Dinesh D'Souza

Mr Bean D'Souza at CPAC in 2012

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“”One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.

—D'Souza, staking out his future political career, as well as advocating something that his existence already accomplishes

“”There are some things that remain true, even if Dinesh D'Souza says them.

—Todd Gitlin

Dinesh "Leni Riefenstahl without the talent" D'Souza (also nicknamed Distort D'Newsa by his fellow students at Darthmouth) (1961–) is a domestically violent mall ninja (see below), convicted felon, historical revisionist, multi-Razzie award-winning Schlockumentarist, and — drumroll please — Christian apologist, and just generally a wingnut. Regarding the last topic, D'Souza is both a prolific author and public speaker, and has been clobbered on issues of faith and religion in various debates with notable atheists, including Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Michael Shermer.

He produced a documentary about Barack Obama, whom he alleged is primarily motivated by "anti-colonialist" fervor. Bringing D'Souza to prominence is perhaps one of the mistakes that William F. Buckley may have wanted to take back most. D'Souza also directed and wrote another waste of everyone's time entitled Death of a Nation.

D'Souza was the president of King's College, an accredited Christian college located at the Empire State Building, but he resigned after admitting to an extramarital affair.

Beginnings

The Dartmouth Review spun out of the Collegiate Network, a string of right-wing campus newsletters financed by the Olin Foundation that was so extreme that they led Jack Kemp, Bob Dole's 1996 running mate and a good friend of former President Ronald Reagan, to resign from his position on their advisory board out of disgust. The Review infamously published an editorial proclaiming, "Now we be common' to Dartmut' and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still not be graduating Phi Beta Kappa". The paper hosted a feast of lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledgehammered a shantytown erected to protest apartheid, and published a transcript of a secretly-taped meeting of Dartmouth's gay-student association. The Review became an incubator for right-wing media figures such as D'Souza and radio-host Laura Ingraham. Its counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave Marc Thiessen his start in journalism. Thiessen, a columnist at the Washington Post, became best known for his defense of the Bush administration's use of torture.

Martial-arts background

According to his ex-wife, D'Souza has a purple belt in karate, and once used his skill to kick her in her head.

Criminal mastermind

Mugging for the camera

“”AN INTERESTING PARALLEL: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character; I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama

In January 2014, D'Souza was indicted by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney for laundering campaign contributions for a Republican Senate candidate.

In May 2014, he pleaded guilty to avoid a more serious charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. This made him perhaps the only person in America stupid enough to actually violate campaign finance law, which has dozens of ways to legally bribe politicians with limitless amounts of campaign donations.

On September 23, 2014, D'Souza was sentenced to five years of probation. During the sentencing hearing, a letter from his ex-wife was read, in which she stated:

It is my former husband who has an abusive nature. In one instance, it was my husband who physically abused me in April 2012 when he, using his purple belt karate skills, kicked me in the head and shoulder, knocking me to the ground and creating injuries that pain me to this day.

For his support of Donald Trump and hatred for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, D'Souza was given a complete pardon by Trump in May 2018, but it was mainly a signal by Trump to his allies (particularly his lawyer Michael Cohen) that he would pardon them if they stay loyal to him.

Public positions

Social issues

D'Souza, a staunch neoconservative, began his public career while still at Dartmouth College, writing for conservative publications like the Dartmouth Review (which became notorious for its racist and homophobic content under his editorship) and The Prospect. In this period, he criticized Dartmouth's policy of affirmative action and used the publication to attack gay rights and gay students.

In one issue of the Dartmouth Review, D'Souza published an interview with a Ku Klux Klan leader. However, far from being controversy-seeking and "edgy" journalism (contrast with John Safran interviewing KKK leaders), the piece was accompanied by a photo of a lynched black man, and the rest of the publication became well-known for its mocking tone of "black speak".

The Review also frequently "outed" gay students against their wishes. His far-right slant on many subjects led others to nickname him "Distort D'Newsa". He then went to work for the Policy Review.

Climate change D'nial

D'Souza pretends to believe what climate researchers are saying by pretending they only agree that the greenhouse effect exists and that the "human involvement" portion gets attached to that. He also freely makes up facts as he goes along.

Politics

D'Souza served as a White House political adviser during the Saint Reagan years. He has been known to support United Nations mediation in war-torn parts of the world. In his book What's So Great About America, he defends the United States against criticism it has received for its overbearing role in geopolitics, and the conservative method of government, while attacking liberalism.

D'Souza has pushed GOP batshittery like birtherism, and appears regularly on Fox News. During the Republican nomination in 2012, two contenders — Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee — used points raised in his book The Roots Of Obama's Rage to portray Obama as alien without having to engage in obvious birtherism. Other Republican leaders have also indirectly used this talking point to attack Obama's character, blissfully unaware of the irony of politicians from a country that owes its very independence to anti-colonialism accusing its president of adhering to anti-colonialism. This also applies to D'Souza himself, since he was born in India, a country that had its own struggle against British colonial rule.

Homophobia

As editor of the Dartmouth Review, D'Souza outed the officers of the Gay Straight Alliance and published stolen confidential files. He claimed he just wanted to make sure they weren't using university funding for "gay parties, gay orgies, or whatever." He has repeatedly gone on homophobic rants online and in public. His attempt to recast the movement for gay rights from a personal and humanitarian one to a political one has not gone down well, even with conservatives, who see it as something that is mandated by the will of God, not the will of the people.

Income inequality

D'Souza pretends to "address" income inequality in the United States by not actually addressing the real problem: that it's gotten out of hand, not that it merely exists. He uses his own alleged rags to riches story as an "example" of people moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Like most people born into a wealthy family, he leaves out the fact that he was born into a wealthy family and no doubt wants us to assume he had no help from his family (in his case, as he grew rich grifting for old money interests).

Racism (or, I am brown. I used to have many black friends.)

See the main article on this topic: Friend argument

“”Dese boys be sayin' that we be comin' here to Dartmut an' not takin' the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hea' dey all be co'd in da ground, six feet unda, and whatchu be askin' us to learn from dem?

—From The Dartmouth Review under D'Souza. Ahem.

D'Souza is completely out of touch with the discrimination that minorities face in the United States. In his controversial 1995 book The End of Racism, he argued that "Racism, which once used to be systematic, had now become episodic," and that it "no longer controlled the lives of blacks and other minorities." He explains away the prejudice against Blacks and Latinos as being caused by cultural factors, not racial victimization. In the same book, he defended slavery, saying that "The average American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." The End of Racism, indeed.

In the book, D'Souza also, among other things, argues that the parts of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to private companies should be repealed. D'Souza holds a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank which published the book. This caused two of AEI's black fellows to resign their positions.

He has also tweeted a hashtag showing his support for the return of slavery to America, and another reading #Burnthejews. This is especially ironic, as he was tweeting about a movie that claims Republicans aren't racist because of Lincoln.

In a foreshadowing of his 2018 film Death of a Nation, D'Souza engaged in Holocaust denialism by blaming the victim and smearing Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros:

“”@georgesoros, now a principle [sic] financial backer of violent #Antifa thugs, admits his collaboration with Hitler and says he has no regrets:

Barack Obama

At one point, D'Souza was supportive of Obama, whom he said "makes his claims on the merits" and "appeals to shared American ideals," while contrasting him with people like the evil Jesse Jackson. This happened while he was desperately trying to justify his twisted views on racism, as he used the fact that a black man had been elected president to assert that racism was dead.

D'Souza then hopped on the "Obama is un-American" bandwagon. He argued that Obama's hatred towards the country he leads is indicated by his failure to spend the first 17 years of his life there (Hawaii doesn't count). This is in stark contrast to D'Souza's first 17 years, spent in America's heartland of Mumbai, India.

D'Souza's main claim is that Obama is an anti-colonialist who wants to suck America dry and distribute the spoils among Third World nations. His argument is as follows: Obama's father was an anti-colonialist, and one of Obama's books is titled Dreams from My Father, so he must be carrying on his old man's alleged agenda and wishing for the swift demise of America's empire. His evidence for this unorthodox theory consists of a few choice quotes from both Obamas and already-debunked myths, such as an alleged support of Brazilian offshore drilling with US taxpayer money. Why Obama would take his father's understandable opposition to British rule over his country and turn it into an anti-American doctrine remains a mystery. Not to mention that the US itself has had some issues with British colonialism, as did D'Souza's native India. He also repeats the debunked myth that Obama's removal of the Winston Churchill bust is symbolic of his anti-colonialism, when in reality every incoming President replaces their predecessor's art collection with their own (the bust was just one of many items Obama replaced).

In yet another case of a broken record spinning completely out of control, D'Souza insisted on making a movie about this (non-)issue entitled 2016: Obama's America. Predictably, the biggest critical booster of the film was WND. Later he claimed that Obama was sympathetic to Muslim jihadis and other terrorists because his mother "wanted to marry a Third World anti-American guy," among other things. D'Souza's production of pseudo-psychological crap on this subject is unequaled. Furthermore, the pretzel logic he displays on the subject is starting to resemble a Möbius strip; he's apparently convinced that Obama's support for equal rights for gays is somehow tied to his anti-colonialist views because — wait for it — he identifies "traditional Christianity" with colonialism.

Victims of mass shootings

After the 2018 Parkland school shooting, instead of expressing sympathy for the victims, D'Souza preferred tweeting "jokes" so tasteless that even the Conservative Political Action Conference denounced them.

Debating tactics

1. D'Souza has an aggressive and rhetorical speaking and debating style that makes him sound forceful and convincing. He uses the Gish Gallop frequently and effectively, rebuffing his opponent for not addressing every point he makes.
2. He frequently employs caricatures and strawmen of atheist positions. He presents these positions to make them sound whimsical or silly, while presenting his own statements with an air of utmost gravity, no matter how lunatic or far-fetched they may be.
3. Every time D'Souza attempts to speak for, quote, or misquote his opponent, he adopts a buffoonish, mocking tone. It is a very unsubtle ad hominem attack fused into his prose.
4. He is a big fan of quote mining. Not content with simply taking his opponent's statements out of context, he will take a quote about a topic completely unrelated to the one under discussion and reframe it to make it sound like his opponent is uninformed or delusional.
5. A main weapon in his debating arsenal is the emotional appeal, where he paints his opponent's position as false because some of its implications may be distasteful to certain members of the audience.
6. He enjoys painting his opponents as vicious critics of innocuous policies and events, and himself as a paragon of intellectual virtue. While not going as far as blatant character assassination (at least not in a face-to-face debate), he does subtly attack the character of his opponent.
7. He often says that an assertion by his opponent, or even the opponent's entire position, is invalid because it is not intuitively or obviously true. He paints this as a "common sense" argument where he calls upon the audience to evaluate an assertion using their own intuition. In reality, this is a denial of the obvious fact that many things are counterintuitive and require expertise beyond the experience of the average person (but don't take our word for it; ask your neighbor about quantum mechanics or the economics of sub-Saharan Africa). This is a particularly effective tactic, as it shifts audience opinion to his side.
8. Thanks to his wide repertoire of tactics, he rarely is forced to allow a point by his opponent to pass unchallenged. This projects the illusion of competence, whereas most of his rebuttals are intellectually dishonest and completely invalid.
9. When all else fails, he will spout outright lies and half-truths, pulling facts and statistics out of thin air to give his argument some credibility. This amounts to an argument from authority, which he seems to derive from his public "reputation" as a political commentator, academic and writer.
10. Lately, he appears to carry around a sizable library of books to debates, frequently flashing them at his opponent and at the audience, while stating that they completely prove his own points or disprove his opponent's. These are usually self-published works by fringe lunatics that re not worth the paper they're printed on. This is argument from authority on steroids, since no one except himself has read the books. Therefore, his opponent cannot call him out on it, and is forced to let the point go without comment.

More hypocrisy

In true fashion of other vocal religious neoconservatives, it was revealed in October 2012 that D'Souza was having a sexual relationship with a woman other than his wife. A few days after the news hit the media and internet, D'Souza resigned from his position as president of The King's College. In his defense, he claimed that he was divorced (despite having previously stated his belief in marriage as an eternal covenant), when in fact he was simply separated from his current wife, and divorce proceedings had begun but not yet been finalized — which still technically makes him an adulterer (a comment on one blog suggested he was also being polygamous by getting engaged to one woman while married to another). Not to worry, though. D'Souza's squeeze on the side apparently thinks that women's suffrage is a really bad thing (and gives a truly goofy shout-out to Rick Santorum on the subject to boot), meaning that he's got a ticket in the wingnut sweepstakes as well.

D'Souza and Godwin's Law

Whether it be Democrats, Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders or George Soros, D'Souza loves to compare everything and anything to Hitler and the Nazis, no matter how ridiculous it may sound.

Passionate defenses of complete idiocy

D'Souza has occasionally applied his standard Gish Gallop debating style defending some truly obviously idiotic opinions. For instance, when Donald Trump accidentally mispronounced Thailand as "Thigh-land", D'Souza bizarrely launched a massive Twitter rant stating that "Thigh-land" actually was the correct pronunciation, for no apparent reason other than the fact that Trump pronounced it that way. He also tweeted that snow in Australia somehow disproved global warming. Never mind that August is usually winter in Australia, and snow would be quite normal to see in many areas down there.

In an interview with fellow Dartmouth College graduate Laura Ingraham on her program The Ingraham Angle, D'Souza revealed his belief that there is a need to "defund universities". His justification for doing so was a nonsensical chain of snarl words that had no logic, beyond allusions to vague socialism bogeymen. It is noted that D'Souza and Ingraham's alma mater is a member of the Ivy League, a group of American colleges that are considered some of the most prestigious universities in the world. The only real issue here with a university education is Ingraham and D'Souza's questionable decision of wasting an Ivy League education on a career of being populist conservative trolls.

Publications

• 1984: Falwell, Before the Millennium: A Critical Biography
• 1986: The Catholic Classics
• 1987: My Dear Alex: Letters From The KGB
• 1991: Illiberal Education
• 1995: The End of Racism
• 1997: Ronald Reagan: How An Awful Hollywood Actor Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
• 2000: The Virtue of Prosperity
• 2002: What's So Great About America
• 2002: Letters to a Young Conservative
• 2007: The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11 (ISBN 0-385-51012-8)
• 2007: What's So Great About Christianity
• 2009: Life After Death: The Evidence
• 2010: The Roots of Obama's Rage
• 2012: Godforsaken: Bad Things Happen. Is There a God Who Cares? YES. Here's Proof
• 2012: Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream
• 2014: America: Imagine a World without Her
• 2015: What's So Great About America
• 2015: Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party
• 2017: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left
• 2018: Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party
• 2020: United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It
• 2022: Freedom Day the Asher Way

"Documentaries"

D'Souza is also the producer of a number of very bad films. The general tone of such is, "Conservatives have never done anything wrong in history. Even people who called themselves conservatives and were Republicans who did bad things were actually liberals. Give me $10 million to make a movie, I am very smart." He releases a movie every two years to try and influence the congressional and/or presidential elections that autumn, with mixed success.

2016: Obama's America (2012)

See the main article on this topic: 2016: Obama's America

This film talks about how terrible it would be if Barack Obama were to win re-election. It accuses him of being a communist, which it gives no real evidence for but argus it would become more obvious in his second term. This, of course, did not happen. To its credit, the film does not engage in birther nonsense (thank goodness for small favors). It has a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the highest rating out of all of D'Souza's films.

America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)

This film initially pretends to be a counterfactual history of what the world would be like if George Washington was assassinated by a British sniper and the United States remained a vassal of King George. However, it soon degenerates into an attack on revisionist histories of the US and (for some reason) actor Matt Damon. But D'Souza does show some honesty by alluding to his arrest for campaign finance irregularities, even if he makes it sound like a conspiracy.

It received 8% on Rotten Tomatoes from 24 reviews. Variety praised the production values and noted the commercial possibilities. David Ehrlich for the AV Club gave it the lowest possible grade, F, calling it "a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments".

Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016)

4% on Rotten Tomatoes! This film starts with the fact that once upon a time! the Republicans were the good guys who eliminated slavery, and the Democrats were the hegemons of the racist South, the erstwhile Confederate States of America. Most people know that this ended in the late 1960s or early 1970s after Lyndon Johnson's civil rights reforms and Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, but D'Sousa pretends not to understand that organizations (like people) can change. So the film offers a run-down of racist behavior by past Democrat politicians, taking in things like the American Civil War, Woodrow Wilson's fondness for the movie The Birth of a Nation, and Margaret Sanger once addressing a Ku Klux Klan women's group.

The movie's corresponding book makes several false claims. Page 108 claims that "from the Klan's founding through the late 1920s and early 1930s, every prominent Klan leader was a Democrat," ignoring rank-and-file Republicans among Klan leadership ranks, including James A. Comer. Contrary to contemporary right-wing misconceptions of the KKK as an exclusively Democratic organization, the Second Klan's infiltration during the 1920s found its way into the Republican Party, where cronies were elected to the United States Congress.

After skipping over all the times when Democrats actually helped blacks and other minorities (D'Souza has apparently not heard of the Civil Rights Act, the New Deal, or the entire last 50 years of American history), he moves on to the present day to conclude his thesis: it is Democrats who are racists, once and now and forever, and Republicans are true friends of ethnic minorities, not Hillary Clinton, who was then making a bid for the Presidency (totally did not see that coming!). To do this, he ignores how in America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014), he had already proved that America is in no way racist. Although he seems quite gleeful when it comes to depicting the racial violence of slavery, so maybe there's a little bit of racism still around? So as the title suggests, the second half of this disjointed film is an attack on Hillary Clinton, regurgitating all your favorite 1990s talk radio talking points about Whitewater and the rest. It also devotes a lot of time to attacking community organizer Saul Alinsky on account of his influence on Hillary; he apparently scammed cheap food when he was a student.

But the film isn't all D'Sousa having his mind blown. It recreates the great historical moment when he was thrown in prison for breaking campaign finance laws, and there's a bit of fun with gay panic and racial panic as D'Sousa re-enacts some of his prison experiences before realizing that the Democratic Party is just like the prison gang that wants to violate his sweet ass. And obviously he blames an evil Democratic conspiracy for putting him in jail. There are terrible historical re-enactments, and it ends with three musical numbers: D'Souza's wife Debbie sings "God Bless America", there's the national anthem, and something by country act the Gatlin brothers. D'Souza also gives us one of the most baffling scenes in cinematic history: a ghost Klansman rides out of a film projector during Woodrow Wilson's screening of The Birth of a Nation at the White House, as Wilson himself chases after the ghost in excitement.

Inevitably, the evil liberal media tried to censor the truth by giving it terrible reviews. The Guardian scored it 1/5. The AV Club gave it an F, its lowest grade, calling it "a series of conspiratorial talking points familiar to Breitbart-oriented readers, but reshuffled in a new, startlingly illogical order." Peter Sobczynski on RogerEbert.com called it "the single dumbest documentary that I have ever seen in my life". Both Sobczynski and some dude in The New Republic complained that the film doesn't even manage to land any attacks on Hillary when even the drunkest Bernie Sanders bro could list a thousand reasons why she's the antichrist: "Because he is a very dumb man, D'Souza doesn't even make a credible argument that Bill and Hillary are corrupt, even though in many ways it's low-hanging fruit." Daily Variety, normally sympathetic to any film it thinks will make money no matter how moronic or batshit-crazy, called it "a piece of ahistorical liberal-bashing that slides from propaganda to paranoia."

In the 2017 Golden Raspberries, it was nominated in five categories and won four: worst picture, worst director, D'Souza (playing himself) for worst actor, and Becky Turner (who played Hillary) for worst actress (Batman v Superman ended up beating it to worst screenplay). D'Souza accepted the awards via video, claiming that it only "won" because the awards voters hated Trump, not because of his extraordinary ineptness at filmmaking.

Even if you can't find it in your video store, there's a novelization! With a cover quote from Exorcist creator William Peter Blatty: "Utterly terrifying and based on a true story."

Death of a Nation (2018)

This 2018 "smirky documentary screed" expands his argument and attempts to be an attack on all left-wingers and liberals. The title of the film, a reference to the pro-Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation, plays into this by suggesting that Democrats are still acting in the spirit of the Klan. Critics noted the low quality of D'Souza's argumentation, which seems to devote a lot of time to trying to prove that Hitler was actually one of those whiny liberal snowflake types:

To prove that Hitler wasn't a "right-winger" but truly belongs to the left, D'Souza notes that the dictator is often deemed right-wing because he's perceived as homophobic. (Well, yes.) But in fact, that's incorrect, because Hitler tolerated homosexuals in the brownshirts as long as they were good fighters; ergo, he wasn't homophobic, and by extension he's not right-wing. Beyond the ridiculousness of the claim, D'Souza either missed the logical conclusion of his own argument — that to be right-wing is to be homophobic — or hopes the audience doesn't clock the trap he's set for himself.

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust says of Hitler:

An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments.

D'Souza doubles down on the offensiveness by comparing Hitler to Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish and had relatives killed in the Holocaust. These repeated comparisons of Sanders and Hitler are part of a history of anti-semitic remarks by D'Souza. He didn't help things by retweeting a trailer for the movie with the hashtag "#burnthejews".

The film also attempts to compare Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln (not by pointing out that both were tall or have been accused of racism). Even more bizarrely, D'Souza attempts to prove that he's as black as Barack Obama by comparing the colors of their hands.

It has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 1 on Metacritic, both of which are tied for records. In the 2019 Golden Raspberry Awards, it was nominated for worst screenplay, and even more insultingly as "Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel", being (according to the judges) a "remake of Hillary's America". "Donald J. Trump & His Self-Perpetuating Pettiness" won "worst on-screen combo" for both this film and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9. Trump won "Worst Actor" for both this film and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 as well. At the box office, the film did worse than D'Souza's previous ones, likely because the Democratic Party was not in the White House at the time.

Trump Card (2020)

In a film described by D'Souza as "an exposé of the socialism, corruption and gangsterization that now define the Democratic Party. Whether it is the creeping socialism of Joe Biden or the overt socialism of Bernie Sanders, the film reveals what is unique about modern socialism, who is behind it, why he says it's evil, and how we can work together with President Trump to stop it." D'Souza goes all in describing center-right politics and democratic socialism as full on socialism, and promotes the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory.

However, the impact of this film was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ended up being released via DVD and video-on-demand on October 9, 2020, instead of theatrically in August 2020 as originally planned. As a result, the film has zero reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and only one negative review on Metacritic, although it was still viewed heavily by Republicans on streaming services.

2000 Mules (2022)

“”And the premise [of 2000 Mules] that, you know, if you go by about, you know, five boxes or whatever it was, you know that that's a mule is just indefensible. If — by definition you're going to have a lot — hundreds of this. I mean when I saw [what] one contractor said, we figured out that our truck alone would account for six cell phone signals. … On the other hand, you know, when I went into this and would, you know, tell him [Trump] how crazy some of these allegations were. There was never — there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. And my opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud and I haven't seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the 2000 Mules movie.

—William Barr, Trump's second Attorney General

So named because this film alleges that during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, at least 2,000 people (the so-called mules) across five states were paid to drop-off ballots for other people, which is sometimes called "ballot harvesting". How do they know this? They had a non-profit named True the Vote buy anonymized cellphone data from various swing counties and track which devices "pinged" near a ballot drop-off box and various non-profits. If a device passed by a ballot box more than 10 times and a non-profit more than five times between the beginning of October and Election Day, they were considered a "mule".

Aside from committing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the big problem is that cellphone location data is incredibly imprecise. Even the best geolocation data can only narrow things down to a couple meters. It wouldn't be able to tell if someone walked up a ballot box and dropped off a ballot or if they merely walked by it, so many of those 2,000 "mules" might have never even touched the ballot box. Furthermore, the data counts devices, not people, and the data also tracks things like tablets and smart watches, so if someone owns multiple electronics, they could be mistaken for multiple people.

The film attempts to substantiate its claims by showing videos of people dropping off multiple ballots at a drop-off box. This doesn't really demonstrate anything; the documentary doesn't actually prove if the people shown were the supposed mules, and it's entirely possible that some of them were actually dropping off ballots for family members, which is perfectly legal, even in states that outlaw ballot harvesting.

On August 29, 2022, Regnery Publishing delayed the publication of D'Souza's companion book 2000 Mules to October due to an unspecified "publishing error". Quite possibly, the book was not published until October 25 because word had gotten out that the organization Protect Democracy was about to sue D'Souza and the film's sponsors.

In 2021, True the Vote filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger alleging the above, e.g. a vast voter conspiracy of ballot-trafficking. Despite claiming at the time that they had "a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta," by 2023, it was clear that these claims were, quite simply, bullshit — in July 2023, the Georgia State Election Board sued True the Vote over failure to comply with subpoenas to back up its claims. On February 14, 2024, True the Vote admitted to a Georgia judge that they had zero evidence to support its assertions.

One of the people included in the film was Mark Andrews, a Black auditing and technology executive. The film showed him depositing five ballots in a drop box in an Atlanta suburb. D'Souza claimed in the film that "what you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes." In reality, Andrews was dropping off ballots for himself, his wife, and their three adult children — something that is completely legal to do. Nonetheless, like many others falsely accused by Donald Trump's Big Lie promoters, Andrews was subject to threats of violence. As a result of this, on October 26, 2022, Andrews (with the help of Protect Democracy) sued D'Souza and True the Vote for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, as well as for voter intimidation, defamation, invasion of privacy, and civil conspiracy. As of June 2024, the lawsuit is ongoing. In attempting to weasel out of punishment D'Souza admitted to falsely portraying a video within the film, stating, "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 this film differently."

In late May 2024, Salem Media Group, who owned Regnery Publishing at the time 2000 Mules was published, announced that they would cease distributing 2000 Mules (both the film and the book). In a statement announcing this, Salem Media (who was named in the Andrews lawsuit) specifically apologized to Andrews, stating that they never intended to harm Mr. Andrews and "relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D'Souza and True the Vote, Inc." to be truthful. This apology was part of a larger undisclosed settlement by Salem to the lawsuit filed by Andrews.

Police State (2023)

His first film not to release during a major US election year, this film is basically just repeating the conspiracy theory that there is a government deep state targeted against conservatives in the U.S., even though Trump will likely move to reduce the independence of executive agencies if elected in 2024. D'Souza, of course, says that he himself is one of the targets of the supposed "deep state" due to his 2014 arrest, even though he pled guilty to one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and a U.S. district court rejected the idea that D'Souza was singled out for prosecution, as he of course submitted no evidence supporting that claim.

Stopped clock

D'Souza believes that Islamophobia is a problem and has condemned Robert Spencer for his hatred of Muslims. He has also claimed that Muslims don't terrorize over modernity, and the reason for those wars in the Middle East was because of America. However, in a typical conservative fashion, D'Souza criticized the building of Park51.

See also

• Regnery Publishing, which prints most of his nonsense
• Voter fraud

External links (if you have the stomach for this kind of bollocks)

• His debate with Daniel Dennett
• His debate with Christopher Hitchens
• His debate with Michael Shermer
• What's So Great About Dinesh D'Souza?
• Fact-Checking D'Souza, Andrew Sullivan
• God Is in the Basement of the Empire State Building, New York Magazine
• Only in His Dreams, a review of D'Souza's hatchet job "documentary" on Obama, David Weigel, Salon
• When your d'aughter d'isowns you for being a d'umbass
• "History of Democrats" debunked as D'Souza propaganda, The Cynical Historian