AN INTERESTING PARALLEL: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character; I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 19, 2015
Of all the batsh*t crazy conservative Great Backlash style of politics I've ever seen, this might take the cake. Conservative grievances go on ad infinitum, but the delusion that since Dinesh is a convicted felon, his fight to beat the charges is equal to the struggle Martin Luther King faced trying to break the bonds of racism and equality while being hounded by Hoover is mind-blowing and insulting. Sure there are those fringe Fox Newsers that will shake their heads in agreement over his plight because, how dare a conservative criminal be prosecuted?
What a sick man.
I suppose there’s something to be said about the manner in which the terms of conservative “intellectualism” have changed over the years. In the 1980s and 1990s, D’Souza felt the need to make an effort at what amounted to mainstream respectability. Today, he has no interest in it, and it’s hard to identify conservatives who have the same pretensions. I guess that Ross Douthat would be the closest to having “crossover appeal."
Dylan Matthews has a great piece up about this poor persecuted man:
Among the many reasons this is a ludicrous comparison: the FBI never tried to blackmail D'Souza into killing himself, and Martin Luther King Jr. never broke federal campaign finance laws in an attempt to help a college buddy's doomed Senate campaign (as D'Souza did, leading to the eight-month "community confinement" sentence he's currently serving in San Diego). Someone with only a light exposure to D'Souza's oeuvre might be tempted to dismiss this as a ludicrous provocation by a fringe criminal, and perhaps they'd be right to do so.
