Wearing a pair of bright red sunglasses, a backwards hat and a grey hoodie, conservative author and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza raised his hands to form a gesture he must have thought was a gang sign.
This bizarre scene was part of a video shot for Vanity Fair and posted online on Thursday. The video offered a peek into D’Souza’s life in a nighttime “confinement center” since his conviction for campaign finance fraud in 2014.
Amid gritty, hand-held footage aided by pounding soundtrack, D’Souza could be seen roaming the streets, moodily walking across a beach, and sometimes just staring into the camera.
“I would describe my political work as an act of gratitude,” he said in the video. “It is a defense of the American dream.”
He told Vanity Fair editor Evgenia Peretz described life with some of his fellow detainees, including a 400-pound bunkmate who asked D’Souza to help raise money for him.
“Then there was the mandatory rape class, which was about ‘establishing that all of us have a right not to be raped.’ Very reassuring,” D’Souza said.
D’Souza has gone on record saying his trouble with the law is political retribution for his broadsides against the Obama administration, such as his film “2016,” in which he portrayed the President as driven by an anti-colonialist ideology forged in Africa. He pleaded guilty last year to using straw donors to illegally contribute $20,000 to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long.
The disgraced author still regularly appears on Fox News and occasionally makes a splash on Twitter, as he recently did when he compared Obama to the Ebola virus and wrote that the President has never left “the ghetto.”
Watch the video, courtesy of Vanity Fair:
