2000 Mules Review

This review of the Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules is going to be broken up in to 2 parts. Part 1 will be my initial thoughts immediately after watching the film. Part 2 will include some commentary after doing a bit of research in to the background of some of the participants in this film.

Part 1:

The primary piece of evidence in this film involves people leaving more than one ballot at drop boxes in Georgia. Though as Dinesh himself says, the law states that you can turn in a ballot for yourself as well as family members or someone within your care. So video of people turning in multiple ballots isn’t evidence of any wrongdoing.

Dinesh does claim to have footage of a woman dropping off ballots at multiple locations, but never shows that footage. Honestly, given that they have thousands of hours of footage, and the best they could find was people turning in 2 or 3 ballots, seems to indicate that there wasn’t any fraud. They never once show someone dropping off a ton of ballots, visiting a ballot box twice, or visiting multiple ballot boxes. If they found anything damning, they would have shown it.

Their second piece of evidence is cell phone location data they claim can tell if someone is a “Mule”. The person making these claims, Greg Phillips, doesn’t appear to be particularly tech-savvy. When Dinesh asks him if a turned off phone can be tracked, he says “possibly”. His background is also pretty sketchy. He says he works around the world on “election intelligence”, but never provides a country or company he’s worked for.

Greg’s definition of a "Mule" is person who he can track to 10 different drop box locations. Given that many drop boxes are on city sidewalks this would include postal workers, Amazon delivery drivers, Uber drivers, Pizza delivery people, anyone who lives in a densely populated area with a lot of drop boxes, anyone who lives in a city with poor cell reception and bad GPS, hell the election workers who pick up the ballots are all "Mules" by this definition. At no point does Greg acknowledge this fact.

In order to justify the usefulness of his data, Greg shows all the cell phone signals captured during a given period where a murder took place. Greg suggests that his data can pinpoint the individuals who may be responsible. He then claims that he gave the data to the FBI. The film follows up this claim with a news clip of two suspects being arrested, giving the viewer the impression that Greg helped catch a murderer. 

There are a couple problems with this segment: 1. There's no evidence shown that Greg's data is what led to the arrest or was helpful in any way. 2. The FBI wouldn't be involved with a local homicide, so it makes no sense that he would give them the data instead of a local law enforcement agency. 3. The shooting took place at a major intersection, but there are almost no dots shown on the state highway where the murder took place. In contrast, the intersecting street is full of dots. It appears that Greg is either adjusting the data, or straight-up creating fake maps in order to justify his method of tracking "Mules".

On a related note, his map of Michigan is hilarious. It shows more “Mules” in the western UP than in Detroit and Lansing combined. This is not a serious person, and their data should be viewed as junk.

The last piece of evidence in the film involves two interviews, both with individuals who hide their identity. Weirdly, Dinesh didn’t do either of these interviews.

The first anonymous interview comes from a man who claims to have worked for the RNSC. He states that he took video and photos of people stuffing ballot boxes. The film never shows the video, or the photos that this man supposedly took. Given that, it’s safe to assume he’s a liar.

The second anonymous interview comes from a lady who say she worked with the "Mules". The weird part about her interview is that she outright states that she though ballot harvesting was wrong when she moved to Arizona, and then proceeded to take a job as a ballot harvester. Also, her story deviates from Dinesh’s, shouldn’t the "Mules" be dropping off the ballots at drop boxes? Additionally, even in this weird story, it still seems like she didn’t know what was going on at her workplace. She “assumes” people were getting paid. She also said the people at her work should go to jail, but apparently never called the police. This random lady is just not a reliable source.

Outside of that, the rest of the film is just Dinesh chatting it up with his buddies at conservative organizations and Republican dark money groups.

A lot of their criticisms are stuff they’ve been complaining about for decades. Registering voters is bad, throwing people off the voter rolls is good. Yada Yada Yada.

On a funny note: The only example they can cite of case involving large-scale and high-level voter fraud is a Republican who cheated to win a congressional race in 2018. They mention him 3 time throughout the movie.

One of the more annoying parts about this film is that they didn't interview a single person who is involved in any way with administering our elections. This country has fifty Secretaries of State, three-thousand county clerks, tens-of-thousands of city and township clerks, and hundreds-of-thousands people who give their time to work our elections. Not a single one of them was interviewed for this film. No one who has any role or responsibility of administering elections gave their opinion during the course of this documentary.

In conclusion, it’s pretty telling that Dinesh couldn’t find a buyer for this film. Newsmax, Fox News, Daily Wire, Blaze, no one wanted to buy it. As a result, when you try to watch this documentary on Rumble, you’re greeted with video of Dinesh asking for $19.99. Pretty weird to put a paywall in front of a film that is supposedly incredibly important to our elections. The reason Dinesh is asking for your cash is because, at the end of the day, this was a money making endeavor that flopped. He found no evidence, no smoking guns, and is now trying to recoup the money he spent on FOIA requests and hopefully make a profit. 

Part 2:

Greg Phillips

Greg Phillips is presented as a non-partisan individual who works around the world on "election intelligence". The main problem with this claim is that his data appears to be junk and he doesn't come across as particularly tech-savvy. The following information is based off an article written about Greg in 2005 by The Houston Chronicle.

Greg was appointed by Republican Governor Kirk Fordice to lead welfare reform at the Mississippi DHS in the early 1990s. During his tenure, he was criticized by the state legislature for ethics violations in how he handed out state contracts and was forced to resign in 1995. Greg then proceeded to take a highly paid position at one of the companies he had been awarding state contracts to during his tenure in state government.

Greg was then hired by Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas to be the Deputy HHS Commissioner. Greg's time in Texas was comically corrupt. He gave out government contracts to companies run by his former employers, his buddies, his wife, and even himself. That last part isn't a joke. Greg was moonlighting as the shadow CEO for a private company who received $167 million of state contracts that were approved by Greg in his role as Deputy HHS commissioner. In a normal state, this type of scandal would land you in prison, but this is Texas.

The main points here are: 1. Greg isn't non-partisan, he's a Republican, and has a long history of working for Republicans. 2. Greg does not have any type of IT or data analysis background. 3. Greg is not a particularly trustworthy person.

Despite his data being sloppy nonsense, Greg's work has caught the eye of Donald Trump. Trump posted repeatedly on Truth Social this year about how great 2000 Mules is. Given Trump's inclination to hire individuals who frequently praise him, I feel it's safe to assume Greg may be in-line for another government job, where he can continue his long track record of stealing from the taxpayers, should Trump win in 2024.

True the Vote

At one point Dinesh interviews Scott Walter, who complains about how the 501(c)3 designation is supposed to be for charitable organizations that don’t engage in politics. Fun fact: Scott is President of a 501(c)3! 

Also running 501(c)3s: Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager and Catherine Englebrecht, who all appear in this film. Scott pays himself $300,000/yr to run the “charity” CRC, Charlie pays himself $400,000/yr to run the “charity” Turning Point USA. Dennis pays himself $400,000/yr to run the “charity” Prager University. Catherine pays herself $150,000/yr to run the "charity" True the Vote. That amounts to over 30% of True the Vote’s contributions most years. Also, before starting True the Vote Catherine was in charge of another 501(c)3, King Street Patriots, a 2010-era Tea Party group.

Source: The organizations literal tax filings. Yes I looked at them individually. 

One of the more frustrating parts about these filings is that they don’t provide a list of contributors. On the publicly available version of TPUSA’s tax filing, the names of the individuals and/or organizations that gave TPUSA millions of dollars are all blacked out. Though Open Secrets, a legit non-partisan organization that tracks money in politics did manage to find something interesting, TPUSA gave True the Vote $10,000 last year.

My point here: they’re all in the same club, everyone in this film. The big money starts at the top, with conservative “charities” like TPUSA, and then trickles down to the smaller conservative “charities” like True the Vote. Best of all, the contributions are all anonymous, tax-deductible, and the donors conservative buddies take home six-figure incomes.

Just to be clear, the same web of dark money exists on the Democratic side as well. Both parties bad, system bad, all that jazz. 

I suppose all I’m trying to say is: True the Vote isn’t a non-partisan organization. They’re part of the same web of conservative dark money as TPUSA, PragerU, and CRC. Catherine is going to push voter fraud narratives because that’s the narrative that keeps the conservative donations coming in. That’s what keeps the people paying $19.99. It’s in her personal financial interest to claim fraud, even if she doesn’t find any.