2. The key thing @aliceblloyd gets right is that D'Souza's real formation came as an undergraduate editor of the Dartmouth Review, when he pioneered a kind of right-wing prank culture.
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3. It's important to underscore how terrible D'Souza was as an undergraduate: outing gay students, publishing articles in minstrel show dialect to mock Black students, etc.pic.twitter.com/y8bobOlFNw
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4. It's tempting to say D'Souza started as a buffoon and was always a buffoon. But it's a little more complicated. He had period in the late 1980s and early 1990s where he pretended to be an intellectual.
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5. Now I think
@aliceblloyd probably has a higher opinion of D'Souza's anti-PC book Illiberal Education than I do. It's his best book but it's still suffers the same problems of all anti-PC literature (anecdotal, one-sided, disregarding full spectrum of academic life etc.)Show this thread -
6. Still! With Illiberal Education got some centrist and center-right publications to take him seriously: the Atlantic, the American Scholar, TNR (alas!). He was still a simulacrum-intellectual but gained surprising respectability.
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7. But D'Souza couldn't keep up the act long. You can take the boy out of Dartmouth Review but not Dartmouth Review out of the book. He quickly reverted to form, as I note here: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/151305/dinesh-dsouza-right-wing-troll-since-college …
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8. But any study of how trolling came to be the dominant lingo of the American right has to give pride of place to undergraduate newspapers like The Dartmouth Review (and their predecessor The American Spectator). That's the true incubation ward.
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Mental illness is a trajectory?
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Puerile - the most salient word used in describing the profoundly misguided products of the [very long comma delineated string of very foul descriptors] and delusional
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