Author’s note: This is an essay that does a “close reading” of a particular essay that critiques deconstruction (or, really, the modern humanities). A valid objection is that I have devoted a lot of effort to an essay that probably wasn’t intended to be a finely-honed, final statement of someone’s opinion. However, I think it’s still worthwhile, because it illustrates something literary-style criticism is for: you’re reading along in something when an oddity brings you up short.

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In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” In it, he surveys what he learned reading Jonathan Culler’s 1982 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, which was a standard text at the time for people who want to do literary criticism. Nowadays, he’d have had an easier time. I would recommend Peter Berry’s 1995 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory or Lois Tyson’s 1998 Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide.

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Interviews are a staple of the journalist-equivalent essay or book. They seem credible. If something is taken out of context or completely made up, surely the interviewer won’t get away with it? Well, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” A correction inevitably gets less attention than the original misquotation, and there are only rarely any penalties for misquoting people. So, in a polemical work like Illiberal Education, if you wouldn’t believe the author’s opinion stated directly, you shouldn’t believe it when confirmed by an interviewee.

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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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