How about you and I sit down to a lunch of these tasty Easy Salsa Sloppy Joes, and I’ll just reach over and help myself to half the chips on your plate.

You don’t mind, do you?

Oh, you do.

Well then.

How about you and I take a hike at state park together?

Go ahead and strap on your backpack. And wait just a second here while I unzip something and load all the crap from MY pack into YOURS.

There. All better.

You don’t mind, do you?

Oh, you do.

Well then.

You know, come to think of it, you might be the sort of person who would enjoy Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book.

D’Souza broke an obscure campaign finance law. His punishment sprang all out of proportion to the crime, given how it went down for similar offenders. To him, the whole deal smelled of political retribution.

D’Souza, you may remember, created the film 2016: Obama’s America.

For eight months he reported nightly to a “confinement center,” where he slept among the burglars, murderers and gang-bangers housed there.

Sitting in jail gives you time to think. Presumably the judge hoped D’Souza would vow, I will never, never, never break laws I’ve never heard of ever again. But the more D’Souza observed his fellow inmates and the more he listened to their stories, the more he recognized behavior he’d seen on the outside of the “confinement center.”

So he wrote Stealing America.

Connecting the dots between the modus operandi of ordinary criminals and of politicians crushed more than a few of D’Souza’s cherished ideals. Like other immigrants, D’Souza sees America as special, a rarity in all of human history. The law of the jungle — might makes right — ruled centuries of human existence, whether from marauding gangs running off your horses or kings taxing you at will. Earn your bread and thieves will come along and take it.

D’Souza argues that the intent of the American founders was to create an anti-theft society. “Government exists to protect us from foreign and domestic thugs. In this way might is mobilized on behalf of right.”

The way D’Souza sees it, this project is currently not going well. Perhaps you see things the same way.

Anyway, this is a bad-news book. But I can tolerate bad news from some people and not others. I can tolerate it from D’Souza because he delivers it so well.

If you like his message, you may want to catch his newest movie, Hillary’s America, in theaters July 22nd.