Dinesh! D'Souza! Demands! To! Be! Taken! Seriously!

He went to a very prestigious college and can't stand academics.

Guys, we're a little worried about convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza. His latest dumb movie,   Death of a Nation, which unironically claims Donald Trump is a second Lincoln while Democrats are literally segregationists and Nazis, is making far less money than his previous cinematic masterpieces. D'Souza was also the target of a piece in The Atlantic  in which David Frum wondered what the hell went wrong with Reagan Conservatism (short answer, which Frum never quite gets to: it was never anything to write home about in the first place, and attracted lots of glib jerks like D'Souza). And of course, there's D'Souza's bête noire, Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's made a hobby of debunking D'Souza's farcical claim that Democrats remain the party of the KKK and there was never any such thing as a Southern Strategy.

In the last week, D'Souza has been trying to provoke even more attention from people who think he's an idiot, on the assumption that even negative attention is better than no attention at all. It energizes his fans' perception that D'Souza must be on to dangerous truths that The Left wants to suppress -- and if it makes some people go to his dumb movie to mock it, well then, that's still a ticket sale.

One of D'Souza's favorite ploys is the unrequited debate challenge -- it costs him nothing, and when a real historian like Kruse says nah, I won't legitimize your nonsense, D'Souza gets to proclaim, "See! They're AFRAID of me!" Of course, D'Souza could certainly "debate" Kruse right on Twitter, where Kruse regularly supports his threads debunking D'Souza with facts, but that's not really the point, now is it? Like creationists demanding to "debate" scientists, the goal is to get the legitimacy of sharing a stage, where it's possible to reel off a lot of impressive-sounding lies in less time than it takes to refute. D'Souza's target audience, after all, are the folks who, like "Fox & Friends" host Ainsley Earhardt, are proud of how America defeated communist Japan:

I'm DEAD. Fox & Friends' Ainsley Earhardt says "we defeated communist Japan." Doocy's cleanup is priceless. https: //t.co/LAHmGa5HCb

— Tommy X-TrumpIsARacist-opher (@Tommy X-TrumpIsARacist-opher) 1534428666.0 

D'Souza was at it again yesterday, more than once, and this time he was armed with a thesaurus, to demonstrate what a very smart fellow he is:

Hilarious that Kruse’s raucous claque keeps chanting he “owns” me when @KevinMKruse himself hides under his desk, too timorous to debate me

— Dinesh D'Souza (@Dinesh D'Souza) 1534353023.0 

Kruse was quick to point out that he's already taken apart D'Souza's claims, including yet another of his ridiculous attempts to proclaim no racist southern Democrats changed parties after the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act (here's D'Souza's bad history, and here's Kruse's very detailed thread debunking it). Strangely, D'Souza never replied. He's really good at that.

@DineshDSouza I wrote this on top of my kitchen table, and I've asked you repeatedly to provide the names of "progr… https: //t.co/PF9mP6P0Ky

— Kevin M. Kruse (@Kevin M. Kruse) 1534353674.0 

No, of course D'Souza had nothing to say in reply, because why would he? Instead, he went back to retweeting people who think D'Souza coined the brilliant insight that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. Then he returned to just plain lying about history and historians, and insisting once more that Democrats are hiding the real facts!

This is the ugly truth about his party that @KevinMKruse & others are so eager to conceal with their… https: //t.co/8sJ6golYle

— Dinesh D'Souza (@Dinesh D'Souza) 1534367685.0 

Hey, who was it who said if you repeat lies often enough, some people will start to believe them?

Needless to say, the "Prager U" (Motto:  "We're not a university" ) vid D'Souza links to is nothing but another rehash of the old "Democrats were slavers and Klansmen and history ended in 1964" bullshit, and of course, no historians have ever "hidden" the facts of the party's origins, as if that were even possible. Of course, maybeother things happened later -- it's a definite possibility. 

@DineshDSouza We’re not hiding it, you con man. We write and teach about this *all* the time. You said “progressiv… https: //t.co/1CGhDOiKZf

— Kevin M. Kruse (@Kevin M. Kruse) 1534368045.0 

Also amusing, in the way that a pathetic liar can be amusing: D'Souza's reaction to the David Frum piece has been fairly predictable, veering between "Nope, doesn't bother me at all" to "I am in fact areal scholar, and YOU went to a crappy state school, loser" (the person he replied to has "@uwmadison alum" listed in his Twitter bio):

@wcingersoll @davidfrum You went to a less distinguished college than I did. You weren’t a Stanford U scholar as I… https: //t.co/l4igZIV8sn

— Dinesh D'Souza (@Dinesh D'Souza) 1534161884.0 

Probably worth noting the guy was calling D'Souza's readers uninformed, but obviously Dinesh has superior reading comprehension because he went to Dartmouth and had a job at a rightwing think-tank. For a guy who shuns academe because it's full of liars, he's really desperate to be recognized as academe-adjacent.

As for his being a "Stanford U scholar," quite a few people jumped in to remind D'Souza that his two-year appointment at the seriously partisan Hoover Institution doesn't exactly make him a Stanford professor, even though Hoover is indeed located on the Stanford campus. Among them was John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter, who's not exactly a flaming liberal. That brought this very strange exchange:

You were a Stanford U scholar because an idiot millionaire paid for a place for you for a while. https: //t.co/fumW8EETrd

— John Podhoretz (@John Podhoretz) 1534344515.0 

@jpodhoretz And you have unsuccessfully struggled all your life to get places I reached when I was in my 20s and 30… https: //t.co/RYYwrUtCKB

— Dinesh D'Souza (@Dinesh D'Souza) 1534349615.0 

@DineshDSouza The difference between you and me is that I am neither an intellectual fraud, nor a charlatan, nor an… https: //t.co/f7umQiAj8E

— John Podhoretz (@John Podhoretz) 1534358050.0 

Yes, everyone is jealous of Dinesh, you bet. Because of the places he's been.

I don’t think “inside Ann Coulter” and “jail” are places most people try to go, Dinesh https: //t.co/Gd0YGRSObq

— kilgore trout, ted’s travel agent (@kilgore trout, ted’s travel agent) 1534351078.0 

The whole wretched mess was strangely fascinating, and before the day was out, D'Souza managed to make an ass of himself yet again by citing a top historian of fascism as "proof" that liberals are the real fascists, giving Kruse the chance to do one more History Smackdown for the day:

It's amazing how bad he is at this. Here's the full paragraph from the introduction to Paxton's Anatomy of Fascis… https: //t.co/7kga5UiDwB

— Kevin M. Kruse (@Kevin M. Kruse) 1534372632.0 

At some point, we'd like to hope D'Souza will realize there are only diminishing returns on trying to win supporters by repeatedly letting smarter people spank him. But it's the only schtick he's got to market his garbage, so we can assume the beatings will continue while his morale improves.

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[ Atlantic / Kevin Kruse on Twitter]