Making It in (Right-Wing) America

Dinesh D’Souza and the shame of immigrant self-hatred

By Jeet Heer

February 20, 2015

I have two shameful family secrets. The first is that when I was growing up, almost all gatherings of my extended clan would include buckets and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a staple of our diet. The second and more serious source of self-mortification is that some of my kin—almost all of whom hail from rural India—sometimes vent anti-black racism.

These two focal points of embarrassment merged when I was 19 and went on a KFC run with a cousin I will call Amandeep. As our car glided into the parking lot, we saw a black family exiting the fast food joint. “Boy, black people sure love fried chicken,” Amandeep muttered. The comment angered as it baffled me: He clearly couldn’t see the irony of stereotyping black culture while heading for one of our regular KFC pick-ups. It was actually one of Amandeep’s more benign remarks. On other occasions he made Charles Murray-like forays into questions of black genetic inheritance and propensity toward crime.

I wish Amandeep’s racial theories were an anomaly, but he’s far from alone among South Asian immigrants. Anti-black racism, I’ve often thought, is one of the more unwholesome manifestations of assimilation. If blacks are near the bottom of the perceived racial hierarchy across North America, some enterprising immigrants find it useful to step on blacks as a way of climbing higher.

Racism among South Asians has some peculiar qualities; it’s not so much hatred of the other but the hatred of the almost-the-same, akin to a sibling rivalry. At the heart of this sort of immigrant racism is the desire to differentiate oneself from the group one could easily be identified with. As it happens, Amandeep is one of the most dark-hued members of my family. When he was small, his nickname in India was “kala” (Punjabi for black). I’ve sometimes thought that some discomfort at being labeled black contributed to his racial fixations.

Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing provocateur whose history of incendiary racial comments stretches to his undergraduate days in the early 1980s, provides an interesting case study for the intersection of immigrant upward mobility and racism. D’Souza grabbed attention this week for a tweet about President Obama taking a selfie: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”

YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment pic.twitter.com/C9yLG4QoOK — dineshdsouza 

This tweet was only the latest in a long career of racist hijinks. As student editor of the right-wing newspaper the Dartmouth Review, he published racially charged material. One D’Souza-edited article discussed affirmative action in Amos 'n' Andy dialect. “Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be over our ‘fros in studies, but we still not be graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa," the article read. In his 1995 book The End of Racism, D’Souza argued that “the old discrimination” has declined and been replaced by “rational discrimination” based “on accurate group generalizations.” During the Obama years, D’Souza has specialized in writing books and producing documentaries suggesting the President is motivated by anti-colonial hatred of Western civilization. After pleading guilty to campaign finance violations last year, D’Souza remains unbowed, casting himself as the victim of a political witch-hunt by the Obama administration. Amid this flurry, D’Souza continues to tweet ugliness like this and this.

undefined — AdamSerwer 

Obama forcefully asserts his position on Beheading pic.twitter.com/QbVbvE582d — dineshdsouza

It’s tempting to dismiss D’Souza as an outlier. He’s aligned with the right-wing of the Republican party, while the vast majority of American South Asians identify as Democrats. Still, anyone who spends time among South Asians will recognize the popular currency of attitudes like D’Souza's. Moreover, D’Souza indicates a wider problem, given that one of the Republican Party's most prominent Islamophobic voices is Louisana Governor Bobby Jindal, a South Asian. D’Souza's racism and Jindal's xenophobia find a more muted parallel in the career of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, whose advancement includes suppressing public references to her Sikh heritage and being presented by her campaign as a “proud Christian woman.” The careers of D’Souza, Jindal, and Haley carry an implicit message: Racial minorities can advance in the GOP by erasing their ethnic identity and/or attacking other minorities.

D’Souza’s racism makes sense if we view it as part of his long effort to succeed in a right-wing milieu that is both anti-Indian and anti-black. Within that context, D’Souza has given saliency to anti-black racism to compensate for a potentially embarrassing background as a Mumbai-born immigrant. Is D’Souza sincere in his beliefs or simply an intellectual mercenary? It’s impossible to know for sure. What can be said with certainty is that as an Indian willing to voice anti-black sentiment, D’Souza has carved out a lucrative niche for himself, enjoying a national audience from the time he was an undergraduate.

D’Souza’s mentor at the Dartmouth Review was the English professor Jeffrey Hart, who also served as a senior editor at National Review. The college paper was founded in Hart’s living room, and he was the de facto career counselor who guided D’Souza and other Dartmouth alumni into the world of right-wing journalism. Hart's work from the '70s onward offers a clear philosophical foundation and tactical guide to D'Souza's writings during Obama's presidency.

In 1975, Hart published a startling review of Jean Raspail’s xenophobic novel The Camp of Saints, a didactic tract warning of the dangers of mass immigration from India and other poor countries. The novel celebrates the heroism of a ragtag band of right-wing heroes (including a tank commander and a duke) who wage a sniper campaign against the refugees. “In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” Hart wrote in a National Review rave (September 26, 1975) that compared the book to modern masterpieces by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. “Raspail is to genocide," Hart continued, "what Lawrence was to sex."

Hart’s praise of Raspail’s novel might seem at odds with his sponsorship of D’Souza’s career. But even in reviewing The Camp of Saints, Hart distinguishes between good immigrants who assimilate to white culture and the refugee horde who must be exterminated. As Hart notes, Raspail’s novel features a character named Hamadura, “a very black Indian” who “has lived in France and become completely assimilated by Western Civilization.” As the character notes: “Being white isn’t really a question of color. It’s a whole mental outlook.” In his prize student D’Souza, Hart found his own version of Hamadura: a “very black Indian” who has the mental outlook of a white conservative.

In its stark division of the world between the West and the threatening chaos of the non-white world, Hart’s review was an exercise in imperial nostalgia that D’Souza later echoed when he complained that Obama suffers from a Kenyan, “anticolonialist” mindset. (Others have followed D'Souza in attacking Obama with that phrase. The latest: Rudy Giuliani.)

Hart's brand of imperial nostalgia pervades the wider National Review conservatism that shaped D’Souza’s worldview. A foundational text in this weltanschauung is James Burnham’s Suicide of the West (1964), which D’Souza cited in his book What’s So Great About America (2002). Thematically, Burnham pioneered many of the themes D’Souza has expanded upon in books like The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010) and Obama’s America (2012): the insidiousness of white liberal guilt in disarming the West, the underappreciated virtues of imperialism and manifest destiny, the need to affirm the unequivocal cultural superiority of Western civilization. Among the founding editors of National Review, Burnham was second only to William F. Buckley in importance. His book is key to understanding the contradictions of D’Souza's role in the conservative movement as a non-white advocate for “the West.”

As with Jeffrey Hart, Burnham combined a scorn for the great mass of Indians and African Americans with a belief that a few non-whites might be of some service to the West. At one point Burnham offers an anecdote about the folly of liberals who overestimate the intelligence of South Asians and "Africans":

“I recall an evening not long ago that I spent with one of the country’s most distinguished historians, who is a liberal à outrance. As the night wore on, he got somewhat more tight than was his habit; and at one point he remarked, more to his fifth gin and tonic than to the rest of us, ‘In the last ten years I’ve had several hundred Indian and Pakistani and lately Africans in my graduate courses, and I’ve given out many an ‘A,’ and never flunked any of them; and there hasn’t yet been a single one who was a really first-class student.’”

Elsewhere in Suicide of the West, Burnham heaps scorn on the efforts of the Kennedy and Johnson administration to end food insecurity in poor countries—projects which led to the Green Revolution, sparing millions of lives in India and elsewhere.

Yet if Burnham had little use for Indians and Africans as scholars and harbored no concern for preventing their starvation, he does see a use for them as soldiers. “There have been few better fighting formations than the elite brigades of Gurkhas or Sikhs trained and led by professional British officers,” Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West. “Those tall, powerful black and brown men that France recruited from a French West Africa and trained in the tradition of Gallieni and Lyautey were nearly as good, though….These splendid fighting men of the Gurkhas, Sikhs, Senegalese and Berbers are not the least of the grievous losses that the West has suffered from the triumphs of decolonization.”

Burnham’s loyal and fighting trim Gurkhas and Sikhs are the military counterpart to Raspail’s Hamadura. Such figures function in the right-wing imagination in the crucial role of the ethnic sidekick, providing the sort of support that the Lone Ranger received from Tonto and the Green Hornet from Kato. Their skin color might be non-white, but they are trustworthy defenders of the West, as eager as D’Souza to fend off any Kenyan anti-colonial threats.

Thanks to the help of Jeffrey Hart, D’Souza started writing for National Review in 1981, while still an undergraduate. D'Souza adopted the ideological prism of his National Review mentors and carried it duly, proving his loyalty to the American ideal by championing white culture and showing contempt for its black counterpart. Obama's election in 2008 created a niche on the right for a person of color—an immigrant, even—to slag the president as being un-American. D'Souza had been preparing for such a role since college.

One of the saddest things about D’Souza’s racism is that it’s clearly built on some element of self-hatred. By aligning himself with figures like Hart and Burnham, he chose a form of upward mobility that required abasing himself before those who despised his heritage.

Most South Asians do not follow such a dim path. D’Souza and many others have benefited from the African American Civil Rights Movement. Prior to 1965, America set severely restrictive quotas on immigration from non-white countries such as India. The creation of a more generous and less racist immigration policy came about as a direct result of civil rights agitation and the work of liberals such as Ted Kennedy. Going back at least a century, South Asians and African-Americans have made common cause in fights against colonialism and racism: It’s no accident that Martin Luther King Jr. cited Gandhi as a predecessor, or that Bayard Rustin supported Indian independence. In choosing to align with and carry on the imperial nostalgia of Burnham and Hart, D’Souza betrays that less profitable but ultimately richer tradition.

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic. @HeerJeet

Source: newrepublic

How Hackers Broke Into John Podesta and Colin Powell’s Gmail Accounts

Written by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

October 20, 2016 // 09:30 AM EST 

On March 19 of this year, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta received an alarming email that appeared to come from Google.

The email, however, didn’t come from the internet giant. It was actually an attempt to hack into his personal account. In fact, the message came from a group of hackers that security researchers, as well as the US government, believe are spies working for the Russian government. At the time, however, Podesta didn’t know any of this, and he clicked on the malicious link contained in the email, giving hackers access to his account. 

Read more: We Spoke to DNC Hacker 'Guccifer 2.0'

 

Months later, on October 9, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of Podesta’s hacked emails. Almost everyone immediately pointed the finger at Russia, who is suspected of being behind a long and sophisticated hacking campaign that has the apparent goal of influencing the upcoming US elections. But there was no public evidence proving the same group that targeted the Democratic National Committee was behind the hack on Podesta—until now. 

The data linking a group of Russian hackers—known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Sofacy—to the hack on Podesta is also yet another piece in a growing heap of evidence pointing toward the Kremlin. And it also shows a clear thread between apparently separate and independent leaks that have appeared on a website called DC Leaks, such as that of Colin Powell’s emails; and the Podesta leak, which was publicized on WikiLeaks. 

All these hacks were done using the same tool: malicious short URLs hidden in fake Gmail messages. And those URLs, according to a security firm that’s tracked them for a year, were created with Bitly account linked to a domain under the control of Fancy Bear. 

THE TRAIL THAT LEADS TO FANCY BEAR

 

The phishing email that Podesta received on March 19 contained a URL, created with the popular Bitly shortening service, pointing to a longer URL that, to an untrained eye, looked like a Google link. 

A screenshot of the Bitly link used against John Podesta.

Inside that long URL, there’s a 30-character string that looks like gibberish but is actually the encoded Gmail address of John Podesta. According to Bitly’s own statistics, that link, which has never been published, was clicked two times in March. 

That’s the link that opened Podesta’s account to the hackers, a source close to the investigation into the hack confirmed to Motherboard. 

That link is only one of almost 9,000 links Fancy Bear used to target almost 4,000 individuals from October 2015 to May 2016. Each one of these URLs contained the email and name of the actual target. The hackers created them with with two Bitly accounts in their control, but forgot to set those accounts to private, according to SecureWorks, a security firm that’s been tracking Fancy Bear for the last year. 

SecureWorks was tracking known Fancy Bear command and control domains. One of these lead to a Bitly shortlink, which led to the Bitly account, which led to the thousands of Bitly URLs that were later connected to a variety of attacks, including on the Clinton campaign. With this privileged point of view, for example, the researchers saw Fancy Bear using 213 short links targeting 108 email addresses on the hillaryclinton.com domain, as the company explained in a somewhat overlooked report earlier this summer, and as BuzzFeed reported last week.

Using Bitly allowed “third parties to see their entire campaign including all their targets— something you'd want to keep secret,” Tom Finney, a researcher at SecureWorks, told Motherboard. 

It was one of Fancy Bear’s “gravest mistakes,” as Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College who has closely studied the case, put it in a new piece published on Thursday in Esquire, as it gave researchers unprecedented visibility into the activities of Fancy Bear, linking different parts of its larger campaign together. 

This is how researchers have been able to find the phishing link that tricked Colin Powell and got him hacked. This also allowed them to confirm other public reports of compromises, such as that of William Rinehart, a staffer with Clinton’s presidential campaign. As The Smoking Gun reported in August, Rinehart received a malicious Google security alert on March 22, according to a screenshot Rinehart shared with the site. SecureWorks found a URL that had Rinehart’s Gmail address encoded, which had the same date. 

A screenshot of the phishing email received by Rinehart. (Image: The Smoking Gun)

A screenshot of the malicious Bitly URL received by Rinehart.

Similar malicious emails and short URLs have also been used recently against independent journalists from Bellingcat, a website that has investigated the incident of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine in 2014, finding evidence that Russian-backed rebels were behind it.

A screenshot of a phishing email received by a Bellingcat journalist.

Other journalists in eastern Europe have also recently been targeted with phishing emails trying to break into their Gmail accounts. 

 

These malicious emails, just like the ones used against Podesta, Powell, Rinehart and many others, looked like Google alerts, and contained the same type of encoded strings hiding the victims’ names.

It’s unclear why the hackers used the encoded strings, which effectively reveal their targets to anyone. Kyle Ehmke, a threat intelligence researcher at security firm ThreatConnect, argued that “the strings might help them keep track of or better organize their operations, tailor credential harvesting pages to specific victims, monitor the effectiveness of their operations, or diffuse their operations against various targets across several URLs to facilitate continuity should one of the URLs be discovered.” 

The use of popular link shortening services such as Bitly or Tinyurl might have a simpler explanation. According to Rid, the hackers probably wanted to make sure their phishing attempts went past their targets' spam filters. 

THE SMOKING GUN? 

None of this new data constitutes a smoking gun that can clearly frame Russia as the culprit behind the almost unprecedented hacking campaign that has hit the DNC and several other targets somewhat connected to the US presidential election. 

Almost two weeks ago, the US government took the rare step of publicly pointing the finger at the Russian government, accusing it of directing the recent string of hacks and data breaches. The intelligence community declined to explain how they reached their conclusion, and it’s fair to assume they have data no one else can see. 

”They don’t want to understand the evidence.”

This newly uncovered data paints an even clearer picture for the public, showing a credible link between the several leaking outlets chosen by the hackers, and, once again, pointing toward Fancy Bear, a notorious hacking group that’s widely believed to be connected with the Russian government. While there are still naysayers, including presidential candidate and former reality TV star Donald Trump, for many, the debate over who hacked the DNC, and who’s behind all this hacking, is pretty much closed. 

“We are approaching the point in this case where there are only two reasons for why people say there’s no good evidence,” Rid told me. “The first reason is because they don’t understand the evidence—because the don’t have the necessary technical knowledge. The second reason is they don’t want to understand the evidence.” 

UPDATE, 10/20/2016, 4:31 p.m.: After publication of this story, Bitly sent Motherboard a statement to say the company can only do so much to prevent malicious actors from using its service, as it "cannot proactively police our customers’ private data without compromising our commitment to their privacy."

"The links and accounts related to this situation were blocked as soon as we were informed. This is not an exploit of Bitly, but an unfortunate exploit of Internet users through social engineering. It serves as a reminder that even the savviest, most skeptical users can be vulnerable to opening unsolicited emails," the statement read. 

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Source: motherboard