Conservatives sour on 'rebel media'

Dinesh D'Souza first seized the attention of the political world in 1981, when he was a student writer at the Dartmouth Review, the conservative newspaper that was a progenitor of what he calls "the rebel media."

D'Souza, then 20, wrote an article naming the officers of the Gay Student Alliance, including students who had not disclosed their sexuality to family and friends.

Now, seven books later, D'Souza is still naming names: In his new book, he blames liberals for inciting the 9/11 attacks with their permissive social policies, and he specifies the culprits: Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, and more.

On Thursday night, the 45-year-old D'Souza will return to New England to debate one of his leading critics, professor Alan Wolfe of Boston College. But while the subject will be liberal responsibility for 9/11, it might also be the state of conservative media in 2007.

Far from becoming a favorite title on the right, D'Souza's book has produced a furious response from many conservatives, who feel that it carries liberal-bashing so far that he appears to endorse Osama bin Laden over Hillary Clinton.

There are other signs that the naming-names style of "rebel media" that helped power the conservative movement may have run its course.

Ann Coulter, the best-selling author of "Treason" and "Godless," had her column dropped by eight newspapers after she used a homophobic slur in reference to Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards during a political conference in Washington. Even Rush Limbaugh, the populist right-wing radio host, got slapped by some conservatives when he asserted that actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, was exaggerating his symptoms to promote stem cell research.

In interviews, some conservatives described liberal-bashing as a stunt that has grown old.

"He's bearing the brunt of the backlash against something a lot of mainstream conservatives have done -- blame liberals for a lot more than liberals have done," said Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative magazine.

Even the man D'Souza calls his mentor, retired Dartmouth English professor and conservative columnist Jeffrey Hart, said of liberal-bashing: "That's the shtick. And I think it's an unattractive way to go about things."

Like dozens of conservative bestsellers over the past two decades, D'Souza's book, "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," takes repeated shots at familiar targets. In its first paragraph it lists such culprits as billionaire George Soros, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the National Organization for Women, Human Rights Watch, and others.

The book also uses the conspiratorial tone of recent political bestsellers on both the left and right, speaking of "unmasking the liberal-Islamic alliance" and the need to "defeat the enemy at home and abroad."

But many conservatives have said that in the process of heaping blame on liberals, D'Souza was portraying radical Islamists as rational actors, at least to the degree that they were aggrieved over some of the same policies that offended conservatives around the world. In doing so, he appeared to contradict the conservative view that terrorism is an ideology unto itself, which they see as an evil divorced from rational political thought.

"I often wondered, when reading 'The Enemy at Home' and his extended aria of a response to conservative critics, whether D'Souza was the victim of intellectual Stockholm syndrome, his effort to understand the enemy nudging him toward sympathy for the enemy, or whether the whole production was just a brazen bid for notoriety," Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of New Criterion, wrote in an online symposium convened last month by the National Review.

Now a research scholar at Stanford University, D'Souza began his career as a writer and activist as a 19-year-old student at Dartmouth. He was the second editor of the Dartmouth Review, an unofficial campus paper whose founding in 1980 coincided with a rebirth of conservative activism on campus and beyond.

Hart, who was adviser to the paper and helped attract numerous national conservatives to its board, portrays the paper as a serious engine of conservative thought, in the mode of National Review, William F. Buckley's pioneering conservative journal.

"After a couple of years, the Reagan White House [cafeteria] looked like an editorial board meeting of the Dartmouth Review," he said, ticking off the names of graduates who went straight from the Hanover campus to Washington.

But at the time the paper was better known for its efforts to incite liberals, or the perceived beneficiaries of liberal policies like affirmative action.

During the 1980s, before and after D'Souza's editorship, the paper was repeatedly in the news for controversies that included taping a Gay Student Alliance meeting, publishing a column in a mocking imitation of black English, ridiculing a class by a black music professor, comparing the university's Jewish president to Adolf Hitler, and falsely asserting that a university chaplain had defended a group advocating sex with adolescents.

Before the Review, such tactics as attending the meetings of rival groups, denouncing individuals for their beliefs, and ridiculing established institutions were mostly associated with '60s-type liberal protesters; conservatives argued for tolerance, respect, and order.

The young D'Souza, an immigrant from Bombay and a devout Catholic, was an appealing new face for the conservative movement: He viewed American politics with the keen eye of an outsider.

D'Souza remains proud of the Review, but in an interview he acknowledged regretting some of its tactics, even as he watched those tactics spread through the conservative movement.

"Now, in my mid-40s, I have to explain some of my sophomoric behavior by saying at the time I was, in fact, a sophomore," D'Souza said.

But he added: "If you look today at the conservative media, you'll see conservatives went into rebel media: talk radio of the Rush Limbaugh type, Fox News, web sites like Drudge. . . . If you look at this rebel media, it's the Dartmouth Review writ large."

D'Souza's chosen medium, political books, has also gone rebel in recent decades, starting with a spate of anti-Clinton books in the 1990s by writers such as Coulter and former Dartmouth Review editor Laura Ingraham.

They unleashed a maelstrom of titles such as Bernard Goldberg's "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America." In recent years, liberals have taken the same tone in numerous bestselling anti-Bush screeds.

D'Souza does not see himself as similar to Coulter. "What's happened over the years is you've had some conservative bomb throwers, but their books don't get discussed. They're merely bomb throwers," he said. "Bomb throwing is very much alive, but it's important to do it the right way . . . to take an idea that's deeply ingrained and just sort of turn it around and challenge it."

That's what D'Souza said he's doing in "The Enemy at Home," challenging the left-wing idea that American foreign policy sparked Islamist anger and suggesting that the liberal social agenda is to blame.

Wolfe, the BC professor, saw it differently in his New York Times review, writing that D'Souza has "a soft spot for radical evil."

"I think the ideas in his book are what we need to talk about," Wolfe said in an interview. "I think they're bad ideas, and I want to show why."

Among those curious about the debate is Hart, D'Souza's mentor. He praised D'Souza's first two books, particularly "Illiberal Education," which took the academy to task for political correctness.

"It was a very soundly researched book," Hart said. But in later years, "it seemed to me Dinesh veered away from any serious stuff and began to write books merely for the purpose of debating, which is where he makes most of his money."

"Dinesh is a good debater," Hart added. "He's very quick. He has a hard one to defend this time, though."