D’Souza’s decision to stay humble and write for the critics helped make Illiberal Education a success, but his background and hard work helped too. Born in Mumbai in 1961, D’Souza was a rare prodigy. He was a young, non-white, Ivy League-educated conservative immigrant arguing within the tradition of liberal education. His criticisms of political correctness and multiculturalism could be not dismissed as the work of a has-been or crypto-racist. “I especially empathize with minority students, who seek to discover principles of equality and justice that go considerably beyond the acquisition of vocational skill,” he wrote in Illiberal Education.

Raised in a Catholic household and educated by Spanish Jesuits, D’Souza was also a Christian public intellectual of erudition and wisdom. He cited Simone Weil and Reinhold Niebuhr in his books as easily as he did Scripture. His main criticism of the Reverend Jerry Falwell was the minister’s tendency to let his conservatism get the best of his Christianity. A passage from his first book, Falwell Before the Millennium: A Critical Biography, illuminates D’Souza’s own recent work:

In Reinhold Niebuhr’s words, “Political controversies are always conflicts between sinners, and not between righteous men and sinners.” Falwell is in the pulpit. The Bible speaks of good and evil, and in the Bible the two do not mix. But in politics, distinctions are often less vivid. Falwell’s rhetoric, however, frequently does not distinguish between liberals, socialists, and Communists. He sometimes regards his enemies as opposing not just his programs, but God Himself. So he demonizes his critics the way they do him.

At 53, D’Souza looks only slightly older than he did a generation ago. His hair is graying at the temples and his face has gotten fuller. His sympathies and work ethic have not changed much either. But he has expanded his range from author and public speaker to filmmaker, serving as a writer and director of both 2016: Obama’s America and America: Imagine a World Without Her.

He has also struck a series of road bumps. In October 2012, D’Souza was forced to step down as president of Kings College in Manhattan after running afoul of the evangelical school’s sexual mores; he divorced his wife of two decades; and he pled guilty to using straw donors to aid the candidacy of Wendy Long, a friend who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. In the eyes of progressives, those sins and crimes made D’Souza a moral hypocrite and phony. In the eyes of critics, he trots out straw men rather than concrete arguments. But both were symptoms rather than causes of his change intellectually (and perhaps spiritually) from a generation ago. D’Souza has not so much broken bad as fallen victim to pride.

“It was my very first book,” D’Souza said recently of Illiberal Education, smiling nostalgically at the thought of the critical and financial success it received. Except it wasn’t. In addition to the Falwell book, he had written a book on the great works of the Catholic intellectual tradition and co-edited another that boasted an introduction from no less a Republican titan than Richard M. Nixon. The chronological order of the books does not matter, but D’Souza’s belief that Illiberal Education was his first is a window into his mind. He is more than an author. His books have massive appeal to Fox News viewers; he refers to the ones that did not as his “pre-books.” Whatever the view of his critics on the left or right—and in the last five years nearly all have heaped scorn on The Roots of Obama’s Rage and Obama’s America—he plays to the crowd. “The book industry was changing after Illiberal Education, and I found out you could make money by not writing for the critics, that book reviews didn’t matter,” D’Souza said.