Politics

D’Souza Plans To Write About Prison Experience If Sent To The Slammer

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
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If conservative author and documentarian Dinesh D’Souza is sentenced to prison on Sept. 23 for violating campaign finance laws, he says he will use his time in the slammer as material for his next book.

In a very revealing interview about his career and current troubles in the New Republic, D’Souza opened up about the possibility of going to prison.

“I’m just gonna have to go to jail and write something about it,” he explained when asked what he will do if he is actually sentenced to hard time.

But D’Souza says he is hopeful that this will not be his fate.

“My lawyers tell me that there is no one in the United States who has received a substantial sentence for doing what I did under similar facts,” he explained. “Hopefully, it will be just community service and a fine, but we don’t know. The judge has guidelines that would allow him to sentence me to up to two years.”

D’Souza pleaded guilty in May to reimbursing associates of $20,000 they donated to his college friend’s 2012 long-shot Senate campaign, in violation of campaign finance laws. D’Souza said in his interview with the New Republic that he “should be punished proportionate to the offense, proportionate to what my motives were, which were not corrupt.”

“I wasn’t trying to benefit myself in any way,” he said.

Since President Barack Obama assumed office, D’Souza has been among his most prominent critics. D’Souza’s 2012 anti-Obama documentary was the second highest grossing political documentary of all time, while his most recent political non-fiction book has spent the last nine weeks on the New York Times best seller list. Asked by the New Republic whether he believes his prosecution was politically motivated, D’Souza merely said: “The government said it was the result of a routine review. Apparently, it was a routine review that yielded a single offender—me.”

In the New Republic interview, D’Souza also broaches a number of other subjects.

On writing for ordinary Americans, not intellectuals: 

One of the things I discovered in the late ’90s is there is a large populist conservative audience of people who want to learn. And yet, don’t know. A typical Tea Party member isn’t an intellectual. But he or she has a real affinity with the American founding, a belief that a return to our original principles can save us, and wants to know what those principles are. Not just in crayon outline, but in fleshed-out detail. And I say to myself, I can help that guy, and make a much more valuable contribution than by operating in what I now saw as the very small world of the ambivalent liberal.

On being provocative: 

I always have. I’ll never write a book that I don’t think says something original. I’m struggling to find ground that is unoccupied, and I’m kind of surprised and thrilled that there’s so much of it. When I stumbled upon the thesis of The Roots of Obama’s Rage, about Obama being an anti-colonialist, it looked to me like the most obvious thing. Yet when I said it to conservatives, they were both surprised and fearful. They would say, (a)“Where’d you get that idea?” and (b) “Dinesh, why are we talking about Kenya? It sounds like black, black, black.” I live in California now, but if I still lived in D.C., those vibes might have terrified me into not writing that book.

On what he learned from Michael Moore: 

I went back and watched Roger and Me, which I think is his best film. It’s got an interesting premise: General Motors closes down a big auto plant that his dad happened to work at, and he’s going to go find the CEO of General Motors and demand to know why. Now, it fails intellectually, because there is an obvious reason why General Motors might want to close that plant—i.e., it’s not making money. And one possible reason it’s not making money is General Motors has been paying people like his dad way too much and can make cars much cheaper in North Carolina or other countries. You can’t proceed without confronting that argument. But Michael Moore’s presumption is that the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, is just a mean guy who wants to deprive working people of their livelihood. So intellectually, it’s ridiculous. But visually, cinematically, narratively, it works. This clownish Michael Moore showing up everywhere, the cops in dogged pursuit. All of that works. What Michael Moore understands is that a movie traffics in the language of emotion. The intellect is subordinate to that.

Be sure to read the full, illuminating New Republic interview for yourself here.

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