Even Conservatives Who Are Convicted Felons Get NY Times Interviews

By John Amato — July 7, 2015

Being a conservative pundit or politician means you never have to say you're sorry and you can always wind up with a glowing profile from the Washington Post, Politico or The NY Times.

You can even get a headline like this even if you're a convicted felon. Dinesh D’Souza Isn’t the Real Criminal

After your conviction for violating campaign-finance law, you served an eight-month sentence, spending nights in a confinement center. Irving Kristol once said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been ‘‘mugged by reality.’’ So what’s a conservative whose reality is being surrounded by muggers?

Unlike white-collar prisons, the confinement center has the full gamut of criminals — armed robbers, rapists, murderers. I thought of myself as an anthropologist with a rare opportunity to, you might say, study the natives.

What did you learn about the natives?

I couldn’t find one guy who said that he was framed. They all acknowledged their guilt but argued that they were the small fry. They believe that the real criminals are not only part of the system, they are running the system, and, in fact, that they are the system and that, at its highest level, America is a crime syndicate.

You are a criminal, literally, and you’ve also said that your own prosecution was politically motivated. It sounds as if your worldview was actually quite similar to that of your neighbors.

If you put my rap sheet alongside the Clinton rap sheet, I think that would be almost a prima facie case that they have gotten away with far more than I have. My crime consisted of giving away too much money. I didn’t benefit from it in any way.

Many conservatives these days are calling for reforms of the criminal-justice system. Do you think you’ll be joining that fight anytime soon?

No, but I have been somewhat shaken in certain assumptions that I used to have about America’s criminal-justice system.

Which belief was shaken the most?

That you are innocent until proven guilty. I have no doubt that the majority of people who are in prison are guilty of the crimes that they were accused of. Still, there are also a whole bunch of people who are in prison as a result of plea bargains.

I’ve read that 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains.

Before this experience, I would probably have been fairly glib about that.

Do you think that would be a clarifying experience for most wonks?

Absolutely. I think we need to bridge the divide between the intellectual talking class and the people who actually respond to politics through raw experience.

In your book ‘‘The Enemy at Home,’’ you suggest that liberal attitudes about divorce and adultery helped to invite the Sept. 11 attacks. Have your own extramarital relationship and divorce changed your opinion in any way?

My own marital woes and divorce and ill-fated engagement, all of that, have certainly made me more aware of how difficult it is to make marriages work. But I have not in the slightest departed from my belief in those traditional institutions. Now, my argument was that radical Muslims are able to point to the moral and cultural decay of America as displayed in Hollywood and use it as a recruiting tool. That was true when I wrote it; it’s true now.

In a recent interview, you said that a close reading of Milton’s ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ helped you understand Lucifer’s influence on Saul Alinsky’s organizing methods. Should we expect any more analysis of epic poetry to explain Hillary Clinton? Perhaps Coleridge’s ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ or Shelley’s ‘‘Prometheus Unbound’’?

Either that or Dante’s ‘‘Inferno.’’ When I think of a Hillary administration, I’m reminded of the sign on the outer gates of hell: ‘‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’’

Hey Dinesh, I don't seem to remember the Clintons being convicted of a felony or sent to prison. I didn't know the new conservative perspective on law and order is that you decide what law is important.

If anything, prison has made him a bigger a-hole.

I want to thank the NY Times for interviewing a conservative criminal like Dinesh D'Souza. It was a very illuminating piece. (I kid, I kid. There wasn't one thing in this article that was worthy of being in any traditional publication, let alone the NY Times.) What were they thinking? What was so newsworthy about Dinesh at this time that they just had to have this interview? Maybe Margaret Sullivan, the public editor can tell us.