Stealing America; What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party

363 Pages·2015·2.603 MB·English

by  Dinesh D'Souza

DEDICATION
FOR DEBBIE FANCHER,
Immigrant, patriot, and the woman I love
CONTENTS
Dedication
A Note to the Reader
Chapter 1 Crime and Punishment:
How They Taught Me a Lesson
Chapter 2 The World as It Is:
Inside the Confinement Center
Chapter 3 How to Steal a Country:
A Heist to End All Heists
Chapter 4 Creating New Wealth:
America, the Anti-Theft Society
Chapter 5 History for Profit:
The Reparations Scam
Chapter 6 The Things That Keep Progressives Awake at Night:
The Greed and Inequality Scam
Chapter 7 You Didn’t Build That:
The Society-Did-It Scam
Chapter 8 Silver Spoons and Genetic Lotteries:
The Lucky Luciano Scam
Chapter 9 The Godfather:
Saul Alinsky’s Art of the Shakedown
Chapter 10 Barack and Hillary:
The Education of Two Con Artists
Chapter 11 The Envy Triangle:
Shaking Down the Wealth Creators
Chapter 12 Cracking the Con:
Restoring the Productive Society
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photographs
About the Author
Also by Dinesh D’Souza
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
A NOTE TO THE READER
The language spoken in a confinement center is extremely coarse. Hardly a
sentence is uttered that does not contain obscenities. There is no way to
convey the sense of place and even the meaning of what convicts are saying
without using some of this language. Out of respect for the reader, I’ve
scaled it way back and used asterisks to bowdlerize the most offensive
words.
Chapter 1
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:
How They Taught Me a Lesson
If a man wishes to be sure of the road he’s traveling on, then he
must close his eyes and travel in the dark.1
—John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
T
he mood in the courtroom was tense and electric as I entered,
accompanied by my superstar lawyer Benjamin Brafman and another
attorney, Alex Spiro. We were in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States
Courthouse in lower Manhattan, the offices of Judge Richard Berman.
Brafman, with his elegant locks of hair brushed back, looked completely at
home in this environment. I, on the other hand, was not.
I tried to look nonchalant, or at least expressionless. Inside, however, my
heart was pounding with terror. In a very short time I’d know if I was
headed to federal prison. My crime? I had exceeded the campaign finance
laws by convincing two of my friends to contribute $10,000 apiece to a
candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York; then I reimbursed them for
their contribution. For this—I subsequently discovered—I could be
prosecuted as a felon and sent away for up to two years. I had already
pleaded guilty to the charge. Now I was going to find out whether the judge
would give me a prison sentence.
My greatest fear was not prison itself. At Brafman’s suggestion, I had
hired a criminologist with extensive experience in the various federal prison
camps. “If you get prison,” this fellow told me, “it’s going to be a white-
collar camp, most likely Taft or Lompoc in California. You’re going to be
surrounded by accountants, lawyers, dentists, bureaucrats. All the others in
there have proven themselves through good behavior. These are nonviolent
criminals, just like you.”
That part—the “just like you”—jolted me. I almost didn’t hear the rest.
“You’ll have to work part-time, but you’ll have lots of free time. There is
little contact with the outside world. No cell phones and no laptops. But you
can send emails from a general computer that is monitored, and you can
make three hundred minutes of phone calls per month, also monitored.
That’s not much, but you’ll get used to it. Taft, the camp I’d recommend for
you, has pretty good facilities, a gym, a running track, a tennis court. You’re
a writer, so do a lot of reading and writing. I’ll help to prepare you for what
to expect. If you stay busy, and use common sense, you’ll be fine.”
Fine? I took that as an exaggeration. Even if there was little danger of
being stabbed or raped, how can someone who is locked up for two years,
without a phone and a laptop, and such limited contact with the outside
world, be fine? My deepest fears were over my nineteen-year-old daughter.
She, I knew, would be devastated. I had recently gone through a difficult
divorce and unfortunately my daughter’s relationship with her mother had
been, at least temporarily, severed. Even though my daughter was now in
college, in terms of immediate family, I was all she had.
I was accompanied by a few close friends, and two sympathetic
journalists, the seasoned veteran Jerome Corsi from WorldNetDaily, and a
young reporter for Breitbart News, Adelle Nazarian. Nazarian said she was
an immigrant from Iran and understood where I was coming from
politically. Most of the crowd was hostile. The liberal press was there in
force, from the staid New York Times to the rabid Daily News. The reporters
are so young, I thought to myself, and how delighted they look at the
prospect of me being sent away. These people hated me because I was a
person of color who was also a conservative. They had regarded me as a
race-traitor, an enemy of the people. Jonathan Capehart, a blogger for the
Washington Post, opined that “Dinesh D’Souza is a disgusting man. . . .
D’Souza should be in jail where he would no longer be able to assault the
rest of us with his special brand of racist bile.”2 For guys like Capehart, I
was about to get my comeuppance and they were about to get their
schadenfreude.
In the back of the room, I even had a critic from the evangelical right: I
noticed the sly reporter from World magazine there to continue that
publication’s long-standing vendetta against me. She avoided my gaze.
Brafman told me the men walking around with badges were from the
government’s prosecution unit. I noticed their smug expressions,
anticipating victory, as if my incarceration were a foregone conclusion.
There were also a few ordinary folk who had read about my case and came
out of curiosity.
My attention focused on the prosecutor, Carrie H. Cohen, a woman with
an enduringly haggard and harassed expression, as if life has done her
wrong. From two previous court hearings, I knew she was brash and
abrasive. Carrie never shook my hand and she avoided eye contact with me;
I got the impression she considered me, like all defendants, to be vermin.
She also had an irritating habit of referring to herself as the Government.
“The Government does not agree.” “Your honor, the Government will prove
. . .” “The Government takes objection.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, Who
elected this woman? She reminded me of Inspector Javert from Les
Misérables. Of course I kept these thoughts to myself. I asked Brafman’s
associate Alex Spiro, “How important a case is this for her?” He said, “For
Carrie? Oh, this is a career case. This could make or break her career.”
Carrie, I realized, badly wanted me in prison so that her career could
advance.
I knew that Carrie was a stooge, an enforcer for people higher up than her.
The most important people—her boss, an Asian-Indian federal prosecutor
named Preet Bharara, and his boss, the attorney general Eric Holder—were
not in the courtroom. Also absent was the biggest boss of them all, the
president of the United States, Barack Obama. That trio, I knew, would all
take a considerable interest in the outcome of my sentencing.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud voice in the courtroom. “United
States versus Dinesh D’Souza.” What a phrase! I winced. “Please stand for
Judge Berman.” The buzz quickly subsided. In sauntered Judge Berman,
fully robed and looking solemn as usual, his head bobbing from side to side
like an old family horse. Behind the judge came three of his clerks. Slowly,
ceremoniously, the judge took his seat. The clerks planted themselves in
chairs against the wall.
Then began what I am going to call my official castigation.3 Normally
sentencing is a perfunctory business, but not this day. The judge gave me a
verbal flaying from the bench that lasted for the better part of an hour.
During this time the clerks watched with evident bemusement; they seemed
to enjoy watching their man carry out a ritual flogging.
The judge insisted I had “willfully and knowingly” violated the law. He
added, “Mr. D’Souza’s crime is serious.” One of the purposes of
punishment, he suggested, is to discourage others from committing similar
violations. “The public certainly needs to be deterred . . . from making
phony contributions and violating the election laws.” I took this to mean I
was going to be punished not just for what I did but also to send a message
of discouragement to the general public.