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2,000 Mules Is Important. But Not that Important.
Dinesh D’Souza’s new film “2,000 Mules” explores the possibility of election fraud in the recent Trump – Biden presidential election. It has generated significant support. It has also, as one might imagine, met with significant opposition. I have a few things in common with its detractors:
- I haven’t seen the movie.
- I don’t understand what happened in the last election.
- I dislike Donald Trump’s personality.
On the other hand, I have my differences with the detractors, as well. For example, while I’m not sure if ballot fraud was the deciding factor in the election, I think it’s obvious that the Democrats at least tried to cheat. On a massive scale. So this was either murder, or attempted murder. One is worse than the other, of course. But both are crimes. Which should be discouraged, not encouraged. When someone attempts murder, it’s a bad idea to give them what they want. Once they see the power they hold, they’ll use the same strategy in the future. It won’t stop until they realize that it doesn’t work.
Which is why cheating is not necessarily new behavior for Democrats, at least since the Civil War. But what’s particularly bothersome to me in this particular case is that they made very little effort to conceal their attempts at cheating. Zuckerberg’s actions were very public, and widely reported in the mainstream media. The Russia Hoax was obviously absurd from the beginning (Why would Putin want a firebrand like Trump in the Whitehouse instead of a useful idiot like Biden? Americans (and Ukrainians) are now learning how much a Democrat President helps tyrants like Putin and Xi, but this is not a new concept). The FBI openly supported Democrats, using its institutional power to destroy a sitting Republican president. Time Magazine wrote an article about the Democrats’ multifaceted, coordinated efforts to control the last election. This wasn’t a secret plot. This was a public action, which was widely publicized, in real-time. It never occurred to Democrats that they might pay the price for cheating. And, it appears, they were right. That really is terrifying.
So yes, Mr. D’Souza. Ballot fraud was likely a factor. But it was only one piece of a massive, concerted effort by many, many, many people who directly or indirectly supported Democrat efforts to control the election, through various means of various levels of ethics and legality.
I mentioned my agreement with the detractors above, in that I dislike Donald Trump’s personality. Although I didn’t care for his persona, I was amazed at what an outstanding job he did as president, and how well America did under his guidance. So I swallowed my pride, and acknowledged his remarkable accomplishments.
But just suppose I despised him so much that I just couldn’t wait until he left office. Ok, fine.
Even then, I can’t imagine voting for a Democrat.
I would presume that a Democrat would govern as a Democrat, as they always have. And I would presume that those Democrat policies would cause widespread pain and suffering, as they always have. And I would presume that the damage caused by those policies would be felt primarily by the underclass, as they always have.
I would be unwilling to intentionally hurt millions of people just because I got tired of listening to an arrogant boor give speeches with a New York accent. I can afford expensive gasoline, but not everyone can.
I might stop listening to his speeches, as I have with Biden’s. But I wouldn’t intentionally hurt millions of people to feel better about myself. That’s horrifying. That might move one past being a narcissist into being a sociopath.
Many criticisms of Trump are valid. Exaggerated by the leftist media, perhaps. Debatable, perhaps. Debatable, but valid.
What’s not debatable is that America was doing very well under President Trump, and is being predictably devastated by the applied leftism of the Democrat party that took his place. Predictably. None of what’s happened has been surprising. Putin understands Democrats. So does everybody else. Even, I would argue, Democrat supporters.
As horrible as it may be to contemplate, I am beginning to believe that Democrat voters understand what they’re voting for. Oh my God.
I understand Trump’s detractors. I share some of their perspectives.
But I don’t understand those who, even at this late hour, continue to try to defend their actions. Pretending to be surprised by the predictable consequences of Democrats governing like Democrats is not a reasonable defense. The worse things get, the worse that sounds.
They were given a simple, stark choice. Their motivations are revealed by the choice they made. And that’s it.
“2,000 Mules” strongly suggests that there was widespread ballot fraud in the last election. There’s no question that the Democrats at least tried to cheat. And that’s an important point.
But not as important as the motivations of those who either supported or ignored their efforts.
Cheating can be fixed. Unless the motivations of those who hold power find that cheating to be helpful.
The cheating is a symptom, not the disease.
Published in General
FIFY.
You really should see this, Doc. It isn’t a documentary that just suggests. It lays out the evidence of actual fraud. Really.
It is a gauntlet smashed into the establishment’s face and dropped into their path. Everyone who wanted Trump gone and were willing to look aside when the shenanigans were in progress are desperate to downplay “2000 Mules”. To ignore that gauntlet. Because it is that shocking.
You’ve chosen to downplay it, too. Sigh. Sorry, but I strongly disagree. This is the kind of documentary that drives the magnitude of the crime home to ordinary people. It is easy to understand. It is compelling.
I didn’t downplay it. Well, not exactly.
I acknowledged that it made an important point.
But just like we can’t stop murders by outlawing guns, we can’t stop cheating by outlawing illegal voting. We already have laws against it. We just ignored those laws. Because those in power found it convenient to do so.
I understand your point. And you’re not wrong.
We can’t fix this problem without acknowledging it. And 2,000 Mules is a step in that direction. Fair enough.
But it’s a small part of a big picture.
I think.
Nailed it. Perfectly.
or Hillary.
The Democrats can’t win without cheating, and I think they know it.
You have really hit the nail on the head for me. I did not vote for Trump in the 2016 Texas primary. Trump’s personality did not and does not appeal to me at all. I preferred Ted Cruz but Trump won the primary, the Republican nomination, and the Presidency.
I could understand the people that did not vote for him in the primary. I could not understand supposed Republicans, that knew what Hillary was, voting Democrat in that election. That was insanity. The Donald had a chance to be different and he was. He governed as well as any President since Reagan.
Still he could not control his impulse to respond to every single supposed slight. He gratuitously tweeted mean things weekly. He was a boor and these supposed Republicans could not stand the lack of decorum even though he was competent at the job and did not descend into the madness that is stated Democrat policy.
Cheating can be fixed but I am not sure that you can fix people that care more about the shallowness of a nice public persona over governing well.
It’s quite likely that “just” “simply” fixing the cheating would have been enough. The shallowness on its own would not have led to Biden “winning.”
@drbastiat
I mostly share your sentiment about President Trump. Think about what the above says about those who typically support Republican candidates but for reasons not understandable by you (and I) did not support him but supported Democrats. This did not result from Trump performing poorly or from Trump having done something inappropriate in office. This was because of a dislike, maybe morphed into a hatred, of his persona. That is about as bad as it could possibly get. It is a form of self-destruction.
Well done and on target
I will add my twist to your title. 2000 Mules is important, but not as important as what we do next.
People of the left are who they’ve always been. The only way to keep them from cheating is to make it difficult and dangerous to cheat, and that’s been true since before we settled along the Indus. Tigris. Whatever. After the rules have been established, social pressures might be enough to keep things honest. That, I think, is the state you’re after. But some of us will always be of the left, and most of us will follow the strong side.
Bad news. We’re on the “after the rules have been discarded” stage of the cycle, and this one has to bottom out before any re-socialization takes place. See you in a generation.
Exactly how I see it. The article was difficult to read it was so infuriating.
Sorry, Doc. But I’ve been turning this over and …
What? 2000 Mules is the first publicly documented irrefutable proof that the Democrats cheated in 2020, enough to swing the election. It isn’t courtroom proof, but it’s beyond convincing.
This is basic rule of law. What more important thing do you want? Would you watch that?
My second Exactly right! reaction.
Where the heck do we start? There is really no honor in a den of Democrats. They cheated in every way imaginable.
The lies they told! The lies were right in the Democratic Party Platform. Every page of it! They claimed that Trump was responsible for thousands of covid-19 deaths.
I’ve been following politics most of my adult life, and I have never seen it this bad.
I think the corruption has risen in response to the size of the federal budget. I think it’s more about controlling those Cabinet-level departments than anything else at this point.
Why did they care? They were poised, and they knew they were, to take the House and the Senate, which would have crippled a second Trump presidency.
I believe it’s jobs and corruption. Our federal government is way way too big, and it controls far more money than it should.
Right on target Dr. B. As usual. Agree completely with the Trump analysis. Governed very well other than the deficit which no one in D.C. likely to fix. Great job on the Supreme Court nominees, less regulation, economic growth, tax reductions, virtually all the conservative check list. Since I don’t do Twitter did not care he was a jerk that spent too much time in the face of his opponents.
But 2,000 mules is something else. Will see it soon. My biggest question is what happened to the certification of absentee ballots? How did all the ballots put in the boxes by mules start out in a building owned by a non-profit? Even in California absentee voting is an honest process. You vote absentee you sign the ballot and that can be verified after USPS delivers it. If a third person delivering it to the voting station, the ballot has to have the voter’s signature and identity of the person authorized to deliver his or her vote. Obviously none of those rules applied in many parts of the U.S. in 2020.
I have no problem with early voting where the voter’s identity can be confirmed at the voting booth. But the absentee controls need to be reinstated.
The People’s Republic of California is one of the states they didn’t bother or need to bother cheating in, because they were going to win it anyway.
The Democrats are gangsters that want unlimited power. There is not much to discuss. Does anybody not understand that?
And don’t forget, he was loved by the left up until he declared for president. I think EVERTHING that Trump is despised for (or notably disliked) is the effect of a media PR campaign that Trump’s even mildest detractors think they were immune to.
Personally, I like that Trump hits back every single time. This is one of the minor criticisms of a prospective candidate DeSantis. When the gloves come off, I think that DeSantis will be owned by the Press.
At least with Trump the Press had to crank up its PR machine to psychotic levels and this became obvious to a lot of otherwise politically proper and gentlemanly Americans.
I mean, isn’t that really the divide between Trumpers and Never-Trumpers? The propriety, the even temperedness of tone, the honorifics, the thin veneer of civility that is both an excuse for perpetual compromise and to the public’s eyes a cover for the naked pursuit of power.
Oh good grief.
Would it kill ya to make the minimal effort?
I still can’t believe people wrestle with this. It’s not that complex.
They stuffed the ballot boxes to bank votes from inflated voter rolls (dead people, former residents etc…), using the number they thought they’d need to win.
The machines self-adjusted Bidens total drawing from those fake ballot batches attempting to keep the margins reasonable.
Trump got more votes than they anticipated in FL, and was pulling too far ahead for the machine algorithm to keep up (not enough banked ballots) in the battleground states.
They panicked.
They shut down the counting, started scanning blank ballots into the machines repeatedly, brought in more ballots in trucks at 3:00am to match the new totals.
All of this is documented in over 5000 witness affidavits. Much of it was captured on camera. It’s been proven by the digital records.
This isn’t rocket science.
“This was because of a dislike, maybe morphed into a hatred, of his persona. That is about as bad as it could possibly get.”
and that morphed into disdain for Trump supporters.
2000 Mules strikes at the very legitimacy of our country. It is a film using the same techniques as were used against the 1/6 defendents. The 1/6 defendents were supposedly running an attempt to overthrow the government. 2000 Mules is showing that the government was overturned. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the technique used for stuffing ballot boxes was limited to the jurisdictions examined.
The Sussman verdict shows positively that the American Justice System is rotten to its core.
But no big deal?
This is the stuff that ignites civil wars.
Thanks to everyone for sharing their thoughts. Even to those who think I’m full of crap on this one, because I may be.
My point, though, is that Trump was likely headed to a 45 state landslide. Ballot fraud could not have fixed that, so a lot had to happen before that.
Zuckerberg’s actions were remarkable, but perhaps not as influential as the FBI’s attempted coup. Which was probably not as important as the impact of the news media’s never ending assault from the first days of his presidency. Which was probably not as important the the Democrat-dominated bureaucracy’s response to COVID which shut down our economy right before the election. I could go on and on, but there were many factors at play here, which enabled ballot fraud to matter.
It’s sort of like saying your field goal kicker won the game for you. Well, yes, but all the other players had to do a lot of things to get in a position where a 3 point field goal could win the game.
I still think the Time Magazine article is more important than 2,000 Mules. Even though neither one of Time’s subscribers probably found it to be remarkable. They support Democrat efforts to “save the election.”
On the other hand, if people were shown irrefutable evidence that Biden is in office only because the Democrats cheated, stuffing ballot boxes in the dark of night, Hang On is right that that sort of thing can start Civil Wars. And 2,000 Mules is a big part of that. So maybe it’s more important than I’m giving it credit for.
Still, I just can’t imagine this mattering.
In D.C., Democrats presume that the Democrat party cheats – they expect it to, to fight the evil Republicans. It’s ok – they’re on the side of the angels.
And in D.C., Republicans don’t exist.
And that’s it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe proof of ballot fraud will be the elusive straw that broke the camel’s back. Even if it’s not, we should still endeavor to document what happened. Right? Right.
Still, I just can’t imagine this mattering.
As usual, I really hope I’m wrong about all this.
Maybe I am…
Oh, and I haven’t seen the movie because I haven’t gotten around to it. I intend to. I’m not ignoring it.
As I said, I think it’s important.
Me as well
I was quite angry at first and said that I was ready to vote for Hillary…and then I stopped and really thought about what that meant. I ended up voting for McMullin, which meant no one, and in retrospect I wish I had simply abstained from voting for anyone seeing what McMullin did post-election.
My fear was that he was actually more liberal, especially on life. Turns out he is, arguably, the most effective Pro-Life President since Roe. The Dems likely could have co-opted him, but they chose scorched earth instead. It didn’t take long to begin to realize that Trump Derangement Syndrome was real and infected way too many people. I could be accused (rightly) of having it through 2016 and early 2020. I actually figured that much of the Russian Collusion story was true, not because Trump was actually evil, but rather that he had no idea how politics worked and blundered into doing illegal things. I was wrong, and happily so. That so many others, still, don’t realize that scurrilous nature of that entire fiasco is depressing. That we uncover real corruption in our gov’t and people just look away…is depressing.
One thing that people miss is that cheating is ingrained into our elections. We have secret ballots, ostensibly, to prevent anyone from knowing how you voted and punishing you. The real effect is that it makes cheating easier.
What is even more infuriating is how many people either read the article and said “Yay!” or, “So what?”, and the people who never read the article because they don’t WANT to actually admit that such behavior was allowed.
Fraud? Biden, a non entity who kept in the basement, didn’t campaign much but could read a speech occasionally, won more votes than anyone in history even in States where they weren’t needed. It was all out and it was practice. Are we ready for what will happen in the next elections? They’ll need perhaps up to 20% fraud to win, but are we confident they can’t get that? Gathering votes from senile folks in nursing homes and kids who are politically, historically and functionally illiterate isn’t all of it, there were made up votes, votes from dead people and some folks had votes in multiple states. How can we know this? We can’t, beyond collections of instances, but you have to exercise judgement and the longer you’ve been around and the more places you’ve been, if paying attention, you acquire judgements that are as valid as things called facts because we can’t “know” much, we have to exercise judgement which constantly changes. That’s why interactions with real people on important subjects is essential to move toward anything we might call truth.
Perfect example of conservatives not realizing what happened. Proof of election fraud just slapped you on your face and you don’t care. We just shrug our shoulders while the entire country is stolen and systematically dismantled. Oh well. There will be no do over. Maybe start by actually watching 2000 mules before you declare its not important?
I said that it was obvious that Democrats at least tried to cheat.
I pointed out that their efforts to steal the election went way beyond ballot fraud.
I suggested that we need to deal with all of those things, election fraud being one of them.
I said that those who ignored or supported Democrats’ efforts to control the election were responsible for the predictable destruction of our country.
.
That’s not quite the same thing as not caring.
Well it all probably does not matter. They were able pull it off. Cheating at ALL levels…voting machines, fake ballots, ballots stuffing etc. they caught us flat footed and we were too paralyzed to do anything and now the cement has set. To quote our favorite dimm HRC “at this point what difference does it make” Trump, like him or lump him, was the last fairly elected president. They have gone too far and now cannot back away from the cliff…once they cross a line like this they cannot relent. there will be no more real elections. We have been removed from the playing field we may not have the ability to fix this. We are the third world now.