Why Dinesh D'Souza Is Comparing Obama's Father To Ebola
Written by Oliver Willis
Published
Continuing his years-long effort to smear President Obama's supposed anti-colonial mindset, conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza is suggesting that the influence Obama's father had on his outlook is “more dangerous” than Ebola.
In a Facebook post, D'Souza asked, “Which is a more dangerous infection: #Ebola, or the dreams from his father?” The latest outbreak of Ebola has killed more than 3,400 people in four West African countries and has spread to Europe and the United States.
D'Souza has been offering ill-conceived warnings about Obama's father since at least 2010, when he authored The Roots of Obama's Rage. That book postulated that Obama's support for policies that have been widely accepted by progressives for decades are actually evidence that the president is “captive of the ideology of a Luo tribesman from the 1950s,” as D'Souza refers to the president's father, who grew up in Kenya when it was ruled by Britain. Barack Obama Sr. left the country to become a Harvard-trained economist and father the future U.S. president, and returned to serve in Kenya's newly independent government, spending very little time with his son before his death in 1982.
According to D'Souza, Obama is punishing America in retaliation for slights against his father's family in the colonial era. The book featured a number of false or misleading claims. Evidence for his premise that Obama is consumed by anti-colonialism include the scheduled return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the British following Obama's election, that Obama repeatedly referred to “British Petroleum” in a speech criticizing the company following the 2010 oil spill (he didn't), and Obama's decision to go by “Barack” instead of “Barry,” which D'Souza claimed was because “he self-consciously rejected his father's American name in favor of the senior Obama's African identity” (in the article that D'Souza cited for this claim, Obama said the decision “was not some assertion of my African roots”).
D'Souza extended this premise in two additional books (Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream and America: Imagine a World without Her) and two movies (2016: Obama's America and America: Imagine a World without Her).
D'Souza, who was recently sentenced to 5 years of probation after pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance law, has continued to be embraced by conservative media, even though the central thesis of the last few years of his work is completely without merit or factual basis.