chris, in a personal letter to me dated Nov. 10, 1993, invited me (and I accepted) to continue my position as an AEI adjunct fellow. Also at his request, I have attended a number of meetings at the institute as part of AEI's "To Empower People" project. The book by the same name will be reissued soon.

But these are nit-picking details in response to an ad hominem attack. What is more important here is the larger issue: This is a racist book, whose mean-spiritedness obfuscates the need for thoughtful and constructive debate on such issues as affirmative action and other racial policies. It is not worthy of an institution like AEI.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.
Founder and President
National Center for
Neighborhood Enterprise
Washington
---
It is by no means clear to me what Christopher DeMuth knows about my recent departure from the Washington Times or how he knows it. In his Letter he appears to congratulate AEI and its "scholar" Dinesh D'Souza for causing my "firing" over my "remarks at a white supremacist gathering chillingly documented" in Mr. D'Souza's book.

The American Renaissance conference on "Race and American Culture," held in Atlanta in May 1994, was in no sense a "white supremacist" gathering. No speaker at the conference advocated "white supremacy," nor do I advocate it. While I believe that significant natural differences between the races exist, I have repeatedly written that these differences do not justify the entrenched political domination of one race over others.

As for my departure from the Times, that was due less to the prowess of fraudulent scholars like Mr. D'Souza than to the discomfort of the Times's editors with the expression of ideas (by no means confined to racial matters) that transgress the established boundaries of public discussion -- boundaries that the Times, for all its chest-thumping about challenging conventional wisdom, is insistent on preserving.

The editors' dissatisfaction with my habit of transgressing those boundaries first became apparent in June of this year, well before the D'Souza book was published or available, and resulted in my dismissal as a staff columnist at that time. The publication of the book and of a factually flawed excerpt from it by the Times's competitor, the Washington Post, in September was used by the editors to complete the process of separation they had already initiated.

Samuel Francis
Seabrook, Md.
---
There is much irony in Mr. DeMuth's letter, in which he writes that Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson "anathematized" Mr. D'Souza and demanded that conservatives repudiate him "on their say-so." I sympathize, because that is exactly what Mr. D'Souza has tried to do to me.

It was I who organized the "white supremacist gathering" that Mr. DeMuth says was "chillingly documented" in Mr. D'Souza's book. We must have been up to a very rum sort of white supremacy; of the 10 speakers, two were nationally syndicated columnists, five were Ph.D.s, one was a Jesuit priest, and four, including an orthodox rabbi, were Jews. Why would Mr. D'Souza describe the conference as if it were a Klan rally? Because he knew that his book would draw just the sort of accusations that it did, and because he thought he could deflect criticism by pointing to others and saying, "They're the racists; I'm just a bold thinker."

The trouble was that the conference, which was organized around American Renaissance, of which I am editor, expressed views far too close to Mr. D'Souza's for him plausibly to claim that we were beyond the pale. His published account of the conference is laughably misleading, but it is nothing compared with what he originally wrote. Fortunately, the participants saw the bound galleys. Mr. D'Souza had invented passages from speeches (which had been recorded) and deliberately falsified "quotations" from American Renaissance. All this to "anathematize" us and draw distinctions between what he fatuously calls his "principled positions" and those of people he calls "bigots."

We wrote his publisher. Books were already in print, but Mr. D'Souza's falsehoods were so egregious that the Free Press took the extraordinary step of junking the entire first print run while Mr. D'Souza hurriedly made corrections. I would not expect Mr. DeMuth to know this. It is not the sort of thing Mr. D'Souza would tell his boss. But I do find it contemptible, even "chilling," that Mr. DeMuth should rejoice in the punishment of Samuel Francis on account of his ideas -- "documented" by Mr. D'Souza -- while piously denouncing those who would punish Mr. D'Souza for the same reason.

Jared Taylor
Editor
American Renaissance
Louisville, Ky.
---
Throughout his 600-page work, Mr. D'Souza insists there is a cultural explanation for the deficiencies in average black intelligence and behavior that he relentlessly catalogues, and he labels as "racist" anyone who believes that these black disadvantages may be at least partly hereditary. But when he finally discusses the hereditarian position at length, Mr. D'Souza, after much hemming and hawing, reluctantly admits that he has no arguments against it: "The Bell Curve makes a strong case that cannot be ignored. . . . The conclusion of most scholars is that despite many caveats, there is no scientific basis for rejecting the possibility that race differences in I.Q. are partly hereditary" (pp. 475-76). Having quietly conceded what he loudly denounces as "racist" everywhere else in his book, Mr. D'Souza looks for an escape hatch: "It is possible to reject the fatalism of genetic theories of I.Q. differences, as I do. My view is that . . . it is a `reasonable hypothesis' that [racial] I.Q. differences can be explained by culture and environment." But he offers not a shred of support for that "reasonable hypothesis," other than his wish that it be true -- and his hope that some future evidence may confirm it.
Thus Mr. D'Souza's trumpeted "end of racism" -- by which he means the end of the belief in intrinsic racial differences in civilizational abilities -- turns out to be a fraud. And the worst part of the fraud is that Mr. D'Souza, backed by his boss Christopher DeMuth, labels as "bigots" and "white supremacists" people who honestly believe what Mr. D'Souza himself evidently believes but doesn't want to admit.

Lawrence Auster
New York

(See related letters: "Letters to the Editor: Dinesh D'Souza Is No Myrdal" and "Letters to the Editor: White Supremacist? Judge for Yourself" -- WSJ Dec. 1, 1995)
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