Dinesh Joseph D'Souza (/dɪˈnɛʃ dəˈsuːzə/; born April 25, 1961) is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist, author, and filmmaker. He has made several films and written over a dozen books, several of them New York Times best-sellers.

Born in Mumbai, India to Catholic parents, D'Souza moved to the United States as an exchange student and graduated from Dartmouth College. He was a policy adviser in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and has been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. He became a naturalized citizen in 1991. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of The King's College, a Christian school in New York City, until he resigned after an alleged adultery scandal, after he shared a hotel room with a woman he referred to as his fiancé; both were married, but had separated from their respective spouses.

In 2012, D'Souza released the conspiracist political film 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Barack Obama polemic based on his 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage. He has since released five other conspiracist films: America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014), Hillary's America (2016), Death of a Nation (2018), Trump Card (2020) and 2000 Mules (2022). D'Souza's films and commentary have generated considerable controversy due to their promotion of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, as well as for their incendiary nature.

In 2014, D'Souza pleaded guilty in federal court to one felony charge of using a "straw donor" to make an illegal campaign contribution. In 2018, D'Souza was issued a pardon by President Donald Trump.

Dinesh Joseph D'Souza was born in Bombay, India, in 1961. D'Souza grew up in a middle-class family; his parents were Konkani Roman Catholics from the state of Goa in Western India, where his father was an executive with Johnson & Johnson and his mother was a housewife. D'Souza attended the Jesuit St. Stanislaus High School in Bombay. He graduated from high school in 1976 and attended Sydenham College in Bombay for year 11 and 12. In 1978, D'Souza became a foreign-exchange student and traveled to the United States under the Rotary Youth Exchange, attending Patagonia Union High School in Patagonia, Arizona. He went on to matriculate at Dartmouth College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1983 and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

While at Dartmouth, D'Souza wrote for The Dartmouth Review, an independent, student-edited, alumni- and Collegiate Network-subsidized publication. D'Souza faced criticism during his time at The Review for authoring an article publicly outing homosexual members of the school's Gay–Straight Alliance student organization. He also oversaw The Review's publication of "a light-hearted interview" with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan over a staged photograph of a black person hanged from a tree, as well as a piece mocking affirmative action in higher education written from the point of view of a black student and phrased in Ebonics. These incidents caused U.S. Representative Jack Kemp, then a prominent Republican leader and member of The Review's advisory board, to resign from the board.

After graduating from Dartmouth, D'Souza became editor of a monthly journal called The Prospect, a publication financed by a group of Princeton University alumni. The paper and its writers ignited much controversy during D'Souza's editorship by, among other things, criticizing the college's affirmative-action policies.

From 1985 to 1987, D'Souza was contributing editor for the Policy Review, a journal then published by The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In a September 1985 article titled "The Bishops as Pawns", D'Souza asserted that Catholic bishops in the United States were being manipulated by American liberals in agreeing to oppose the U.S. military buildup and use of power abroad when, D'Souza believed, they knew very little about these subjects to which they were lending their religious credibility.