Here’s a typical Dinesh D’Souza argument. In Death of a Nation – the far-right commentator, film-maker and recently pardoned ex-con’s fourth political documentary – he tries to make the case that Hitler was a lefty. That’s a tall order, and here’s the best D’Souza can muster: he says Adolf wasn’t a homophobe. Most historians think he was, and will cite as proof the 100,000 arrested for violating Nazi anti-homosexuality laws and the 15,000 murdered in camps. And yet here’s D’Souza claiming there were known gay men peppered about the Nazi top brass. Hitler didn’t have them executed or even demoted. Ergo, Hitler was an SJW snowflake. QED. Right?

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Let’s think this through; D’Souza certainly didn’t. Putting aside his typically sloppy historiography, is he really saying that Hitler’s alleged LGBTQ tolerance disqualifies him from conservative circles? Has he accidentally let slip that, in 2018, much of the right remains homophobic? And isn’t he cherry-picking facts then arriving at a dubious conclusion that does nothing but suit his needs? Who would fall for this except someone who would unironically watch a film by Dinesh D’Souza? (Incidentally, D’Souza’s films are reliably lousy with faux-naive rhetorical questions.)

Then again, watching Death of a Nation (a film that tries to compare Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln), you might not get a chance to think anything through. Throughout D’Souza does what he always does: he drops a bombshell, then before you’ve had a chance to recover, he hits you with another, over and over and over, for nearly two hours. It’s a downright Trumpian move: exhaust your enemies (and your supporters) through the sheer volume of your nonsense. Thing is, D’Souza’s been doing this for decades, well before the world was hijacked by the tweeter-in-chief. Confusing through multiplicity has long been one of his favorite tricks. And he has a heaping bag of them.

D’Souza has never had the fame and notoriety of an Ann Coulter (whom he once dated) or even a Laura Ingraham (ditto), but that’s not for lack of trying. Born in Bombay, he emigrated to the US as a teen and quickly made a name among the conservative intelligentsia for “going there” – saying anything to get a rise. At Dartmouth College, he was the editor-in-chief of the rightwing Dartmouth Review. Under his watch, the paper cruelly outed liberal campus homosexuals for fun, and it published a notorious piece known as the “jive column” – a takedown of affirmative action written in stereotypical black language. (The hed: “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro.”)

D’Souza thinks, as a conservative minority, he can say the repugnant things his white brethren no longer can

D’Souza didn’t calm down as he got older. He’s relentlessly banged out books, some more appalling than others. In 1995’s The End of Racism, he defended Jim Crow, invented buzz terms like “rational discrimination” and casually dropped the words “the facile equation of racism and slavery”. The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, from 2007, argued just that, and not well.

It wasn’t until D’Souza rebranded himself as the Michael Moore of the right that he approached household name infamy. His cinema debut, 2012’s 2016: Obama’s America, is the fifth highest grossing doc of all time (though it made $80m less than Fahrenheit 9/11). It hit pay dirt because, during an election year, D’Souza told his target audience (read: scared white Republicans) that America’s first black president was a Manchurian Candidate – a plant brainwashed by his anti-colonialist Kenyan father to scale the peak of the US government and destroy it from within. D’Souza unmistakably, enthusiastically preyed on racist fears. His next film in 2014, America: Imagine the World Without Her, claimed slavery wasn’t that bad.

D’Souza could get away with this, sort of, because of another of his moves, and a most un-conservative one: he played the race card. Towards the start of 2016, D’Souza shows a picture of his hand next to Obama’s, pointing out that they’re the same color. He does this, he says, to show that he, too, knows what it’s like not to be white. What he’s really doing, though, is tacitly admitting this: D’Souza thinks, as a conservative minority, he can skip the usual dog whistles and say the repugnant things his white brethren no longer can.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scene from Death of a Nation. Photograph: Dinesh D'Souza

The problem with D’Souza’s race-baiting? (Apart from, you know, being wrong.) It means his party alienates increasingly needed minority voters. And so his last two movies have attempted damage control. 2016’s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party revealed the not-so-secret news that the Democratic party was, a century and a half ago, the racist one. Death of a Nation repeats this, but adds another grievance: he’s sick and tired of the left calling the right the party of racists and fascists just because the Republican president called all Mexicans “rapists” and all modern American Nazis are really into Trump. So D’Souza tries to turn the tables, or at the very least play an epic game of “I know you are but what am I?”

Death of a Nation is classic D’Souza, only even angrier than usual. All his tricks are present, particularly his cut-and-paste argumentative style. Back in 1991, on the heels of his debut tome Illiberal Education, a flustered Michael Kinsley asked in his review: “Are you going to use the evidence to think through something, or as a weapon?” D’Souza has always used evidence as a weapon. And so we get a handful of out-of-context FDR quotes to make him sound like he admired Hitler (before going to war with him). We get D’Souza being casually offensive, as when he says the Nazi doctrine sounds like it was written by Bernie Sanders, whose ancestors died in the Holocaust. We get pure nonsense, like when he equates Antifa members shutting down “alt-right” speakers with a recreation of the Nazis launching the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. According to D’Souza, the anti-fascists are really against themselves.

We also get D’Souza interviewing Richard Spencer. The white supremacist is there so D’Souza can ask him leading questions, in a comically unconvincing attempt to make him and his fellow Nazis sound un-conservative. (D’Souza also compares Spencer to Malcolm X for some reason.) Thing is, D’Souza’s not really trying to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with him. He knows how to play his supporters, how to hoodwink the gullible. When his critics call out his falsehoods, all he’ll do is cry about it on social media, make it sound like the media is persecuting him. For D’Souza, the Trump age and its record number of suckers must make him feel like a kid in a candy store. And yet he’s never been more mad, or made less sense.