After right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza on Friday attacked Bette Midler’s appearance in response to her tweet that women should refuse sex with men until abortion rights are protected, the Twitterverse was quick to remind him why those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
“Any woman that really is serious about a sex strike just has to look at your face for 2 sec’s and she will dry up like an old dead prune and that will be all she wrote 4ever,” one commenter wrote, resurfacing D’Souza’s mug shot from his 2014 felony conviction on campaign finance violations.
Another Twitter user snarked: “Dinesh D’Souza is the leading cause of vaginal dryness.”
It all began when D’Souza made the mistake of riling Midler’s loyal fans with an ad hominem attack on her looks and sex appeal. “Bette Midler is calling a ‘sex strike’ over the #TexasAbortionLaw even though I hear that she herself has been on an involuntary sex strike since, oh, around 2004,” he tweeted, sharing a perfectly normal photo of the septuagenarian at an event.
D’Souza has spent the better part of the last four decades embroiling himself in controversy, making him a sometime-hero of the right. His books and movies attacking liberal ideologies and politicians have found great commercial success but he has also promoted debunked conspiracy theories and his work has been criticized as inaccurate and excessively incendiary, often by other conservatives.
In 2014, he pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation after being accused of using straw donors to donate $20,000 to a Republican Senate candidate in New York, exceeding the $5,000 limit. He was sentenced to a $30,000 fine and five years of probation, including eight months living under supervision in a “community confinement center” in San Diego.
President Trump pardoned him in May 2018, saying that D’Souza had been “treated very unfairly by our government.” Later that year, D’Souza released a nonfiction film called “Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?” that glowingly compared Trump to Abraham Lincoln
Although several conservatives have slammed Midler’s initial tweet (which was written in response to the draconian anti-abortion law that went into effect in Texas earlier this week), several Twitter users took issue with D’Souza’s exceptionally mean-spirited diss — and did not hold back with their remarks on his own appearance.
Many users inevitably utilized D’Souza’s mugshot from his campaign finance case in their burns against the pundit.