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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Interesting piece in The New Republic [newrepublic.com]:

Donald Trump’s pardon of Dinesh D’Souza says everything you need to know about the Republican Party and its intellectual underpinnings.

Well, that remains to be seen, right?

Conspiracy theorist, bestselling author, convicted felon: Dinesh D’Souza has worn many hats in his life. He can now add a presidential pardon to his distinguished resume, after Donald Trump announced that he would wipe D’Souza’s record clean. In a tweet, Trump claimed that D’Souza had been “treated very unfairly by our government!” But there is no doubt that D’Souza actually committed his crime, pleading guilty in 2014 to violating campaign finance laws, for which he received community service and a $30,000 slap on the wrist. Trump’s pardon cements D’Souza’s self-proclaimed status as a martyr—he has since claimed that he was persecuted for his conservative political views—and it also reveals the beating heart of conservatism in 2018. Like, after all, knows like. Grifter respects the grift.

Oouhh! Well played, New Republic, well played!

It can be difficult, even for conservatives, to defend D’Souza and other conservative intellectuals like Charles Murray (who has claimed that genetics can explain inequalities between races), Jordan Peterson (who once said that feminists have “an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”), and Ann Coulter (who wants to keep the immigrants out). One way is to skirt the substance of their arguments and turn them into free speech warriors engaged in the fight against liberal intolerance. D’Souza is an example of this dynamic at its most extreme, a pure tribal totem, and his pardon is expected to play well with Trump’s base in the conservative media.

Wait, it gets even harsher!

The conservative defense of free speech disguises the fact that these thinkers are invested in protecting the status quo. And it is difficult for a defense of power to be truly contrarian; it is certainly not “iconoclastic,” as commentators like Bari Weiss have argued. To maintain the fiction that intellectual curiosity, and not reactionary sentiment, informs their arguments, conservatives gravitate toward what they believe to be the trappings of serious thinking: bow ties, purple prose, name-dropping. D’Souza, as usual, provides an extreme example. His former employer, The King’s College, adopted a European-style house system, where students can join the House of Margaret Thatcher or the House of Ronald Reagan, among other options. It also offers a politics, philosophy, and economics degree modeled in part after Oxford University’s famous program. (Alas for D’Souza, he was fired once his extramarital affair became public, one of the first indications his conservatism was something of an act.)

Time to stop pulling punches, and just call a Roseanne a Roseanne. And we should call "convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza" a convicted felon, (pardoned), even if the pardon is by a soon to be convicted felon? On the same charges?

Original Submission