Mediaboss Marketing

"2000 Mules is Dinesh DSouzas application for a job in the next Trump administration, or at least for a talking head spot on Russia Today. It takes the same debunked claims about the 2020 election and adds a few more hunks of bigotry and bad production values in an effort to keep fleecing the MAGAt sheep.

The specific evidence he uses cell phone location data is discussed and dismissedby Reuters hereandnoted Leftist Ann Coulter here.They cover the main problems with DSouzas claims thoroughly. I will refer to the Reuters piece several times throughout my discussion here. DSouza uses three main techniques to create his illusion of nefariousness: imagery, labelling, and concealment of facts that change the interpretation of events. I will discuss each in turn.

IMAGERY

DSouza copies the aesthetics of anAll The Presidents Men type heroic-journalists-exposing-massive-corruption thriller. He suggests, without ever providing anything that anyone else could corroborate, that the 2020 election was stole.The movie starts with a grainy image of Joe Biden and a video clip of someone in a grey hoodie putting something in a drop box, but with no identification or explanation, just a clip of someone dressed in the standard Scare The Wingnuts costume in bad light. He returns to the spy movie imagery again and again in the film, trying to suggest by image that something nefarious happened without actually saying words that include provable statements.

The scene cuts to DSouza stalking through Washington DC asking whether the election really was that secure. Then we get clips of wing nuts suggesting that the election was fraudulent. Included in this was a clip from local Austin stations KXAN asserting that the Travis County clerk locked Republican poll watchers out. This assertion came fromfailed GOP candidate Jennifer Fleck,but the film doesnt provide that information. No charges ever resulted from Flecks claims. Next, there is a short clip from an Atlanta station saying that a software glitch delayed counting, Rand Paul saying there was election fraud, and a short clip of security camera recordings which a Gateway Pundit announcer claims to be someone dropping off ballots somewhere at 3 a.m. Nothing in any of these clips is ever discussed again in the movie.

DSouza then shows a clip fromProject Veritaswhich the voiceover claims to be of a man selling a voter registration from. It is not possible to identify anyone in the video. PV adds helpful labels to each of the participants: VOTER and BALLOT HARVESTER, and adds a big red arrow pointing to POCKET MONEY supposedly changing hands for the registration form. Notably PV doesnt stated that the BALLOT HARVESTER is paying the VOTER for a vote, only a registration form. This is, again, imagery from thrillers designed to suggest something bad happened but without needing to provide demonstrable corroboration.

DSouza convenes a meeting of his fellow Salem Now pundits, including Sebastian Gorka, Dennis Prager, Larry Elder, and Charlie Kirk. They chat and pretend to discuss whether there is evidence of election fraud. DSouza films this on a set designed to look like an Ivy League library lots of bookshelves, leather wing chairs, nice panelling and everyone pretends the discussion isnt scripted. Elder says Democrats would have done anything to beat Trump, and goes to the bottomless well of wingnut obsessions by quoting Jane Fonda. They conclude, unsurprisingly, that the election was fraudulent.

DSouzas next section really leans into the Fake Woodward and Bernstein elements. He and a woman are on a set that looks like a kitchen in an ordinary house. DSouza gets a phone call from Catherine Engelbrecht ofTrue the Vote, in which Engelbrecht says she has lots of useful evidence. The scene cuts to a parking lot in the back of a strip center, showing a sedan drive up toward two people next to a dumpster. This doesnt last but a second or two, because showing the scene from outside the vehicle reminds viewers that this is a movie, with camera operators, and not a couple of brave journalists meeting their secret source.

Next we go inside to an overhead shot of a set that looks like a basement. Theres a table in the middle of a big room, a barely-visible map of the southwest corner of the US, some blue-painted boxes that look a little like ballot boxes, and a desk partiallyconcealed by a bank of lockers. Engelbrecht and her partner, Gregg Phillips, sit with DSouza and the other woman at a table. Engelbrecht claims to be non-partisan and discussesthis election.Phillips then describes what he claims is a pattern to election fraud: non-profits hire people to collect ballots and others to deposit the ballots. Engelbrecht interjects that it is illegal to get paid for your ballot. They then claim to have evidence of fraud in the form of cell phone data.

She is correct. It is illegal to pay someone to vote.

LABELLING

DSouza and company create pejorative labels for the various participants in their asserted scheme. These labels are not terms of art used in any specific field but words and phrases DSouza and his collaborators coined for their own enterprise. Those words and phrases are mules, ballot trafficking and stash houses.

Engelbrecht and Phillipsclaimthat the cell phone data they obtained shows mules taking ballots from non-profits and delivering those ballots to drop boxes. It should be noted that theyadmitthat theycoined the phrase ballot trafficking because it sounds like the phrases drug trafficking and human trafficking. There is no specific crime of ballot trafficking. They use the word mule to describe the people delivering the ballots because thats the same word used for people who carry illegal drugs. They claim that the mules collect ballots fromNot only is this a way to imply an unproven connection to crime, its also racist. Drug mule conjures images of scary brown people from south of the Mexican border invading White America.

Supposedly these mules would obtain ballots from what they call stash houses. They coined the phrase stash house to describe non-profits that collect ballots and distribute them, which is in some undefined way nefarious. DSouza again coins a pejorative phrase stash house which conjures images of drug dealers or other criminals to disguise the fact that he doesnt actually provide any facts here. DSouza never names any of these non-profits other than to state that they are aligned with Democrats. That, apparently, is enough for him to convict them, but it shouldn't be enough to persuade anyone else. It is a really good example of his tactic of creating phrases to generate an emotional reaction but that dont state any facts. Its a nice way of avoiding a libel suit but doesnt prove anything. (See the links at this Wikipedia article for good discussions of what happens when someone makes unsupported assertions about private citizens.)

Concealment of Facts

DSouza and company fail repeatedly to analyze the stuff they present as evidence to show whether or not it proves what they claim. The Reuters article above discusses the problems with the specific geotracking: its not possible to prove that the person didnt have a good reason to follow the same routes and stop at the same places during the period in question. Drop boxes are usually in libraries or post offices, which get a lot of traffic for reasons unrelated to the election. Nowhere in this entire flick does DSouza, Engelbrecht, and company ever note the locations of any of the drop boxes. In the absence of this vital evidence, their entire case falls apart.

Their concealment of facts and failure to analyze what they present is best demonstrated by the part of the movie devoted to security camera recordings.Engelbrecht claims they matched security camera recordings of the drop boxes to their cell phone records, and shows a couple of clips from those security cameras. It should be noted that despite their claims that the people in the recordings visited dozens of drop boxes, they only show one recording of each person. The only evidence of these other visits are their assertions.

In one, a woman wearing blue disposable gloves that look like medical gloves drops an envelope into a drop box located near the door of a large building. Engelbrecht makes a great fuss over the fact that the woman goes straight to the drop box and doesnt have to look around for it. Theres what appears to be an ATM near the box, facing the camera. The possibility that the woman has been to that location to use the ATM isnt mentioned. Furthermore, the clip doesnt show every move the woman makes from her arrival, so its possiblethat she looked around off camera or at some time before dropping the ballot.

Engelbrecht mentions that the device associated with this person is from South Carolina and implies that means that this person is casting an illegal ballot. Engelbrecht does not provide the evidence which leads her to conclude that the device, which I assume is a cell phone since theyre whole case is based on cell phone data, is from South Carolina. I make another assumption that the number associated with the device has a South Carolina area code. First, obviously, cell phones are MOBILE. This person can legitimately have a South Carolina number and still live in Georgia because she moved recently, especially if she didnt change service carriers. Since 2003, cell phone carriers have to allow customers to port old numbers to new carriers. (Seehere.) Therefore, its possible that this person kept a number from a previous residence even when moving. Another possibility is that the woman is posting a ballot for a family member, which, as the Reuters article linked above notes, is legal in Georgia. Thus, this clip proves nothing.

Another clip shows a man walking a dog and placing a ballot in a box that is also at a polling place. This clip happens during daylight, and there is a line of voters observing the action.Phillips comments on the brazenness of the dog-walkers actions, adding people watching you cheat. Again, there is no actual indication that this man is cheating at all, just Phillipss accusation by voice-over.

In the final section of 2000 Mules devoted to what he claims his evidence,DSouza then shows several Power Point slides with numbers and simple multiplication equations on them. He shows the asserted number of mules for several swing states, the number of asserted illegal ballots, multiplies the two numbers and gets what he states are the number of illegal votes. He does this two times for each state, once with a lower number of mules and again with a higher number. Since he hasnt provided anything else at all, even of the useless quality of the Georgia security camera scenes, for any of those other states, these calculations are completely worthless. In case anyone needs reminding, statistics need to be connected to actual, provable events to have any merit as evidence. Stats are narrative in number form, and the numbers are only as good as the narrative, which in this case isnt even close to being good for anything.

It should be clear that after more than 60 lawsuits all being dismissed, that Trumps claims about the 2020 election are lies. That much others have confirmed, mostly the judges that heard those silly lawsuits. Its still worth paying attention to right wing propaganda to see the techniques they use to manipulate emotions in the absence of facts. Showing the world how the illusionist does his magic is the only effective way to counteract the illusion. 2000 Mules uses all the standard techniques: imagery, labelling, and concealment of facts that would alter the asserted interpretation. If we progressives want to defeat the right wing propaganda mill, we need to recognize those techniques and counter them.

Read more from the original source:
I Watch Bad Movies So You Don't Have To: "2000 Mules" An Exploration Of The World Of A Jackass - Daily Kos