Dinesh Unchained

D’Souza’s rhetorical tactics may be perfectly suited to the Age of Trump, but he learned them long ago: at Dartmouth College in the early 1980s, where he led the Dartmouth Review, the country’s best-known conservative campus paper. “American politics has caught up with Dartmouth,” he tells me. The Review’s undergraduate antics—outing the officers of the Gay-Straight Alliance, printing an affirmative action op-ed in Ebonics, hosting a lavish luncheon alongside a fast for world hunger—readied him for Trump: “For 20 years, I wasn’t doing it. Because for 20 years, American politics wasn’t like this.” D’Souza, 57, sees himself as a pioneer of the puerilizing of political discourse. Responding reciprocally, he says, to the “gangsterization of the left” by “treating them like gangsters,” he helped pave the way for Trump. I’m surprised, therefore, when he tells me he doesn’t know what “trolling” is.

We meet on a Sunday morning in July at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Though we’ve spoken on the phone, this is our first meeting. After his pardon, he’d texted me a picture of the cake served at an impromptu party. It bore a printed-on photo of D’Souza sitting on the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk in an orange frog-suit, next to a picture of President Trump gazing fixedly into the middle distance and saying via cartoon talk-bubble, “You’re Pardoned!” Surrounding the image, in icing, the triumphant words: “Dinesh Unchained.” He appears in the lobby wearing a pastel polo shirt and a jovial smile. Over coffee and mineral water, he talks at a fast clip and tends to flit between defenses.

“My Twitter persona is different,” he tells me, back on the subject of trolling, and emits a small self-conscious sigh. In the week leading up to our meeting, he’d retweeted a fan’s use of the hashtag “burntheJews,” later saying he hadn’t noticed the hashtag and was simply trying to promote his own movie trailer—which itself happens to be rife with images of Nazis. He retweeted “#bringbackslavery” too. And earlier this year, profoundly tasteless tweets about the Parkland shooting earned D’Souza a disinvitation from CPAC, an event not short on controversial speakers.

His early training at the impish and often outrageous Review may have equipped him for public life outside the confines of normal decency. But he was once, and not so long ago, widely regarded as one of the cleverest polemical journalists on the right. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1983 and the next year published a critical biography of Jerry Falwell, arguing that the Moral Majoritarian did religion no favors with his overtly political agenda. His next political salvo was no less portentous: Coauthored with Dartmouth Review founder Greg Fossedal, My Dear Alex: Letters from the KGB (1987) purports to be a series of lessons from a Soviet disinformation expert instructing a protégé in the art of manipulating the American media. D’Souza spent a year in the Reagan White House as a domestic-policy analyst and in 1989 joined the American Enterprise Institute as a fellow. He was one of conservatism’s rising stars, and with 1991’s Illiberal Education, D’Souza won broader fame. A deeply reported exploration of the excesses of campus culture wars, it was a hit with critics—touted by Andrew Sullivan’s New Republic, serialized in the Atlantic, heralded by C. Vann Woodward in the New York Review of Books.

Our universities’ commitment to diversity and multiculturalism, D’Souza argued, had proven a force for iniquity and disharmony. Through field interviews and convincingly drawn case studies, he showed the dangers many campus observers had helplessly witnessed and worried over for years—mostly quietly, lest their concerns offend anyone. The book liberated reason from oversensitivity. Tom Wolfe called D’Souza “one of the true fearlessly iconoclastic writers around, as opposed to the fake a.k.a. fashionable iconoclasts.” The success of Illiberal Education, of course, made D’Souza suddenly quite fashionable. His new fame even threatened to fix him firmly among the establishment, but with the follow-up, the Dartmouth Review-er reared his head.

In The End of Racism (1995), D’Souza took the inferiority of the black race for granted in service to the thesis that “racism is not the main problem facing blacks in the U.S.—their own dysfunctional culture is.” What disturbed readers just as much was his knowingly provocative approach to a subject of profound complexity. He did not conceal his disgust when describing, in gratuitous detail, conditions in the urban ghetto. In a chapter sneeringly titled “The Content of Our Chromosomes,” he flirted with a biological explanation of inferiority. Elsewhere, he considered an historical one and defended slavery: “In summary, the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well,” he reasoned and further argued that “Africans were not uniquely unfortunate to be taken as slaves; their descendants were uniquely fortunate to be born in the only civilization in the world to abolish slavery on its own initiative.” It was a bestseller, but panned by critics and abhorred in polite circles. “I would not take back even a word from that book back then,” he tells me. In many ways, Death of a Nation picks up where The End of Racism left off, only now, D’Souza uses the plantation as an analogue for the Democratic party.

Last year, his Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left was taglined “There is a fascist threat in America—but it’s not Donald Trump. The real threat is from the Democratic Party.” But the new book is “a little different,” he assures me. The difference? “I link the Nazi brownshirts and the KKK, eerily similar groups,” he leans in and lowers his voice to a whisper, lest the nearby brunchers mistake him for the sort of person who casually proffers Nazi analogies. But, more important for sales, he links the KKK to the pre-Civil Rights-era Democrats as an answer to the problem of Trump’s association with white nationalism. “Would you have written this book if Trump weren’t so often compared to Hitler?” I ask. “No, my books always begin as a refutation of something,” he says. “And then in the process of refuting a narrative, I always think it’s important to produce a reconstructed narrative in its place.”

He doesn’t whisper when he cops to the mercenary nature of his support for Trump. Back during the 2016 primaries, he and his second wife, Debbie, a Republican activist, favored Ted Cruz, whose father married them that year. (They met on Twitter in 2014: She DM’d him clips of Bill Ayers, and he asked her for help getting his movies screened in Texas public schools.) D’Souza prefers to avoid publicly backing any candidate and to keep his focus on antagonizing the other side. “I was making a movie on Hillary, right? And I thought, I’m not going to get into an internecine Republican debate.” But Hillary’s America did only $13.1 million at the box office where 2016: Obama’s America had managed $33.4 million in 2012. D’Souza saw the writing on the wall. “I completely jumped on the Trump bandwagon after he was the nominee,” he says. It was a solid business play: The Big Lie was a big bestseller.

There was reason to hope the pardon would bring an added bonus. (As it happened, Death of a Nation earned only a fraction of what all his other films had made.) D’Souza wasn’t surprised by Trump’s announcement. “I talked to him yesterday,” he told me the morning of the president’s fateful tweet, weighing at the time whether to unleash a tweet storm of his own. “I got the call midday yesterday. The operator put Trump on the phone.” Trump, never one for under-embellishment, described D’Souza to reporters as being physically overwhelmed by gratitude when he called: “He almost had a heart attack when I told him.”

Decline Was a Choice

Before the pardon came the felony. D’Souza’s started with anti-establishment antics and ended with characteristic hubris. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to having circumvented campaign-donation limits in the 2012 New York Senate race. He’d directed his mistress and his personal assistant to donate $10,000 each to Wendy Long’s longshot run against Kirsten Gillibrand and reimbursed them. Following an investigation and a heated hearing in New York’s southern district, he received a sentence of eight months’ “community confinement”—in which, free to spend the days at home, convicts return each night at eight to a lockup-like halfway house—plus a $30,000 fine, community service teaching English as a second language, and court-mandated psychotherapy sessions, which D’Souza says he spent primarily on the subject of his recent divorce.

“I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be made in the name of another was wrong and something the law forbids,” D’Souza told Judge Richard Berman. “I deeply regret my conduct.” But his protestations in a televised interview earlier the same day—that he was the victim of a “witch hunt”—clashed with his attempts to telegraph compunction. During his sentencing, Berman played an interview D’Souza gave to Newsmax TV about the unfairness of his case and rebuked him from the bench, “I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it.”

D’Souza’s defenses often reflect Trump’s, and the pardon could be interpreted as a shot across Robert Mueller’s bow. “I don’t think there’s any connection at all,” he told me the morning of the pardon and paraphrased the president: “As Trump said, ‘I knew from the beginning that you got’—his word was—‘screwed.’ ” Trump thought the FBI treated him unfairly, D’Souza says, and the president wasn’t alone in believing he deserved a pardon. “Senator Cruz pushed it to Trump,” and this, D’Souza insists, proves the injustice of his conviction. “I think it’s particularly commendable given Cruz and Trump were rivals for the nomination,” he said. “They did it just because it was the right thing to do.”

But why did D’Souza do it?

Predictably, Dartmouth played a part. Wendy Long worked at the Dartmouth Review with D’Souza, and Gillibrand is a Dartmouth alumna, too. Five years their junior, the Blue-Dog-Democrat-turned-progressive-feminist reminded these friends of the humorless liberals they’d razzed at the Review. “Wendy goes, There’s this Dartmouth woman—you know what I mean,” D’Souza says. “This was a Dartmouth fight, and almost a surrogate for our old clashes.” There’s little a Review-er relishes more. Long, who ran again in 2016, readily accepted his apology for the awkward scandal, she tells me. “When you run you keep asking people for help,” Long says. “Maybe he just took it to heart. He kept saying, I’m really sorry, Wendy.” She also doesn’t mind my, and every other reporter’s, calling her campaigns “quixotic.” In New York, “Republicans don’t really have a chance statewide,” she admits. But Long ran anyway, against absurdly unbeatable odds, for the same reason D’Souza illegally donated over the limit: the love of the old fight. “I felt like I had to stick my head out and contribute to the movement as Dinesh and Laura had,” she readily admits. “They motivated me, absolutely.”

Laura is Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who both dated D’Souza at Dartmouth and followed him as Review editor. They are the embodiment of the paper’s success. Four young conservatives, troubled by their inability to support Ronald Reagan in the campus daily, founded the Dartmouth Review in 1980: Gregory Fossedal, Gordon Haff, Benjamin Hart, and Keeney Jones. Haff, now a software consultant, is the only one still active on the Review’s board. He sees D’Souza’s and Ingraham’s stardom as anomalous. “Most people, they have a family, a job outside politics, and they stop engaging,” Haff says when I ask what sets these two apart from other alumni. What he means is that at some point most of them just grew up and moved on. Jones, who wrote the infamously tasteless Ebonics op-ed attacking affirmative action, is now a Catholic priest in a small town in Connecticut. Hart—whose Dartmouth professor father Jeffrey was a prominent conservative thinker and the Review’s early connection to national Republicans—is a marketing consultant and competitive breakdancer in Illinois. Haff hasn’t heard from Fossedal, who founded and ran a small think tank of his own for a time, since they quarreled over tech policy 10 years ago. “Of the old cohort, most of our thinking has evolved,” Haff says, particularly when it comes to those fraught areas of debate where the Review’s reporting earned them the most enemies. “If you work in the milieu of having strong, provocative opinions, it usually doesn’t behoove you to second-guess yours too much. George Will has been able to, but he’s more established.”

The author of Illiberal Education was, until he changed course, on track to be himself so established. For D’Souza, decline was a choice. He could still be writing serious books, he insists, and enjoying the friendship and favor of the conservative elite. “I miss that, I miss that,” he says when I ask whether his mind ever wanders back to the days of D.C. dinner party debates and chess matches against conservative luminaries. He’s lost in thought for a moment, but recovers. “I moved to California in the year 2000, and by doing that I took myself out of the D.C. camp, which I was very much a part of.” Living in San Diego, a long way from his new base at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he found himself adrift. “I lost that social circle. That was my social circle.” But the way D’Souza sees it, he had to leave behind the world of Washington at some point.

“There’s no use talking to the whole country,” he’d realized. “There’s a pointlessness to expending a lot of energy to get a liberal to concede a point without conceding anything beyond it.” The catalyst was the tepid reception of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America, “a liberal restatement of Illiberal Education,” per D’Souza’s reading. Schlesinger presented a patriotic case against factious identity politics in 1991, the year of Illiberal Education’s publication. It was a case for American unity that liberal elites could get behind, and yet, “it barely made a ripple,” D’Souza says. “The futility of trying to do that hit me—the waste of time.” Why write for that narrow cross-section of conscientious Americans? “I said to myself, I could do that, and I could keep doing it. Or I can realize that there is a large audience out there that wants to learn, but their only sources of knowledge right now are the liberals.”

He would indeed find a zealous audience for his “reconstructed” narratives. Books of sensationalism like The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010), 2016: Obama’s America (2012), America: Imagine a World Without Her (2014), and Hillary’s America (2016) topped bestseller lists despite near-universal disdain in serious circles. The movie versions did even better.

Ex-Friends

Glenn Loury, the black conservative economist, was probably the first to see through D’Souza—and resigned from the American Enterprise Institute over its support of The End of Racism in 1995. Loury says he still sees much to admire in Illiberal Education and agrees as much as ever with The End of Racism’s suggestion that the black community’s redemption must come from within. But Loury condemns its broader argument and tone: D’Souza’s partial defense of slavery—it had little to do with race, he argued—and his demeaning descriptions of black culture were distasteful context for his less objectionable arguments. Apparently eager to offend the standards of decency, he elevated archaic profiles to persistent types: “The sullen ‘field nigger,’ the dependable Mammy, the sly and inscrutable trickster,” D’Souza wrote, could be found in today’s ghettos.

“What it’s lampooning is a cartoon,” Loury recalls. “It’s not serious.” In a devastating review of the book, published in one of the first issues of this magazine, he got D’Souza’s number: “If one were to adopt the voice used by D’Souza throughout the book, one might speculate that he actually longs to hear those ‘triumphant roars,’ from black and white racists alike, because such vitriolic discussion sells books.”

Decades later, Loury still lives rent-free in D’Souza’s head. “Let me tell you something about Glenn Loury,” he tells me over coffee in Manhattan, suddenly electrified. “This guy is in the same place that he was in 1991, and he’s talking about the same things—if we literally took his old article and put a new date on it. To me this reflects a level of intellectual stagnation.” Loury sees himself quite differently, saying he’s evolved since his departure from AEI and finds himself far removed from the partisan frontlines. He attributes this widening distance in no small part to his conservative colleagues’ intolerable tolerance of Dinesh D’Souza. In the ever-growing league of public denouncers, Loury’s Cassandra status grants him unrivaled seniority.

“The streets are irrigated with alcohol, urine, and blood,” Loury quotes a gallingly sensational piece of scene-setting from The End of Racism. It’s the first line of a chapter that goes on to claim black ghettos as empirical proof of racial inferiority. The book was “snide, gratuitously provocative, arrogant,” Loury says, serving up an assessment that fits D’Souza’s later works as well. He wasn’t surprised, he tells me, after The End of Racism to see D’Souza brazen his way onward to thinner treatments of broader subjects.

Peter Robinson, another Dartmouth Review-er, worked with D’Souza in the Reagan White House. Journalism, Robinson recalls, was a better match for D’Souza’s talents than toiling away in near-anonymity as a West Wing policy wonk: “I can’t remember anything he did in the administration,” Robinson admits. But he remembers his articles and his fearless reporting, particularly a 1986 article for Crisis magazine. After a pastoral letter condemning the administration’s defense and economics policies, D’Souza called around to various bishops asking elementary economic questions—which none of them could answer. “Dinesh as a journalist was extremely clever, devastatingly funny,” Robinson says. In those days, “He was a polemicist and a true journalist.”

The two men were close in Washington, less so later at Hoover, where Robinson remains a fellow—although they’d meet for a meal on D’Souza’s occasional visits to campus. “It pains me to remember the last time Dinesh crossed my mind,” Robinson says. “It was a movie poster for a coming attraction, and there was a big, larger-than-life-sized face: Lincoln spliced with Trump to convey that Trump is a second Lincoln.” Robinson wandered on to his movie, some light summer fare, but the image—advertising D’Souza’s Death of a Nation—stuck with him. “I thought to myself, Oh, Dinesh . . .”

The breaking point for Hoover was The Enemy at Home (2007). D’Souza had at first seemed to settle into the West Coast bastion of conservatism. His What’s So Great About America (2002) caught the national mood in the aftermath of 9/11. D’Souza now calls it a mercenary nod to patriotism—“The American tribe came together, and it seemed only natural.” But his higher calling is to American disunity, which has led him to write less and less like a scholar. The Enemy at Home opens, “In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.”

For D’Souza, the clash of civilizations is as much internal as external. In the book, he imagined an alliance between the American political left and radical Islamic terrorism. “These two forces have formed a strange coalition—a kind of alliance of the vicious and the immoral—and they are now working together against us,” he concluded. “The only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.” The book was so provocative and lightly researched that his fellow Hoover scholars, several of whom publicly critiqued his claims, couldn’t bear the association any longer. In 2007, D’Souza resigned.

His next role was, by his own admission, the unlikeliest of all: In 2010, he became president of the evangelical King’s College in New York City. D’Souza was raised Catholic, but his first wife, Dixie, exposed him to evangelical Christianity, and as he alienated the conservative think-tank circuit, he started addressing packed mega-churches, debating famous atheists, and authoring apologetics with ambitious titles like What’s So Great About Christianity; Life After Death: The Evidence; and Godforsaken: Bad Things Happen. There’s a rabid audience for confident and confrontational defenses of Christianity, which D’Souza was happy to provide. This audience also proved just as hungry for partisan rage-making.

From a sales perspective, the move made sense. But evangelism was not his calling. And success on the evangelical speaking circuit is not particularly good training to lead a flock of scholarly young Christians. According to students and professors who remember D’Souza’s tenure at King’s, he talked about his extracurriculars oddly often. “When he lectured the student body, he’d talk about Obama, slam Hillary Clinton, and plug his new movie,” one former student recalled. “Everyone got free tickets at least,” English professor Ethan Campbell says of D’Souza’s film 2016: Obama’s America. Although there were fewer than 30 of them, D’Souza rarely met with faculty: “He’d breeze in and say a few words maybe one or two times a year,” remembers Campbell. And while his fundraising power could have made up for his administrative shortcomings, it didn’t. “I found it frustrating to hear he’d secured donors for his movies while the college was struggling financially,” Campbell says. Students and faculty all describe D’Souza as a predominantly absent president.

“It was a very strange kind of turn for me,” D’Souza admits, “because obviously I hadn’t been a college administrator. I hadn’t been a provost.” His Christian apologetics tour—including splashy debates with Christopher Hitchens—had made him a hero of the evangelical community. And the business-minded King’s College board loved D’Souza even while the academic faculty worried about his inexperience and lack of an advanced degree and feared that his public persona would tarnish the school’s reputation. The provost, Marvin Olasky, resigned in protest at the appointment. “I was not a fan of his candidacy,” Olasky tells me. But the board had great hopes for the high-profile hire.

Olasky left King’s for World, a popular biweekly evangelical magazine—and it was a World reporter who broke the news that D’Souza introduced a married woman as his fiancée at an evangelical conference in South Carolina in 2012. The magazine’s exposé brought D’Souza’s personal life—specifically, his love life—into the public realm. “The World magazine article was written in such a way to suppress all the facts,” D’Souza vents. “And made it look like I took up with another woman.” Yet he doesn’t deny that he did take up with another woman, and a married woman at that, while he was still married himself.

The ‘Master of Lies’

Her name is Denise Odie Joseph, and she hasn’t spoken publicly about D’Souza since before their affair. “I thought the right thing to do was stay quiet,” she says. “Did I make the right choice?” She has doubts even now, because avoiding the press meant never correcting what she calls a “gross mischaracterization” of who she is and what role she played in D’Souza’s life. In reporting on the story of his infidelity, his ouster from King’s, and then his arrest for campaign-finance fraud, the media, she says, treated her “like some sort of bimbo.” This portrait of Joseph as a starstruck groupie turned homewrecker recirculates every time D’Souza hits the news. She bristles but proclaims a Zen-like acceptance. “This stuff makes you bitter,” she admits, and she chooses not to dwell on it. “You understand people who’ve had to face a beast. You become a much more understanding person. I’ve become closer to my God. I’m glad for it.”

Joseph, 34, has homes in Palm Beach, Manhattan, and New Orleans. She’s a lawyer specializing in art advisory, and her husband is the chairman of the psychiatry department at a Florida hospital. She met D’Souza in 2010 and wrote about him on her blog before they struck up a relationship. She was seen at various events with him while they courted, and people at King’s assumed she was his daughter.

D’Souza claims Marvin Olasky knew his marriage to Dixie was not on stable ground and suggests World magazine took advantage of their geographical separation—Dixie stayed in California while their daughter finished high school—to fish for a story on his extramarital pursuits. “My relationship with Denise developed in the wake of a serious crisis that had been caused by my wife,” he says. “That’s kind of what makes the whole thing so unfair. Because this was known to me, known to King’s, and known to Marvin.” “That’s not true,” counters Olasky. The departing provost and incoming president never once discussed anyone’s marriage, he maintains. Olasky declined to discuss D’Souza further, citing the likelihood his comments will only inflame the situation, but, he insists, D’Souza “never confided to me.”

The King’s board drew a line at an adulterous president. They asked D’Souza to resign in October 2012. It’s a blessing that cause for his dismissal came when it did, Ethan Campbell says. “If they hadn’t,” the King’s professor believes, “they would’ve had a revolt on their hands.” D’Souza had already begun to alienate the college community, insisting in a 2012 New York Times interview, “We don’t teach Christian doctrine,” and outlining his intention to produce conservative foot soldiers who would enter the ranks of global finance and American politics, where “they will be even more dangerous.” The scandal that precipitated his ouster confirmed what many at the college already knew or suspected: His hiring had been a mistake.

D’Souza involved Joseph and her husband in his most consequential mistake—using them as straw donors to Wendy Long’s campaign. The ensuing legal entanglements—the federal investigation that ensnared them both two years later—prevent Joseph from discussing the felonious side of their affair. But she does say of D’Souza, “It’s pretty clear, even if you don’t know him, that he’s not sorry. He hasn’t learned anything.”

While Joseph has moved on, Dixie D’Souza’s anger endures—proportional to the commitment a wife of decades has made. In a searing letter to Judge Berman, she described a marriage of ceaseless lying and physical abuse. “In one instance, it was my husband who physically abused me in April 2012 when he, using his purple belt karate skills, kicked me in the head and shoulder, knocking me to the ground and creating injuries that pain me to this day,” she wrote. “I was married to Dinesh D’Souza for more than 20 years and together with him for over 26 years. I know Dinesh better than anyone and can attest to his flawed character and lack of truthfulness.”

She contests her ex-husband’s version of events at almost every turn. “The dissolution of our marriage came when Dinesh became engaged to a newly married woman, Denise Joseph, when we were married,” she tells me. “He was president of a Christian college and found sleeping in a hotel room with a married woman. He and all his mistresses know who they are during our 20-year marriage.” Asked whether their marriage had essentially ended before he left San Diego for King’s College, as D’Souza claims, she says, “No,” and affirms the contents of her letter—which alleged abuse, manipulation, extreme narcissism, and a deep and abiding compulsion toward dishonesty—urging the court to hit him with the harshest possible punishment: “I stand by my letter to Judge Berman because it is true,” she says. “Dinesh is the Master of Lies,” she later texts me.

Dinesh Unchanged

Ask Dixie and she’ll say she now sees her ex-husband for the man he was all along. But one question still haunts his former-admirers: Was D’Souza fooling us all along, or did he lose himself just as he lost us?

Ask D’Souza, and he’ll tell you he’s been fighting the same battles, and in the same way, since college. The Dartmouth Review’s regular scraps with the college whose name it bore reflect his failed fights with the establishment. “It was just a small example of the kind of aggression which I now see on the national scale,” he tells me of the liberal Dartmouth community’s disapproval of the alternative paper in the 1980s, which prints fortnightly to this day and has never shaken its association with D’Souza. “I’m different than I was then, but some of that sense that, Look, something is very wrong here at a basic level of fairness has stayed with me from my Dartmouth days.”

His federal trial didn’t humble him, either. “I was stupid,” he says. “There are many legal ways to give.” He wishes, for instance, that Long had set up her PAC by the time he wanted to donate. And he is unrepentant. He’s still thrilled by Trump’s acting on his case. “There’s more to the pardon than not having to do community service or getting to travel without permission,” he says, calling it a “profound relief” from a punishment intended to humiliate. “I got to see the constipated expression of my prosecutor on CNN,” he adds, with a crooked grin. When Preet Bharara held forth on cable news the day of the presidential pardon, D’Souza tweeted a storm of spite and glee: “Karma’s a bitch,” he summed up.

The sophomoric spirit shines on. “Since I’m a public figure, the left was able to hang the ‘felon’ label on me, and it became their automatic go-to epithet.” Now, when they trot out the old insult, Hey, aren’t you a felon?, he has his own handy go-to: “Actually, no, I’m not. I’m an ex-felon.” He smiles, relishing the riposte.