Two Thousand Mules Or Seventy Four Million Fools.

Donald Trump is a liar. Sorry to start with such a bold, and controversial, statement but it's true. Donald Trump is a liar. I doubt there's a person left in the world that doesn't know that Donald Trump is a liar. His family know he's a liar, his colleagues know he's a liar, his supporters know he's a liar, and everyone who is sane, kind, or lucky enough to be none of those things know he's a liar.

A good challenge would be to try and find someone, anyone, anywhere, who genuinely doesn't think Donald Trump is a liar. Depressingly, the fact he's a liar isn't even the worst of his many awful traits. But this evening's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, 2000 mules and one big lie:A stubborn conspiracy theory, was about lying. Not so much Trump's lying as the lying of his some of his most well to do supporters. Which is all part of the sausage machine and all contributes to the Trump/bullshit industrial complex

Speaker Jim Cliff (an author, video editor, and former BBFC examiner - the latter a subject he spoke to the Skeptics about back in March 2021) accepted that most people in the UK were perhaps unfamiliar with either the 2000 Mules conspiracy theory or the man who made a film about it, Dinesh D'Souza. A convicted felon who was pardoned of his crimes in May 2018 by .... you'll never guess who .... Donald Trump.

D'Souza, a 67 year old Indian-American right wing commentator and film maker, has a history of spreading conspiracy theories and in May 2022 he made a "documentary" called 2000 Mules about how the evil Democratic party stole the 2020 US election from its rightful winner, Donald Trump. No big deal you might think, the Internet is full of Trump cranks (and bots) spouting all manner of unsubstantiated bullshit. What's new? 

Well, D'Souza's film became the most successful American political documentary in over a decade. People watched it. People believed its claims. Despite them being utterly ludicrous and there being no real evidence for any of them. In many cases, the claims were demonstrably untrue. D'Souza didn't make this film alone. His two fellow travellers down this particular wormhole were Catherine Engelbrecht (who became a Trump supporter after being sickened by Obama and formed a Tea Party inspired group called The King Street Patriots) and Gregg Phillips, the former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services.

Phillips claimed as far back as 2016, when Trump won, that over three million votes had been made by "non-citizens" and that all of those votes were, of course, for Hillary Clinton. This would 'prove' that not only did Trump win the election but he also won the popular vote. How convenient. 

Engelbrecht and Phillips, between them, are the leading lights of an organisation called True the Vote and the primary source of 'information' for D'Souza's film. The film is 89 minutes long and most of it is pure filler so Cliff wanted to drill down on the 28 minutes of the film that can loosely be said to contain evidence of this astronomical level of voter fraud.

You may remember that back in 2020 there was a little thing called a pandemic happening. Because of that many cities were using drop boxes to make it easier for people to vote. Engelbrecht and Phillips believe these drop boxes are the key. They have it that "mules" were employed, by shadowy and unnamed left wing cabals, to put multiple ballots in multiple drop boxes in multiple cities around America. All voting for Biden, obviously.

These mules, they claim, were being paid for doing this. Yet they provide no evidence whatsoever for that claim except for one supposed witness. A witness who they claim insisted on anonymity and would only speak to True the Vote and nobody else. That sounds legit, right?

To 'prove' (sorry about all the quotes but I think the story demands them) the 2000 Mules theory, True the Vote got hold of cell phone (sorry, I know they're called mobiles but this is America) geolocation data. They bought a lot of it and they claimed it was very efficient on the basis that the police and the FBI were able to track down January 6th insurrectionists and criminals using this data.

Disingenuously overlooking the fact that a lot of the insurrection was filmed, televised globally, and often livestreamed by the perpetrators themselves. The authorities may have used the location data but it was hardly their main source of evidence. Engelbrecht and Phillips bought the data for the five states that Biden took from Trump in 2020:- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

They didn't bother too much with the data from the rural areas of those states (where the vote tended towards Trump) but instead they focused on the large cities like Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee. They make accusations about multiple individuals (most of them are not named and often in the film their faces are blurred, at one point they even blur the face of a dog perhaps fearful that this particular hound has a good team of lawyers) and the accusations True the Vote and D'Souza make are so absurd as to be laughable.

Or at least would it be if people didn't actually believe this shit. By design and to make it easier for people to vote, drop boxes were usually placed in busy areas that people would visit anyway so data showing that somebody passed a drop box or several drop boxes does not prove they voted more than once. Just that they went near a drop box more than once. I know I walked past several voting stations during our recent General Election.

In some states, the voting window can last a couple of weeks so the odds of people passing the drop boxes more than once increases hugely. On top of that, the GPS data isn't all that accurate. It's a marvel of science how accurate it is but it can't narrow down your location to an exact point. At best it can narrow it down to a few metres here and there. You'll know that if you've ever tried to navigate using the blue dot on your phone and got frustrated by it. It also doesn't help that during the film when they show what they claim to be a heat map of Atlanta it isn't Atlanta, it's Moscow. I wonder why these people would have maps of Moscow so easily to hand!

So the film makers can't, despite claiming they can, possibly know if people revisited drop boxes or just happened to be near them. D'Souza tweeted twice to prove how accurate the GPS data was. Both times it only went to prove how inaccurate it was. For some reason (huge amounts of money and a slavish devotion to Donald Trump), this didn't stop him doubling down on his lies.

But, hey, it's not just the GPS evidence that proves the mules exist. There is video evidence too. One of the pieces of video they use shows a man voting. Yes, a man voting. Perfectly normal voting. Two ballots. One for him and one, presumably, for a family member. Totally normal. But, hold on, at one point he drops one of the ballots on the floor and picks it up - suspicious. And he's voting when it's already gone dark - doubly suspicious.

Considering the film makers had over seven hours of video it seems a bit pathetic that that's the best 'evidence' they can find. But hold on, what's this? There's more? Another woman is shown voting and, on the way to the drop box, putting something in a bin - suspicious. Also, she's wearing gloves. Why would anybody be wearing gloves during a pandemic in which airborne particles and infected surfaces can potentially kill you?

Clearly, she's a mule. It's not clear how many times she is alleged to have voted but the dropped ballot guy apparently, and again with no corroborating evidence whatsoever, is accused of voting twenty eight times. The evidence gets stronger. One guy rides his bike to the drop box and then, check this, takes a selfie of himself voting. Is that the smoking gun? Or is it just somebody celebrating democracy and being part of it?

Lots of people here take photos of themselves going out to vote and then post them to social media. It seems likely the same would be true of America. The most ovewhelming(ly shit) evidence comes with a guy, the guy with the blurred out dog, who has the audacity to take a photo but does it in broad daylight. So, according to D'Souza and True the Vote, voting at night is suspicious and voting during the day is also suspicious. You begin to suspect that the thing they really don't like is democracy itself.

Most of these supposed mules remain unnamed (D'Souza, I suspect, fearing law suits) but one guy stood up to D'Souza, True the Vote, and the Salem Media Group (who produced the film and employ the utterly odious Sebastian Gorka). Mark Andrews wasn't happy about being called a mule after he dropped off the votes, perfectly legally, in Georgia for himself, his wife, and his three grown up children.  

Salem, to their eventual credit, paid off Andrews and pulled both the film and the accompanying book. D'Souza, Engelbrecht, and Phillips still maintain that the 2000 Mules conspiracy theory is true (we can't know if they really believe it or if they're just grifting, such is the world we live in) and, in November, if - and hopefully when - Trump loses to Kamala Harris it seems certain that these claims will be made again and possibly, likely, put innocent people into serious danger. Though not as much danger as a second Trump presidency will put them in.

Thanks to Jim Cliff, host Dave Jenkins, and Skeptics in the Pub - Online for another interesting night at home in front of the computer. A short Q&A touched on Fox News, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, North Korea (all your favourites), and another conspiracy theory that people were registering their dogs to vote and then voting on their behalf.

Which isn't as weird as the idea that Trump might regain the presidency. If you're American and you're reading this then please do what you can to vote him out (don't employ mules though!). Obviously, if he loses he will do very bad things. But if he wins those things will be far far worse. Vote against Trump, vote for democracy.