2000 Mules
It came me in a couple of different, rather obscure sources, but this Substack email headline really nailed it: “‘2,000 Mules’ Retracted, Still Lodged in Grandma’s Brain,” (part of which post is copied below). Instead of grandma, I thought of the earnest sixty something man, Tim Kinley, who habitually appears at the 2PM Spokane County Commissioner Meetings (here at 5:32) and “demands” of the commissioners in a public comment that they “demand” an audit of “all our Spokane County voting processes.” I thought of all those true-believing Spokane GOP Republicans who, last March, adopted a platform demanding “an end to mail-in voting.” And I thought of all those condemned to listen to the talking heads on syndicated, right wing, stations owned by the “Christian” Salem Radio Network on their car and truck radios, talking heads anointed with supposed gravitas and solemnly featured in Dinesh D’Souza’s “documentary” film “2000 Mules.”
D’Souza’s documentary was so convincing to the un-critical mind that a pirated DVD of “2000 Mules” was broadcast mailed (at a cost of around a dollar each) to hundreds(?) of addresses in Eastern Washington ahead of the 2022 elections. The mailing came from “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity,” an un-researchable group (?person) with un-researchable funding mailing from a non-existent return address. Was the DVD sent and funded by a true believer anxious to spread his or her “truth” or by a cynical Republican election operative? We’ll never know—but the result was the same: manipulating and poisoning un-critical minds with doubt and anger concerning our elections systems.
I made myself watch D’Souza’s film. Sadly, it is easy to see how a listener to the talking heads of the Salem Radio Network would be taken in. After all, if Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka, Larry Elder, Eric Metaxas, and Charlie Kirk are respected authorities in your world then their solemn nodding in agreement with the “evidence” presented must mean it’s true. It was and is a classic confidence scam.
I feel sorry for all the people taken in by Trump’s Big Lie and by Dinesh D’Souza’s propaganda film, “2000 Mules.” I feel far more sorry for the rest of us, condemned, as we are, to listen to people taken in by this shameless horse manure—and, worse, to possibly fall prey to the electoral consequences of their delusion.
The week following Trump’s felony conviction, the Salem Media Group’s retraction of “2000 Mules” is one more illustration of a truth expressed in the post below:
In the world we actually live in, it seems like the only real accountability we ever see these days is legal: Someone harmed by the laws takes the liar to court, proves the lie, and twists their arm into finally admitting the truth.
The trouble is that people need to pay enough attention to hear and absorb that what they were told by someone they trusted was actually a lie. Tell a friend about “2000 Mules” and Salem Radio.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
2,000 Mules, One Ass
Ever since the “Stop the Steal” campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the relentless barrage of election lies from Donald Trump and his allies have been like a river carving a gorge out of a mountain, dramatically reshaping the land long after the water itself has passed. Conspiracy after conspiracy appears, roars across social media at top speed, then is exposed and falls apart. But the dissipation of the individual conspiracies—the foundering of the court cases, the recantations from media companies that spread them, the eye-popping defamation settlements—do nothing to rebuild the trust already eroded as they flowed by. Among Republicans, belief that the 2020 election was stolen is more fundamental than ever—carved into the bedrock.
When Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2,000 Mules arrived on the scene in 2022, it was an immediate MAGA smash—a “masterpiece of meeting market demand,” as WaPo’s Philip Bump put it earlier this year. It purported to prove 2020 absentee ballot fraud on a massive scale. Its ridiculous claims were debunked almost immediately, but that didn’t matter—it became a tentpole of the 2020 MAGA mythology at once. Trump described it as “the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”
Now its distributors are retracting it. Here’s the New York Times:
The conservative media company Salem Media Group has apologized to a Georgia man who was falsely depicted as having committed election fraud in the film 2,000 Mules, which Salem co-produced and released in 2022 . . .
The film features surveillance video of the man from Georgia, Mark Andrews, as he places ballots into a drop box near Atlanta, along with voice-over commentary by Mr. D’Souza calling the action “a crime” and adding, “These are fraudulent votes.” . . .
Mr. Andrews sued Mr. D’Souza, along with Salem and two individuals associated with the right-wing election-monitoring group True the Vote, for defamation in October 2022. State investigators in Georgia have since found that Mr. Andrews committed no crime and that he had legally deposited the ballots for himself and several members of his family.
“It was never our intent that the publication of the ‘2,000 Mules’ film and book would harm Mr. Andrews,” Salem said in a statement on Friday. “We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’s image in the movie, book and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family.”
Salem, one of the largest radio broadcasters in the country, with 115 stations, also syndicates radio and podcast content, operates several websites and publishes a number of conservative Christian-themed magazines. It said on Friday that it had taken “2,000 Mules” off its platforms and that it would no longer distribute the film and the book.
In a less rotten information ecosystem, telling easily debunkable lies might result in some social consequences: The liar’s audience, trust broken, steamed at having been played for fools, recalibrates and tries to find more accurate information elsewhere. In the world we actually live in, it seems like the only real accountability we ever see these days is legal: Someone harmed by the laws takes the liar to court, proves the lie, and twists their arm into finally admitting the truth.
If you weren’t paying attention in the moment, it is genuinely difficult to communicate how thoroughly [Eric Schmitt was the eventual victor in this linked story] 2,000 Mules seeped into the right-wing consciousness in 2022. Seeing this sort of news, it’s understandable to wonder: Could this be the sort of moment to finally drop the scales from the eyes of those in thrall to Trump’s (and D’Souza’s) 2020 lies?
It was understandable to wonder that in the wake of Fox’s $787 million Dominion Voting Systems’ settlement last year, too. But it’s as true now as it was then: Mopping up the water doesn’t un-carve the gorge.
—Andrew Egger
