I'm trying not to clutter up my feed with responses to D'Souza tweets, but here he's publicly mocking a woman for mentioning one of my threads, so ... here we go.

In this clip, D'Souza claims I'm no expert on southern political history because I "only" wrote one book on it.

Sure, it won prizes from the Southern Historical Association and the American Political Science Association -- but it's only one book. Quantity over quality, I guess.
He claims *he's* the expert in this field, despite never earning a PhD, or an MA, or even a BA in History. I've asked him if he took any History classes at all, but he refuses to answer.

I guess he was too busy publishing pieces like this as editor of the Dartmouth Review.
If D'Souza *had* ever taken a history class, he wouldn't constantly be surprised by fairly basic facts in the field:
And if D'Souza *had* ever taken a history class, he wouldn't make allegations that we don't teach all these things that we actually do:
And if D'Souza *had* ever taken a history class, he wouldn't lie that historians are hiding these things in the textbooks we write:
In that clip, D'Souza says he likes to bring things down to "empirical particulars," but you'll note in all our exchanges I repeatedly offer evidence -- primary sources, links to books and articles, video and audio, etc. -- and he never does.

Yes, please do judge for yourself.
In that clip, he claims that Tower, Helms and Lott -- who were all southern Democrats who later became Republicans -- don't count as examples of southern Democrats who later became Republicans because ... they don't fit his personal definition? Because he's the expert? OK, sure.
Again, I've laid out the "empirical particulars" at great length, using actual evidence as opposed to his hand-waving

You can read them yourself -- Tower, Lott and Helms are #2, #12, and #13 in this thread:
Now, D'Souza says in the clip, that in doing this, "Kruse plays a sly game, he counts as Dixiecrats people who are not Dixiecrats" -- and remember, they're not Dixiecrats because he says so.

This is some amazing projection. Let's look at how D'Souza plays this same sly game.
As I've noted in this thread, D'Souza plays incredibly fast and loose with his evidence, making sloppy mistakes that anyone who'd ever so much as taken a course in southern political history would never make.
For instance, he counts Kerr Scott as a Dixiecrat, even though Kerr Scott was the leader of the North Carolina forces who worked *against* the 1948 Dixiecrat rebellion:
Likewise, in that thread, when counting Dixiecrats who never switched parties in the late 1960s, he names several politicians who died before then.
The biggest howler, of course, is the "Senator William Murray" that he just made up out of thin air.

That's not exactly sly, but it's certainly a game.
We could go on and on, but it's clear who's playing fast and loose with evidence, the way no actual historian would.

D'Souza routinely likes to single me out, as if I'm the only historian who objects to his work, but that's not true. Here's a fun thread:
And I'm not the only actual historian to take issue with our self-proclaimed expert.

Here's @rauchway:
And on and on and on.

This isn't a case of "this guy at Princeton" versus Dinesh D'Souza. It's the historical profession aligned against him.
Now, in fairness, I should note that there *is* one professional historian who likes D'Souza, and whom D'Souza likes.

He happens to be a historian who famously founded a eugenics institute with funding from a leading segregationist.
For as much as Dinesh D'Souza likes to preen and pretend he's the expert who's dismissing dumb hecklers, actual historians think he's the heckler.

And not a very good one.

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More from @KevinMKruse

Feb 1
My trash cans can’t be racist either, but if I repeatedly dump my garbage on my black neighbors’ yard because they’re black, that is racist.
The same people who have been saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” nonstop for decades are somehow baffled by “highways aren’t racist, but highway planners can be racist”
Also, this argument suggests that federal policy was once not “woke” and perhaps even racist and, huh, I wonder if there’s a theory to analyze that
Read 4 tweets
Jan 31
In 1922, Klan leaders (including N.B. Forrest) announced plans for a new University of America.

They said the new college would focus on teaching Christianity and a history that promoted "Americanism," in order to explain to students how "this is a white man's country."
Almost exactly a century ago -- from the Atlanta Constitution (2/5/1922)
Oh Lord, that's right -- the site they're discussing here is now a synagogue.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 25
Twitter aside, I'm going to go with the time we went to Nobu for my birthday and David Hasselhoff was VERY LOUDLY holding court at the table next to us.
I was @kaj33’s faculty host when he got an honorary degree. I had all these questions about his activism but the seating arrangement meant I didn’t get a chance to talk much. When I did, I panicked and asked about the book tour he was on: “so, I guess you’ve been flying a lot?”
The nicest celebrities were probably @CobieSmulders and @TaranKillam, who we sat next to at the @iamsambee Not the WHCD event. Very nice, very normal, swapped kid pics. My only regret was not raving about TK’s Drunk History episode.

(Sam Bee, also nice as hell. Just great.)
Read 4 tweets
Jan 21
Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with this one.
For all the article's claims that historians thought Biden would be another FDR, there's a link to a Doris Kearns Goodwin interview and ... that's it.
The take on the New Deal is wrong -- FDR wasn't laser focused on economic issues alone, but had programs for conservation, public power, the arts, etc. from the start.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 25, 2021
If you’re wondering why this ad never mentions what the scary book was that she wanted to ban or what course it was used in, well, it was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved and the class was senior-year AP English.
If you think your high school senior can’t handle college-level novels in a college-credit course, maybe he shouldn’t take Advanced Placement English?
A lot of people are embarrassed for her son, but (unless I’m mistaken) he seems to be a 27-year-old Republican Party lawyer so he’s probably fine with all this?

washingtonpost.com/local/educatio…

nytimes.com/2020/12/18/sty…
Read 4 tweets
Oct 14, 2021
Hey, it looks like Ted Cruz has nothing better to do than respond to three-day-old tweets.

Must be nice to have that kind of free time with no responsibilities and nothing going on in the world.

Well, let's dig in!
First of all, no, "there is no Biden vaccine mandate" that's been put into effect yet.

Here's a news story about it yesterday. (Which I guess you'll get around to reading a couple days from now?)

nbcnews.com/politics/white…
You might not be aware that "next week" hasn't actually happened yet, but, uh ... it hasn't?

So, no, there is not currently a "Biden vaccine mandate" in place.
Read 7 tweets

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