![]() And learn to trust authors who use and cite sources properly and carefully. By D’Souza’s standard of historical evidence, this memo should be enough to write, “Lyndon Johnson seems to have plotted to kill his predecessor.” Wisely he keeps this bombshell from his readers.Īgain, the lesson is if a claim seems too good-or too outlandish-to be true, check the source. Another FBI memo in the same document dump, for example, reported that the KGB thought Johnson had plotted to kill Kennedy. Khaya Himmelman May 21 225 154 On May 7, 2,000 Mules, a documentary film from right-wing provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, debuted in more than 270 theaters across the country. Even the website D’Souza cites as his source for this damning nugget,, says the claim of Johnson’s Klan membership amounts to nothing more than a rumor.ĭ’Souza’s embrace of rumors is selective. Fact Checking Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘2,000 Mules’ The Dispatch Fact Check Fact Checking Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘2,000 Mules’ The film’s ballot harvesting theory is full of holes. Branigan, the FBI agent, writes that a “confidential informant” told him that the editor of a magazine published by the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana, himself a Klan member, had told the informant that he, the editor, had seen documented proof that Johnson was a member in the 1930s. It is a piece of raw intelligence, unverified, repeated with no assessment of its credibility. It was released last year in the (presumably) final dump of government documents about the Kennedy assassination. The FBI memo that D’Souza is using to misinform his readers was written in early 1964. I’ve got to side with the progressive media on this one. Branigan cites a source with direct knowledge.” D’Souza then treats LBJ’s Klan membership as settled fact and a building block in his case against the Democrats. have largely ignored it, trying to pretend it does not exist. Enjoy a year of unlimited access to The Atlanticincluding every story on our site and app, subscriber newsletters, and more. Johnson, he writes, “is a man who, according to a memo filed by FBI agent William Branigan, seems to have been in the Ku Klux Klan.” He was? “This memo was only revealed in recent months, with the release of the JFK Files. To take one small example: Lyndon Johnson is a pivotal figure in D’Souza’s tale. ![]() If you’re crazy enough to jump down the rabbit hole of his footnotes, you’ll see that D’Souza’s apparently fastidious method covers a lot of hedging, speculation, and misinterpretation. The amazing Andrew Ferguson, an essayist at The Weekly Standard who is on my short list of “Read Everything He Writes,” recently offered an omnibus takedown of a half-dozen Trump-era bestselling books, among them a book by Dinesh D’Souza, who has perfected the art of being a right-wing troll.įerguson relays a footnote he decided to investigate:
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