Dinesh D’Souza Under Fire After Retweeting Posts With #BurnTheJews and #BringBackSlavery Hashtags
By Colin Kalmbacher (lawandcrime.com) / June 30 2018
A conservative author and filmmaker recently pardoned by President Donald Trump is under fire after retweeting a Twitter post with the hashtag #burnthejews.
Dinesh D’Souza pleaded guilty to using a “straw donor” in order to make an illegal campaign contribution to a U.S. Senate race in 2012. In 2014, D’Souza entered his plea and was eventually sentenced to five years probation, eight months in a halfway house and a $30,000 fine. On May 31 of this year, President Trump issued a pardon, saying D’Souza “was treated very unfairly by our government.”
Fast forward one month. D’Souza is currently promoting a new film which compares Trump to Abraham Lincoln. In service of that self-promotion, D’Souza retweeted a Twitter post by user @RedManDan84. Twitter subsequently suspended that account, but not before multiple users made screenshots of D’Souza’s retweet:
https://twitter.com/smoobydog/status/1012903608839557121
Twitter user Ryan Adams–who does not appear to be the country singer of the same name–also noted the D’Souza tweet by retweeting the original screenshot captured by Twitter user @smoobydog:
https://twitter.com/filmystic/status/1012905763860250625
Adams’ post went semi-viral. After that, Twitter more or less collectively leapt into D’Souza’s mentions–accusing him of harboring anti-semitic beliefs.
https://twitter.com/kevinbkelly/status/1012899638154792960
D’Souza claims it was all a big misunderstanding and that he simply didn’t see the hashtag. He wrote, “I did not see the hashtag. Just trying to share the trailer on social media.”
I did not see the hashtag. Just trying to share the trailer on social media https://t.co/u1Wn2JPKLe
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 30, 2018
Comedian Kathy Griffin responded to D’Souza’s explanation with a Nazi joke:
Dinesh D’Souza says he did Nazi that someone used the hashtag #burnthejews in a tweet he retweeted. https://t.co/TAvXnvL36u
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) June 30, 2018
Other Twitter users were similarly unconvinced:
https://twitter.com/LibertyZac/status/1013126726078083072
2 people the prez has pardoned:
Dinesh, who retweets a fan's tweet with the hashtag #burnthejews
& @RealSheriffJoe, who referred to his Tent City for Latino inmates as a"concentration camp" & gives interviews to anti-Semitic Holocaust-denying newspaper https://t.co/mtulHabmPC https://t.co/TCENb4iDUp
— Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) June 30, 2018
As the controversy threatened to die down, however, another Twitter user noticed that D’Souza retweeted another controversial hashtag right after the #burnthejews fiasco occurred. This time, the hashtag read: #bringbackslavery.
https://twitter.com/southernlib/status/1013109799754649600
