D'Souza and the Violent Right by Jeffrey Feldman for Huffington Post

[applegrove]

D'Souza and the Violent Right
by Jeffrey Feldman
Huffington Post
03.02.07

"In his newest book, The Enemy at Home, Republican ideologue Dinesh D'Souza calmly explains that liberals in America caused 9/11, whereupon he recommends that we do to liberals what we are doing to terrorists: fight a war against them.

"While he never comes right out and says that Americans should kill liberals, D'Souza's book shuttles his reader swiftly to that conclusion. By defining liberals as a "hidden" second front of
terrorism, D'Souza's book invokes a very simple, widely held idea in America: that "War on Terror" means first and foremost, "kill terrorists." Thus, The Enemy at Home gives intellectual legitimacy to a widely accepted, rapidly growing Republican tendency to frame national security in terms of killing Democrats.

But the significance The Enemy at Home extends beyond military issues, touching on the key distinction that divides the public sphere in contemporary America: violent right vs. progressive left.

Dinesh D'Souza is a paragon of the "violent right"--a new breed of pundits who seek to control public debate by framing all issues through an authoritarian logic of violence.

............SNIP"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/dsouza-and-the-violent-r_b_42464.html

[Phredicles]

1. Feldman's violent right does remind me of Milosevic, of the Hutus who

agitated for mass violence against Tutsi in Rwanda. We need to start calling them out on their rhetoric, identifying it for what it is.

For this reason I think calls such as one made elsewhere today of DU simply to ignore the likes of Coulter et al. are understandable but misguided.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. D'Souza should be met with nothing but ridicule

First of all, do you know how he became a conservative?

He was an immigrant from India, a freshman at Dartmouth, when one weekend, he happened to wander into a dance sponsored by the gay association.

He was so traumatized by the sight of men dancing together that he started asking around campus to see who was "against that sort of thing."

Someone pointed him to the infamous Dartmouth Review, which campaigned against professors it saw as "too liberal" and gained national notoriety when it published an essay about affirmative aaction, supposedly written by a black student, in Steppin Fetchit, minstrel show dialect.

In other words, your usual Young Republican bunch of racists and homophobes. But well-funded ones. A lot of the alumni of the Dartmouth Review ended up with cushy jobs at conservative think tanks and publications.

D'Souza visited the college where I was teaching in about 1992, pushing his book against affirmative action, saying that it prevented qualified white students from attending Ivy League schools.

The following week, I wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, explaining how admissions at Ivy League schools actually work, including the "dumb rich kid quota" for children of alumni donors. I outlined the gradual shift from student bodies that consisted almost entirely of rich white Protestant males from Northeastern and Southern prep schools to student bodies that are now mostly from public high schools, are equally balanced between males and females, and include all races and religions and all geographical areas. In fact, I added, there was no doubt in my mind that D'Souza got extra points in the admissions game for being an immigrant.

The president of that college's Young Republicans wrote a reply the following week, saying that he could see how admitting a West Coast person to an Ivy League school would increase diversity, and he was all for that, but since there were no cultural differences between black and white Americans (yes, he actually said that, probably because he was from a small town in Oregon where the only African-Americans he ever saw were on the Bill Cosby Show) race-based affrimative action was unfair.

The faculty, especially the faculty of color, had a lot to see about that bozo in the ensuing days.

[nealmhughes]

3. Absolutely, he is a one shot wonder who somehow got picked to be the "token Indian"

during the Reaganzeit. Despite all his lofty "titles" of "fellow" or "senior fellow" or Chief Cootie Catcher, he is a horrid intellectual nonentity. A BA from Dartmouth...ooh! He is a rabid Roman Catholic, by the way, from Goa, which is why he has the Portuguese surname.
I don't consider him worth my time to ridicule further.

[winston61]

4. Only in America-

this twerp should thank god that he can find someone who will print his idiocy. It's a bit funny. Here I am a Liberal who has no trouble expressing his affection for America, warts and all. But scratch one of these flag waving jingoists and you may find someone who really does not like America or Americans. I don't think we'll ever have a 'benevolent' right wing dictator, no matter how much George thinks he is. Not everyone is going to fall into lock step and march off the cliff.