Dinesh D'Souza Quote
How did the South become so uniformly Democratic? Basically the Democrats used racist ideas and practices to establish a lasting political hegemony there. So racism wasn’t incidental; it was an essential part of the Democratic Party’s strategy. The Democrats won the South by appealing not just to the former planter class but also to poor whites. How did they do this? The great postbellum invention of the Democratic Party was the institution of white supremacy. After the war, writes historian George Fredrickson, The one thing that held the Democratic Party together was a commitment to maintaining white supremacy.5 White supremacy is an elaborate ideological structure for justifying racism, in the same way that the positive good school was an elaborate ideological justification for slavery.
How did the South become so uniformly Democratic? Basically the Democrats used racist ideas and practices to establish a lasting political hegemony there. So racism wasn’t incidental; it was an essential part of the Democratic Party’s strategy. The Democrats won the South by appealing not just to the former planter class but also to poor whites. How did they do this? The great postbellum invention of the Democratic Party was the institution of white supremacy. After the war, writes historian George Fredrickson, The one thing that held the Democratic Party together was a commitment to maintaining white supremacy.5 White supremacy is an elaborate ideological structure for justifying racism, in the same way that the positive good school was an elaborate ideological justification for slavery.
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About Dinesh D'Souza
Born in Mumbai, D'Souza moved to the United States as an exchange student and graduated from Dartmouth College. He was a policy adviser in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and has been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. He became a naturalized citizen in 1991. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of The King's College, a Christian school in New York City, until he resigned after an alleged adultery scandal.
In 2012, D'Souza released the documentary film 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Barack Obama polemic based on his 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage; it earned $33 million, making it the highest-grossing conservative documentary of all time and one of the highest-grossing documentaries of any kind. He has since released five other documentary films: America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014), Hillary's America (2016), Death of a Nation (2018), Trump Card (2020) and 2000 Mules (2022). D'Souza's films and commentary have generated considerable controversy due to their promotion of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, as well as for their incendiary nature.
In 2012, D'Souza contributed $10,000 to the Senate campaign of Wendy Long on behalf of himself and his wife, agreeing in writing to attribute that contribution as $5,000 from his wife and $5,000 from him. He directed two other people to give Long a total of $20,000 in addition, which he agreed to reimburse, and later did. At the time, the Election Act limited campaign contributions to $5,000 from any individual to any one candidate. Two years later, D'Souza pleaded guilty in federal court to one felony charge of using a "straw donor" to make the illegal campaign contribution. He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house near his home in San Diego, five years' probation, and a $30,000 fine. In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.