U.S. Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) is calling out the prominent conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza for what Lieu calls “living in the matrix.” D’Souza has recently been focused on planes — both that of Donald Trump and that of Kamala Harris.
Concerning Trump’s plane, D’Souza has been stoking suspicion of foul play — i.e., was it sabotage? — following the Trump jet making an emergency landing recently due reportedly to a mechanical issue.
[NOTE: Trump’s jet is a 30-plus-year-old Boeing 757, previously owned by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, that first flew in 1991. For comparison, the average age of a jet at American Airlines is 11 years.]
But what Lieu is knocking D’Souza (“you are so smart”) for is not his sabotage suggestion, but for the conservative provocateur’s recent post pointing out what he characterizes as a disparity between the crowd in a photo outside Vice President Harris’s plane and the reflection of the crowd in the blue paint of the jet.
Circling the reflection, D’Souza implies that the crowd shown in the photo was superimposed to mislead viewers into believing Harris is popular enough to draw a crowd.
D’Souza is essentially suggesting to his enormous MAGA network that the photo is an AI lie, and that the crowd isn’t really there — all without saying so specifically. All he says specifically is: “Does this look like a real picture to you?”
Dear @DineshDSouza: You are so smart to realize you are living in the matrix. It’s all a dream. So please encourage Donald Trump to just keep golfing and being lazy. No need for Trump to campaign. Everything will be ok. Please stay in your alternate reality. Thanks. https://t.co/jEnXPEmvzO
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) August 11, 2024
Lieu challenges D’Souza to stay on this path: “You are so smart to realize you are living in the matrix. It’s all a dream. So please encourage Donald Trump to just keep golfing and being lazy. No need for Trump to campaign. Everything will be ok. Please stay in your alternate reality. Thanks.
The Congressman’s response presumes that such assertions will not ultimately be enough to win an election. While the conspiracy-minded — those who want to believe that everything is a trick — may subscribe to D’Souza’s formula, that group — according to Lieu’s estimate — isn’t big enough to put Mr. Trump back in the White House.
Lieu’s challenge to D’Souza is to keep doing the same thing: to keep doing this kind of post and not campaigning hard and see how “your alternate reality” strategy performs at the ballot box.
But is Lieu’s confidence that D’Souza’s strategy has limited appeal well-placed? That remains to be seen, as distrust riddles America’s politics at present.
Dinesh D’Souza has 4.1 million followers on X, where his work largely consists of sharing articles from a site called Conservative Brief, which lists him as a “stakeholder” and which was pivotal in promoting Trump’s so-called “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being “rigged” and “stolen.”
Through a network of social media shares, the Conservative Brief site — becoming prominent in 2020 — swiftly gained wide distribution for its stories. In the case of one 2020 pre-election story that made false claims about mishandled primary ballots in California (shared across Facebook with the tagline “Dems CAUGHT — 100,000 Illegal Ballots Found”), Judd Legum reported that over a 90 day period:
“The network of pages that promote Conservative Brief has generated 30.65 million engagements (a combination of likes, comments, and shares). That’s more engagement than the main New York Times Facebook page generated over the same period of time (26.48 million).”
Judd Legum
(NOTE: Trump pardoned D’Souza in 2018 for a 2014 conviction violating campaign finance laws; Trump said at the time: “[D’Souza] was treated very unfairly by our government.”)