2000 Mules Gets Kicked

D'Souza didn't get kicked. That's just his normal face.

On Friday, Christian broadcasting powerhouse Salem Media Group agreed to yank the movie “2000 Mules” off all its platforms, putting yet another nail in the coffin of ridiculous election lies spewed by the former president and his diehard supporters.

Because defamation is fun, but defamation judgments are decidedly not.

2000 Pounds of Bullshit

The 2022 “documentary” purported to reveal a network of “mules” ferrying fake ballots to drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, snatching Donald Trump’s glorious victory from the American people. The producers claimed to have purchased cell tower data proving that specific mobile phones “pinged” within 100 feet of ballot drop boxes multiple times. This is hardly surprising, since drop boxes were often located in heavily trafficked places like public libraries and churches. Nevertheless, the film’s creators hyped the precision of their geolocation data and falsely took credit for helping solve the cold case murder of a little girl in Atlanta.

The movie’s claims were immediately debunked as so patently absurd that even Fox News wouldn’t cover them. That did not stop Trump from airing the film at Mar-a-Lago and touting it as proof that he’d rightfully won the presidency in 2020. And in his bid to keep his bar license in DC, Rudy Giuliani even cited the movie as evidence that his election fraud claims were true. (Spoiler Alert: LOL.)

The film was the (diseased) brainchild of conservative shitposter Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned for criminal campaign finance violations, along with Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, whose “True the Vote” organization has been flogging nonsense about rampant vote fraud for years. It featured Engelbrecht and Phillips meeting D’Souza and his wife in what appears to be a darkened garage. Phillips’s melodramatic storytelling is interspersed with stock footage of endless streaming code that looked cool when the movie Tron came out. (The first time!)

The film’s conceit is that D’Souza is presenting evidence to a dispassionate council of wise men, including MAGA luminaries Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas, and Larry Elder. By the end, the sages are convinced. Election fraud is real! It is proven! Trump is the real president!

Except …

When given the chance to prove their claims True the Vote (TTV) ran and hid. On November 30, 2023, the organization submitted a complaint to the Georgia State Elections Board (SEB) repeating the allegations of ballot fraud that form the basis of the movie. When the SEB asked for the evidence, TTV attempted to withdraw its complaint, claiming the need to protect sources. When that didn’t work, TTV defied a subpoena for documents.

In November of 2023, after a judge ordered TTV to comply, the organization was forced to admit that it had no proof — something to keep in mind when Trump and his supporters howl that they’ve never gotten the chance to air their claims in court.

Sowing vs. Reaping

The film took in a reported $10 million, but it also proved to be an immediate legal headache for Salem Media and its publishing imprint Regnery Press, which put out D’Souza’s companion book, 2000 Mules: They Thought We’d Never Find Out. They Were Wrong. In August of 2022, on the eve of publication, the book was pulped, forcing Salem to downgrade its quarterly earnings.

"Somehow a significant error got missed by the publisher," D’Souza tweeted. “It is now corrected but my book ‘2000 Mules’ is pushed back to October. The book is explosive so I’m glad it’s being done right. It will be worth the wait!”

NPR’s Tom Dreisbach, who was all over this story from the jump, got his hands on an original copy of the book and compared it to the version released in October. What was missing, in large part, was the fulfillment of D’Souza’s promise to “reveal the names of several of these nonprofit stash houses” where the “trafficked” ballots were stored.

Dreisbach writes:

The newly-released book tones down that phrase to "potentially storing ballots."

And the names of specific nonprofits that D'Souza accused of election fraud have all been removed.

Now, in lieu of listing specific groups, D'Souza writes, "True the Vote shared their names with me and has offered to make them available as needed to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.