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. [He and Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals] were trying to sound quite sensible at that point, like: ‘We’re sensible people, and look at these crazy students and professors filling [their] heads with nonsense.’ "
“Now a lunatic” presumably refers to D’Souza’s more recent career as a conspiracy theorist whose life’s work has been a series of books and documentaries filled with wild falsehoods. But here’s the thing: Illiberal Education is also filled with falsehoods (as I will dutifully document in coming posts). Yet even perceptive readers today (like the podcast host) miss them. People at the time missed them. They got suckered.
How? Part of it is that D’Souza uses what you might call “stolen valor.” You see, we’re trained to trust writing that looks a certain way: it uses citations, or interviews, or statistics to buttress its points. It has an evenhanded style. D’Souza’s writing mimics the output of dutiful, honest authors, so we are predisposed to think he’s one of them.
Moreover, many falsehoods would require a fair amount of work to uncover. You might have to go read a campus newspaper article to discover D’Souza had doctored a quote. Easier now than in 1991, but what reader will bother? Or you might have to go read a book to discover it’s nothing like his four-page summary of it. Too much work.
So what I’d like to do is present lower-effort heuristics for suspecting that, in Illiberal Education, Dinesh D’Souza is a lying liar who lies. (Remember, in 1991, that wouldn’t have been so extensively documented.) My hope is that dishonest authors share certain “tells.” ("Tell” is a poker slang term, meaning “a subconscious behavior that can betray information to an observant opponent.") I want us to become more sensitive to these tells. As the consequences of lying dwindle to nothing, we’ll be getting more of it, so we need to be better at detecting it.