Confinement Gave Writer Shocking Insight into U.S. | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Go to civitasclc.com for more about Dinesh D'Souza and other dynamic speakers at the Conservative Leadership Conference on March 4-5

    To find out the truth about our country, conservative writers usually do research, then do interviews ... but Dinesh D'Souza is perhaps the first to do time.

    This is what makes his most recent book, "Stealing America," a powerful and thought-provoking revelation about politics and government in the United States today.

    D'Souza has a long career as a writer and a public intellectual. His 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage was described as the most influential political book of the year. He followed that in 2014 with the book Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. He moved into filmmaking with "2016: Obama's America." The film quickly rose to the second-highest grossing political documentary of all time.

    In the fall of 2014, he was hauled into federal court for improperly donating money to a friend who was running for the U.S. Senate. It's an offense that often goes unprosecuted, or is punished with a slap on the wrist, especially when the accused admits the crime and apologizes, as D'Souza did. D'Souza, however, was nearly sent to a federal prison and, in the end, was sentenced to eight months in a state-run confinement center in San Diego. That meant spending every night in captivity among convicted killers, robbers and drug dealers finishing up their sentences. He gained a view of life and the country he had never gotten before, and it stunned him.

    He got to know criminals and "began to see politics very differently," he wrote in the book. "I understood, for the first time, the psychology of crookedness. Suddenly I had an epiphany: this system of larceny, corruption and terror that I encountered firsthand in the confinement center is exactly the same system that has been adopted and perfected by modern progressivism and the Democratic Party. This book is an exposé of Obama, Hillary, and modern liberalism not as a defective movement of ideas, but as a crime syndicate." He added, "This book is about a remarkable scheme to steal America."

    Yes, he goes on to write, even the FBI and DEA, not to mention the IRS, operate like gangs. As another inmate tells him, "You have to realize, homie, that Obama's a gang leader, just like I used to be."

    Parts of this criminal conspiracy, he asserts, are scams. Take "social justice." He describes it as a way to stir envy as a cover for taking your money and handing it out to various clients and cronies. Then there's Social Security, a Ponzi scheme that surreptitiously funds the government while placing Americans in a dependent state. Or sometimes the criminal activity is outright theft, as when the Affordable Care Act took over the health-care system for the benefit of bureaucrats and insiders.

    Even to conservatives this may seem like a far-out notion. But D'Souza is determined to make his case. For those on the right, some of the most intriguing passages are those in which he looks at the careers of Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in this light.

    Alinsky is the community organizer who was the ideological godfather for modern progressives. Clinton wrote her college thesis on him, and Obama began his activist career working with Alinskyite organizations in Chicago. What is most revealing, D'Souza says, is that Alinsky himself was a con man. He got his best ideas not from idealists and thinkers, but by studying Al Capone's mob. He claimed to be working for the people, but in a magazine interview he boasted about how his hustle worked for his own benefit. By the end of his life, he lived far from the mean streets of Chicago in beautiful Carmel, Calif.

    His protégés Obama and Clinton followed him, D'Souza wrote, with the difference being that Alinsky was a small-time crook, but they had their eyes on the biggest heist of all: the United States.

    D'Souza's key insight into Obama is one of those clues that's lying in plain sight. Yes, Obama called his memoir "Dreams from My Father." But, D'Souza writes, the truth is the president didn't so much seek to emulate Barack Obama Sr.'s African heritage or politics or intellect, but rather his career as a liar, fraud and con man. The results of the younger Obama's obsession with such a father are strewn across the last seven years of our history.

    As for Clinton, our readers are all too familiar with how she and her husband feathered their nest during their long careers of "public service."

    By the way, over the centuries other conservatives have made the same point. "Remove justice," St. Augustine wrote, "and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?" D'Souza, however, is especially convincing, if only because he saw criminals up close at work today, and he has long studied their counterparts in government. These insights, and his portraits of the criminal class, make "Stealing America" a fascinating book.

    This is why we at Civitas are looking forward to his appearance at our upcoming Conservative Leadership Conference March 4-5 at the Embassy Suites Raleigh-Durham/Research Triangle hotel in Cary. Go to Civitasclc.com for more information.