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"2000 Mules"
I had heard about the documentary and read comments it provided proof Trump would have won some or all the swing states...and I was naive enough to think someone had actually found some evidence. Then I started Googling...
The guy, Dinesh D'Souza, who made the film is a Trumper, conspiracy theorist, provocateur, Trump pardonee etc so that's strike one.
The Washington Post headline read: "2000 Mules' offers the least convincing election-fraud theory yet."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/11/2000-mules-offers-least-convincing-election-fraud-theory-yet/
It's a lengthy article and I just copied some of what I thought would be read-worthy.
“2000 Mules” can be broken out into three basic components. There’s the geolocation-based material that’s the heart of D’Souza’s assertions about the election. The second half of the movie is a broader effort to undergird the geolocation claims, an attempt to build a foundation of how and why a rampant ballot collection scheme might have been undertaken. And then there’s the third part, a sort of cable-news-style panel conversation with D’Souza and several other conservative and right-wing pundits. (All of those pundits, incidentally, have shows with Salem Media Group, which served as executive producer of the film.) By the end, the pundits have been convinced that rampant fraud occurred, with former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka outlining all of the evidence that had been presented “empirically” in support of the claim.
There is no such empirical evidence, by a long shot. That geolocation data from Phillips and Engelbrecht’s group, True the Vote, which also has executive-producer credits on the film, is used as a purportedly data-driven latticework on which everything else hangs. But beyond lots of harrumphing about how revealing this data is, we see very little of it.
The theory that Phillips and Engelbrecht present is that nonprofit organizations employed people to collect ballots and then drop them into drop boxes in various cities. They call this “ballot trafficking,” a term meant to connote illegality akin to the transport of narcotics. The people carrying the ballots, then, become “mules” and the nonprofit groups “stash houses.” To test this theory, they obtained a large amount of anonymized cellphone geolocation data and tried to figure out how often individual phones appeared near drop box sites or near those nonprofit groups.
By itself, this is a dubious approach. As the Associated Press pointed out in a fact check of the film, there’s no way by just using cellphone data to know whether someone visited a ballot drop box, particularly since those boxes were installed in high-traffic areas. Last month, I spoke with an expert on geolocation who made clear that the imprecision of phone geolocation would make specifying that a phone was actually near a drop box (and not, say, 10 feet from it) nearly impossible. The film makes repeated comparisons to federal law enforcement’s ability to identify people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, but even if the phone’s location is off by 20 feet, it’s still obvious when you’re inside a large building. (In one shot, the film shows geolocated data inside the Capitol — with positions surrounded by large circles of uncertainty that make this point clearly.)
In essence, we're just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found. That by itself is probably not wise.
At no point is there evidence presented of people getting ballots from a nonprofit group and dropping them in drop boxes. There’s one anonymized interview with a woman in Arizona who claims this happened, but there’s no geolocated or video evidence of ballot drops being made. Despite a confused scene with the pundit panel in which it’s alleged that maybe some of these ballots were submitted on behalf of dead people or people who moved, there’s no evidence of that happening. There aren’t even very many snippets of people casting more than one ballot — a practice that wasn’t itself necessarily illegal.
If there’s no proof of “mules” running around, the film’s second-half effort to explain how the system works is unimportant. (It’s mostly a mishmash of old claims about fraud and the au courant effort to cast increasing voter turnout as devious.)
But none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the viewers come away from the movie believing that they were right all along about the election being stolen. And so D’Souza scratches that itch by adding up the number of “mules,” the number of drop box visits and the average number of ballots deposited to determine how this network of criminality swung the election to Joe Biden.
It's useful here to be blunt: Every part of the calculus that D'Souza uses to show that Trump really won is nonsense, as he himself inadvertently makes clear.
At its heart, “2000 Mules” is a triumph of capitalism. There’s huge demand for proving that Trump didn’t lose in 2020, and this film provides just enough of a veneer of authority to let people collapse comfortably into that belief. That it doesn’t survive even mild external scrutiny is as irrelevant as pointing out contradictions in a religious text is to recent converts: They want to believe what they want to believe.
There is no such empirical evidence, by a long shot. That geolocation data from Phillips and Engelbrecht’s group, True the Vote, which also has executive-producer credits on the film, is used as a purportedly data-driven latticework on which everything else hangs. But beyond lots of harrumphing about how revealing this data is, we see very little of it.
The theory that Phillips and Engelbrecht present is that nonprofit organizations employed people to collect ballots and then drop them into drop boxes in various cities. They call this “ballot trafficking,” a term meant to connote illegality akin to the transport of narcotics. The people carrying the ballots, then, become “mules” and the nonprofit groups “stash houses.” To test this theory, they obtained a large amount of anonymized cellphone geolocation data and tried to figure out how often individual phones appeared near drop box sites or near those nonprofit groups.
By itself, this is a dubious approach. As the Associated Press pointed out in a fact check of the film, there’s no way by just using cellphone data to know whether someone visited a ballot drop box, particularly since those boxes were installed in high-traffic areas. Last month, I spoke with an expert on geolocation who made clear that the imprecision of phone geolocation would make specifying that a phone was actually near a drop box (and not, say, 10 feet from it) nearly impossible. The film makes repeated comparisons to federal law enforcement’s ability to identify people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, but even if the phone’s location is off by 20 feet, it’s still obvious when you’re inside a large building. (In one shot, the film shows geolocated data inside the Capitol — with positions surrounded by large circles of uncertainty that make this point clearly.)
In essence, we're just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found. That by itself is probably not wise.
At no point is there evidence presented of people getting ballots from a nonprofit group and dropping them in drop boxes. There’s one anonymized interview with a woman in Arizona who claims this happened, but there’s no geolocated or video evidence of ballot drops being made. Despite a confused scene with the pundit panel in which it’s alleged that maybe some of these ballots were submitted on behalf of dead people or people who moved, there’s no evidence of that happening. There aren’t even very many snippets of people casting more than one ballot — a practice that wasn’t itself necessarily illegal.
If there’s no proof of “mules” running around, the film’s second-half effort to explain how the system works is unimportant. (It’s mostly a mishmash of old claims about fraud and the au courant effort to cast increasing voter turnout as devious.)
But none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the viewers come away from the movie believing that they were right all along about the election being stolen. And so D’Souza scratches that itch by adding up the number of “mules,” the number of drop box visits and the average number of ballots deposited to determine how this network of criminality swung the election to Joe Biden.
It's useful here to be blunt: Every part of the calculus that D'Souza uses to show that Trump really won is nonsense, as he himself inadvertently makes clear.
At its heart, “2000 Mules” is a triumph of capitalism. There’s huge demand for proving that Trump didn’t lose in 2020, and this film provides just enough of a veneer of authority to let people collapse comfortably into that belief. That it doesn’t survive even mild external scrutiny is as irrelevant as pointing out contradictions in a religious text is to recent converts: They want to believe what they want to believe.
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
A new documentary based in reality I'm working on. It's the total number of Republican Senators and Republican House Members in Congress as of 5/29/2022. Hmmm maybe I should make this it's own post for fun tonight ... 
