In his Illiberal Education, D’Souza uses numbers and statistics, um, liberally but not informatively. In this post, I’ll mix up discussing how he misleads and how you might recognize what he’s doing without having to look at his sources. As with all these posts, I link to archive.org’s copy of Illiberal Education so that you can check my citations. Throughout, boldface indicates my emphasis. Numbers are for comparing D’Souza sometimes uses numbers to establish a vibe: a feeling that he’s bathing you in a sea of facts.

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In the previous post, I showed that Dinesh D’Souza egregiously mischaracterized Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala in his 1991 book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. That was relatively easy to do because Menchú’s book is available online, as are Wikipedia, the archives of the New York Review of Books, and the Nobel Peace Prize’s website. I did the digging because I get obsessive about things, but it ought to be possible to get pretty suspicious of D’Souza’s summary from his writing alone.

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Authors frequently refer to other books to support their argument. Readers are trained to assume the author actually read the book and is summarizing it fairly. In chapter 3 of Illiberal Education (1991), D’Souza uses four pages to summarize a book, the memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. His summary describes the book he needed for his argument, not the book Ms. Menchú produced. (I say “produced” rather than “wrote” because the book is based on 24 hours of interviews, transcribed and edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.

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In this series, I’m proposing heuristics you can use to guess that an author is lying to you. For this post, I’m using chapter 5 of D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, titled “The New Censorship: Racial Incidents at Michigan.” It begins with this anecdote: “On February 4, 1987, undergraduate Ted Sevransky, hosting his talk show on the University of Michigan radio station WCBN, asked listeners to call up with their favorite racial jokes.

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This series was inspired by an offhand comment by one of the hosts of the Origin Story podcast (which I quite like). They have an 2022 episode titled “Woke: The word that splits the world.” The host read Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 book, Illiberal Education: the Politics of Sex and Race, and made this comment about it during minute 22: “Considering that Dinesh D’Souza is now a lunatic, the book itself [is] not anywhere near as wild as you would think.

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Although “political correctness” (in its modern meaning) was occasionally used prior to 1990, that was the year it went mainstream. On campuses, the name apparently took hold strongly and swiftly at the beginning of the 1990-1991 academic year (starting in the fall). Word spread in the media, probably most influentially with an October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein. It got a big boost when then-President George H.W. Bush said, in a commencement speech at the end of that academic year (May 1991):

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This is third in a series examining the evolving rhetoric used by those who believe “political correctness” is a threat to Western, especially American, civilization. (I’ll call that “anti-PC rhetoric” for short.) We’re now up to 1990 with Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. I’m working from a scan of the 1991 paperback edition. I believe it’s the same as the 1990 hardcover, except for the addition of an epilogue.

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My project in this series is to document the history of the rhetoric of attacks on “political correctness” (“anti-PC discourse” for short), to show how it evolved over time. The last post was mainly about the 1984 Bennett Report. This post is about Allen Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind (wikipedia, archive.org, pdf), which both increased the heat of the rhetoric and introduced new tropes. Closing was not expected or intended to sell well, but it became a surprise bestseller, selling nearly 500,000 copies in hardcover and a similar number in paperback.

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While writing a podcast episode on deconstruction as a method and an idea, I got sidetracked into doing a “close reading” and deconstruction of Chip Morningstar’s 1994 essay “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything”. It seemed to me that (1) the essay comes from a time when attacking “political correctness” in universities was popular, and (2) it used several common tropes of such attacks in a pretty revealing way. So I wanted to link Morningstar’s essay to those tropes.

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Consider a yellow coffee cup. It’s sitting on your desk. You periodically grab it to take a swig. How might this work in the brain? Perhaps there’s a mental map of the desktop, with the cup represented in that map. In this telling, you might think that you look at the cup to fix its exact position, then direct your arm to reach for it. In Being There, Andy Clark speculates differently, using something he calls a personalized representation.

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