BRUNSWICK, Maine — Dinesh D’Souza, a controversial conservative author and filmmaker, is scheduled to visit Bowdoin College on Tuesday, Nov. 1 — one week before Election Day — to give a talk titled “What’s so great about America.”
The talk, sponsored by the Bowdoin College Republicans, comes three weeks after liberal icon Noam Chomsky spoke at the Brunswick campus.
D’Souza, a vocal critic of President Barack Obama’s administration and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is the author of several books and the documentaries, including “Obama’s America,” “America: Imagine a World Without Her” and “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.”
His criticism of Obama and Clinton have occasionally drawn condemnation for crossing the line from political discourse to racist and sexist language. On Friday, D’Souza drew fire for suggesting on Twitter that Obama’s parents “dumped him” with his grandmother rather than raise him themselves.
“Did they know something we didn’t when we signed up for this guy?” he wrote, in part.
D’Souza, who was born in Mumbai, India, is a former policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and has been affiliated with conservative organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
He also is the author of the 1991 book “Illiberal Education,” in which he wrote about “political correctness” in America’s colleges and universities.
D’Souza will appear nine years after a controversial 2007 speech at Bowdoin, “America and its Enemies,” in which he blamed President Bill Clinton’s administration for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The funds to pay for D’Souza’s Nov. 1 appearance were donated, in part, by alumni who gave explicitly to bring a conservative speaker to campus, The Bowdoin Orient reported.
“We thought [D’Souza] was a great fit for what we were trying to accomplish, both as an intellectual counterpoint to bringing Noam Chomsky to campus and giving a voice to the conservative values on campus in a way that hasn’t been done recently,” Jack Lucy, co-leader of the College Republicans, told the student newspaper.
In 2014, D’Souza was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he arranged excessive campaign contributions to a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate with whom he had graduated from Dartmouth College, The New York Times reported. He pleaded guilty to finance fraud and was sentenced to five years of probation.
In recent years, Bowdoin has been the target of conservative criticism for its efforts to recruit a more diverse student population, for being “closed-minded” toward conservative ideology and for sanctioning students who dressed as Native Americans for a “Cracksgiving” house party.