#dinesh d'souza

[thingstrumperssay]

"Rules for thee, not for me."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Right-wing pundit and author Dinesh D’Souza has now admitted that the central premise of his election conspiracy film and accompanying book, “2,000 Mules,” is false. In the 2022 film, D’Souza cited the right-wing activist group True the Vote to claim cell phone geolocation data proved that volunteers for nonprofits were stuffing ballot boxes with votes in favor of President Joe Biden, helping him to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election. “We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” said a statement quietly posted to D’Souza’s website on Monday. “I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team. If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently,” he added.

D’Souza’s note apologized to Mark Andrews, a Georgia man recorded on video footage that was used in the movie with his face blurred. In the original version of the film, D’Souza narrated the scene with Andrews and said, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.” Despite D’Souza’s attempt to lay all the blame at the feet of True the Vote, this claim was the central premise of his movie and accompanying book. Salem Media Group, which published the book and distributed the film version, previously apologized to Andrews and said the company would no longer distribute the book or film.

Right-wing serial liar Dinesh D’Souza finally admits that his election denialist propaganda film 2,000 Mules was based on lies.

[mudwerks]

(via Distributor Of Dinesh D'Souza's '2000 Mules' Very Sorry For All Of The Lies)

They have pulled the book and documentary from all platforms.

Salem Media Group (little on the nose there, no?), the right-wing Christian media company that produced Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 documentary 2000 Mules, has issued an apology for all of the lies pushed in it and pulled it from all platforms. So, if you haven’t seen 2000 Mules yet and really want to, you’ll probably have to pry it out of your great uncle’s cold, dead VCR.

“In publishing the film and the book,” the company said in a press release, “we relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, Inc. ("TTV") that the individuals depicted in the videos provided to us by TTV, including Mr. Andrews, illegally deposited ballots. We have learned that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has cleared Mr. Andrews of illegal voting activity in connection with the event depicted in 2000 Mules.”

------------------------------------------------

The quantity of lies embedded in maga-philosophy is staggering.

[wayouts123]

Wait. Dinesh lied?!? (Cue capt. Renault) Shocked! Shocked I tell you.

Yet maganuts will still buy it

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson Editorial Cartoons Page

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 31, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 01, 2024

Today felt as if there was a collective inward breath as people tried to figure out what yesterday’s jury verdict means for the upcoming 2024 election. The jury decided that former president Trump created fraudulent business records in order to illegally influence the 2016 election. As of yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States of America is a convicted felon. 

Since the verdict, Trump and his supporters have worked very hard to spin the conviction as a good thing for his campaign, but those arguments sound like a desperate attempt to shape a narrative that is spinning out of their control. Newspapers all over the country bore the word “GUILTY” in their headlines today.

At stake for Trump is the Republican presidential nomination. Getting it would pave his way to the presidency, which offers him financial gain and the ability to short-circuit the federal prosecutions that observers say are even tighter cases than the state case in which a jury quickly and unanimously found him guilty yesterday. Not getting it leaves Trump and the MAGA supporters who helped him try to steal the 2020 presidential election at the mercy of the American justice system.  

After last night’s verdict, Trump went to the cameras and tried to establish that the nomination remains his, asserting that voters would vindicate him on November 5. But this morning, as he followed up last night’s comments, he did himself no favors. He billed the event as a “press conference,” but delivered what Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times described as “a rambling and misleading speech,” so full of grievance and unhinged that the networks except the Fox News Channel cut away from it as he attacked trial witnesses, called Judge Merchan “the devil,” and falsely accused President Joe Biden of pushing his prosecution. He took no questions from the press.

Today the Trump campaign told reporters it raised $34.8 million from small-dollar donors in the hours after the guilty verdict, but observers pointed out there was no reason to believe those numbers based on statements from Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller shouted on the Fox News Channel that every Republican secretary of state, state attorney general, donor, member of Congress must use their power “RIGHT NOW” to “beat these Communists!” 

The attempt of MAGA lawmakers to shape events in their favor seemed just as panicked. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) posted on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole,” and Jim Jordan (R-OH) today asked Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump, to testify before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about “politically motivated prosecutions of…President Donald Trump.” Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY) noted that Trump is a private citizen and Congress has no jurisdiction over the case, but that Jordan is using his congressional authority illegally to defend Trump. 

MAGA senators were even more strident. Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah melted down on X last night over the verdict, and today he led nine other Republican senators in a revolt against the federal government. Lee, J. D. Vance of Ohio, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a public letter saying they would no longer pass legislation, fund the government, or vote to confirm the administration’s appointees because, they said, “[t]he White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate Republican conference,” they said, although there were only 10 of them, “we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.” 

It was an odd statement seemingly designed to use disinformation to convince voters to stick with them. Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

Awkwardly, considering the day’s news, a video from 2016 circulated today in which Trump insisted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who he falsely insisted had committed crimes even as he was the one actually committing them, “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” If she were to win, Trump then said, “it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put it correctly: this is not an “outpouring of rage and anger,” so much as “an overwhelming effort to match and muffle the earthquake of what happened yesterday afternoon with enough noise and choreography to keep everyone in Trump’s campaign and on the margins of it in line and on side.”

Still, there is more behind the MAGA support for Trump than fearful political messaging. Trump has been hailed as a savior by his supporters because he promises to smash through the laws and norms of American democracy to put them into power. There, they can assert their will over the rest of us, achieving the social and religious control they cannot achieve through democratic means because they cannot win the popular vote in a free and fair election. With Trump’s conviction within the legal system, his supporters are more determined than ever to destroy the rules that block them from imposing their will on the rest of us. 

Today the Federalist Society, which is now aligned with Victor Orbán’s Hungary, flew an upside-down U.S. flag as a signal of national distress. Their actions were in keeping with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Trump is being persecuted “for political reasons” and that the cases show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”

Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today on a spike in violent rhetoric on social media targeting New York judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s Manhattan election interference trial, and District Attorney Bragg. Users of a fringe internet message board also shared what they claimed were the addresses of jurors. “Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote. Another wrote, “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to [W]ashington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution.”

This attack on our democracy was the central message of a crucially important story from yesterday that got buried under the news of Trump’s conviction. In The New Republic, Ken Silverstein reported on a private WhatsApp group started last December by military contractor Erik Prince—founder of Blackwater and brother of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos—and including about 650 wealthy and well-connected “right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists,” including Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who served as Trump’s secretary of the interior. 

Called “Off Leash,” the group discussed, as Silverstein wrote, “the shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists,” collapsing Gaza into a “fiery hell pit,” wiping out Iran, how Africa was a “sh*thole of a continent,” and ways to dominate the globe. Mostly, though, they discussed the danger of letting everyone vote. “There is only one path forward,” Zinke wrote. “Elect Trump.” Another member answered, “It’s Trump or Revolution” “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another. 

And yet the frantic MAGA spin on the verdict reveals that there is another way to interpret it. Americans who had lost faith that the justice system could ever hold a powerful man accountable as Trump’s lawyers managed to put off his many indictments see the verdict as a welcome sign that the system still works. 

“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said today. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself. It was a state case, not a federal case. And it was heard by a jury of 12 citizens, 12 Americans, 12 people like you. Like millions of Americans who served on juries, this jury is chosen the same way every jury in America is chosen. It was a process that Donald Trump's attorney was part of. The jury heard five weeks of evidence…. After careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts. Now he’ll be given the opportunity as he should to appeal that decision just like everyone else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works. And it's reckless, it's dangerous, and it's irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict. Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years and it literally is the cornerstone of America…. The justice system should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That's America. That's who we are. And that's who we will always be, God willing.”

Today the publisher of Dinesh D’Souza’s book and film 2000 Mules, which alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, said it was pulling both the book and film from distribution and issued an apology to a Georgia man who sued for defamation after 2000 Mules accused him of voting illegally.  

MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 600 points.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[jackassdemocrats]

As always, never buy anything made in china. Don't ever trust a democrat and NEVER leave your child alone with one.

[slimethought]

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[cinematicendevaourz]

I am embarrassed to say that I even attempted to watch this film, as if I didn't have enough of "Am I Racist?". "Vindicating Trump" is a god awful film with a bait-and-switch poster featuring Trump throwing up a fist after getting shot in the ear. This film was not about his physical assassination attempt, instead the film is about the political assassination crusade that the U.S. Democratic has been on since Trump started his second move for the White House in the 2010's. I already have ABL and Jason Black and took enough Civic's classes throughout my college career to know that the American voting process is a joke - especially the democratic process practiced here in the States where people wait every four years on November 5th for their vote to be counted, as if Santa actually read Christmas Lists'. The fix is in with the Electoral College, and I dont need Trump's attorney or Trump's daughter-in-law on the big screen (with their spray tans and varicose veins popping out at me like I accidentaly bought a ticket to "The Substance") blowing their trumpets to get this billionaire back in office. I don't need to see caricature's of the Democratic party run around trying to sabotage Trump while his old speeches play in the background from footage of MAGA rally's that I wouldn't be caught dead at. And I especially did not need to see a negroid male Democratic caricature be the fence-sitting voice of reason in the film, when I already have ABL and Jason Black, and those men aren't jokes. I walked out of the film and heard Hilary Clinton's laughter echo on the screen. The theater was damn near empty and it deserved to be. I don't like Kamala Harris as a candidate, but I respect her for not defiling the sacredness of the cinema with running a nearly two hour puff piece campaign ad when another screening of "Alien Romulus" or "Azrael" could have taken up the bill for that day.

I'd much rather see a limited engagement of a horror flick I've already seen than to be reminded of the horror of the U.S. voting process in a country I did not choose to be born in.

C.V.R. The Bard 30th/Sept.2k24

[cynicalclassicist]

Well yes. 2000 Mules is just a heap of what comes out of the rear of a mule. And that was obvious to anyone who bothers to do any actual research, but Trumpists have a habit of swallowing shit.

JUST IN: The producer of 2000 Mules said in court that every single accusation made in the movie was totally invented out of thin air by Dinesh and True the Vote.

[ephrom]

Fact checking right-wing books is such a strange experience because you find they cited some long discredited piece of racist propaganda--and they still totally misrepresented it.

I’m not kidding, Dinesh D’Souza (who got the nickname “Distort D’Newsa when he was in college) actually did that in his book The End of Racism, and I caught in when I wrote the Rationalwiki page for it.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_End_of_Racism

D'Souza, by his own admission, based many of his conclusions off of Robert Fogel's and Stanley Engerman's 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery.[1]:88[2] Even ignoring the fact that said work is considered "at least to be severely flawed and possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars" according to one article in The New York Review of Books the following year,[3] D'Souza still badly mangles the already contentious book into something unrecognizable. To give just one example, D'Souza claims the book proves that "whippings were infrequent,"[1]:88 but the section of Time on the Cross regarding whipping specifically begins by noting "Reliable data on the frequency of whipping is extremely sparse" before noting that one plantation with two hundred slaves saw "a total of 160 whippings."[2]:145 In fact, the book makes the point that whippings as a punishment were actually fairly mundane during that time, writing that "It must be remembered that through the centuries whipping was considered a fully acceptable form of punishment, not merely for criminals but also for honest men or women who in some way shirked their duties."[2]:146

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Vesper Henry at MMFA:

[Update (6/6/24): Following publication, Media Matters received information that Rachmuth was recently replaced in her role as Morrow’s campaign manager, though she has continued to promote fundraisers and events for the campaign. Language in this article has been updated to reflect the change.] Education First Alliance President Sloan Rachmuth put her conservative group in North Carolina on hold to serve as a campaign manager for extremist Michele Morrow’s campaign for the state’s superintendent of public instruction. In years of right-wing media appearances, Rachmuth has espoused inflammatory rhetoric and advocated for policies that exclude LGBTQ people in the classroom and public life. Media Matters previously reported that Morrow is a right-wing commentator who subscribes to the QAnon conspiracy theory and has connections to another extremist group.

Sloan Rachmuth, the Education First Alliance President who formerly served as the campaign manager for far-right North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Michele Morrow, went on various right-wing media shows to oppose LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools.

[mindrat]

tech bro trump is gonna make rednecks turn out in record numbers if he doesn't accidentally disenfranchise them first

[shotofchinaco]

Trump supporter Dinesh D'Souza's election fraud documentary "2,000 Mules," which was widely panned even by some conservatives, was dealt another blow this week when the group whose claims were at the center of the film acknowledged they had no evidence to back them up.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump shoveled dirt on D'Souza's film, as he called anti-voter fraud organization True the Vote's court admission that it lacked evidence to support its claims to be a "final repudiation" of "2,000 Mules."

"D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022," wrote Bump. "Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where [True the Vote organizers Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips] intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. ... At no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial."

This is particularly embarrassing for D'Souza, who repeatedly cited True the Vote's purported research when asked to defend flaws in his movie's claims about widespread ballot fraud.

In fact, D'Souza at one point told Bump in the 2022 interview that True the Vote could provide him with direct evidence of voter fraud that, it turns out, the group never had.

[slimethought]

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The sequel nobody asked for is here. Today, we look at what history is, and what Dinesh D'Souza is doing to ruin it to fit a far-right agenda.

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Chapters: 0:00 Cold Open 1:03 Introduction 1:52 Narrative 3:59 What is History? 16:32 History, the Battlefield 19:09 Propaganda 23:02 Putting it all together 25:42 The 1776 Commission 30:09 Why this is important 31:31 CuriosityStream Sponsorship 32:48#HistoryMatters

~-~~-~~~-~~-~ Please watch: "Why White Nationalists are Terrorizing LGBTQ+ People"    • Why White Nationalists are Terrorizin...   ~-~~-~~~-~~-~

[gusty-wind]

TRUTH IS BEING SILENCE AND GAGGED.