He was a whiz kid from India who quickly became fluent in English, came onto the radar screen as a conservative activist at Dartmouth, wrote some great books, including The End of Racism and a Reagan bio, spent some time as an American Enterprise Institute scholar, and served as a college president for a while.
The first big lapse in judgement was the violation of campaign law by lining up straw donors to try to avoid exceeding the contribution limits in Wendy Long's run for a New York Senate seat in 2012. He pleaded guilty and served some time in prison.
Then came the movies. The first one was pretty good. He seemed to realize that his audience would be normal Americans who might avail themselves of some news - most likely FNC - but otherwise focused mainly on family, work and personal aspirations. He gave that audience a decent look at the philosophical underpinnings of both the Left and the Right, lining up some heavyweight scholars to bolster his case. The second one, though, went over the top with the song-and-dance scene. D'Souza, seated behind a grand piano, starts into a ditty not unlike something one would get from, say, the Capitol Steps or Mark Russell. As the song progresses, an entire orchestra appears behind him, and the atmosphere gets more circus-like from there.
His next book, The Big Lie, was an exercise in throbbing sensationalism bringing Nazis into the discussion, for crying out loud. That tribalism was creeping into his ideological framework was evident in such instances as saying, "Gorsuch is a good constitutionalist. I'm good with that. But is he a good Republican?"
Now comes his tweet in the aftermath of Lakeland. When the Florida legislature voted down an assault-weapons ban, he said of the high-schoolers who advocated for the ban, "Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs."
Thankfully, Matt Schlapp and his CPAC organizing team have dropped D'Souza from this year's roster of speakers. (Le Pen appears to still be on the schedule, but that's a discussion for another post.)
But you just know there are going to be people out there who say that the main point is that the kids who hopped on busses to go to Tallahassee and march with signs were grandstanding moral preeners.
That's a valid point, but a week out from the grisly massacre, it's far from a top-tier one.
It must be admitted that D'Souza's trajectory - from Dartmouth straight into the toilet - is a microcosm of the story of an unfortunately significant swath of what I guess can still be called the conservative movement. Laura Ingraham, with whom D'Souza attended Dartmouth, is another example. Her books got sillier and sillier, a trend culminating in Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump. Rush Limbaugh, whose indispensable contributions as a pioneer of real, modern conservative talk radio, has descended to the point of taking a stance of nonchalance toward the federal debt that once alarmed him. Other examples abound. The LITD archives are full of their documentation.
It stems, it seems to me, from failing to negotiate that tricky line between waging unrelenting war on a Left that most definitely is destroying Western civilization, and framing victory in that war as "our team no matter what." That, and a not insignificant dose of being fascinated by the trappings of celebrity. Getting TV and radio shows, and seeing your movies reviewed in the New Yorker, even if negatively, can make one's head swim with considerations of self-importance.
It's saddening to witness, and it's dismaying when one considers the damage it does to the effort to keep the right-of-center message in the realm of ideas and principles.
Years ago, D'Souza became a Christian. It may be time for him to revisit the teachings about humility he was surely exposed to. I doubt that there's any other way for him to recalibrate and move forward from the mess he's made.
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