I find myself pondering a different question as I watch so many people I have known and admired subordinate their talents and their integrity to Trumpism: How has my political generation of conservatives and Republicans laid itself so intellectually and morally low?

Conor Friedersdorf: Stop bending the knee to Donald Trump

Dinesh D’Souza and I have moved in the same circles for close to three decades. He has been a guest at my dinner table; the back cover of my first book, published in 1994, carries a blurb from him. I’ve been disturbed by his evolution over the past decade and have sometimes said so publicly. Yet there is no denying his influence and success. It was D’Souza whom Newt Gingrich was citing when he mused in 2010: “What if [President Barack Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together” his actions? In 2012, D’Souza would release a movie on the Obama-Kenya-anti-colonial theme. Conservatives across America have, to date, paid $33 million to watch it.

In the early part of his career, D’Souza followed a conventional path. While always enjoying the part of the polemicist and the provocateur, he settled down at age 30 to grind out two serious books under the auspices of prestigious conservative institutions like the American Enterprise Institute. The first of the books, a 1991 critique of American universities, earned both commercial success and respectful reviews. The second and more ambitious of those books, 1995’s The End of Racism, encountered a much more hostile reception. A 2014 profile of D’Souza by Mark Stricherz in The Atlantic described what happened next:

In October 1995, writer Glenn Loury and community builder Robert L. Woodson Sr. announced they were resigning their posts at the American Enterprise Institute because D’Souza was a fellow there. D’Souza took the episode as proof that critics outside the conservative orbit were committed more to a political agenda than the truth with a capital “T.” Already a recent convert to the idea that book sales were not wedded to critics’ judgments, D’Souza decided to stop writing with one eye on the reaction of critics.

D’Souza quickly discovered much more spectacular new material rewards in the conservative mass market. But even as he prospered, his anger at his 1995 rejection by the scholarly and intellectual world burned hotter and hotter. In 2006, he published a book that opened with this startling claim:

The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11 … Some leading figures in this group are Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky. Moreover the cultural left includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org.

In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world … Without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

D’Souza then urged American conservatives to make common cause with Muslims worldwide against gay rights, feminism, and secularism generally.