Leading Election Denier Finally Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Dinesh D’Souza has admitted that “2,000 Mules” is based on junk information.
Unbelievable! A professional conspiracy theorist and useful idiot for the far right lied to promote the lie being pushed by liars about the 2020 election being stolen? Who’d have thought…
Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker behind the election denialist fable 2,000 Mules, revealed that the data that underpinned his supposedly incontrovertible claims of fraudulent voting was actually a complete sham.
In the 2022 film, a Texas-based “election integrity” organization called True the Vote claimed to have reviewed cell phone geotracking data from five 2020 battleground states that traced the movements of ballot “mules” who had been paid by liberal nonprofits to stuff ballot boxes. D’Souza’s film purported that hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots had been cast, tipping the scales for Joe Biden. The movie has been widely debunked by pretty much everyone, now including its own filmmaker.
A statement from D’Souza, quietly posted to D’Souza Media’s website early Monday, revealed that the geolocation data that he called “the premise of the film” wasn’t actually real.
“During the production of this film, as a supplement to the geolocation data, True the Vote provided my team with ballot drop box surveillance footage that had been obtained through open records requests. We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” D’Souza wrote.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” the statement read.
D’Souza downplayed this particular revelation’s impact on the integrity of True the Vote, and the film altogether.
“We operated in good faith and in reliance on True the Vote. We continue to have confidence in their work and also in the basic message of ‘2000 Mules,’” he wrote, adding that he would “continue to have faith” in the “underlying geolocation data and analysis.”
This admission comes as part of a statement apologising to someone that D’Souza seems to have been fool enough to actually identify as one of these “mules”; apparently the guy’s face is blurred in the film itself but not in the trailer and other promotional material… so this fellow was duly investigated and duly exonerated just before the film came out, whereupon he duly sued D’Souza and his publishers, who duly withdrew the film and an accompanying book from circulation. It’s really not much of an admission, though, cos Dinesh is basically just saying “sure, those guys (not us) kind of fucked up, but we were still right and we still believe True the Vote despite all that”… though for his sake I hope he was smart enough to not identify anyone else in his film, cos that’d probably be enough of an admission to sink him in court…
