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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
Trying to be kind/gentle here, but aren’t you saying that those other people are really no different than you, you just woke up sooner than they did? Reminds me of an old saw about knowing what kind of person someone is, and just haggling over the price. Something to think about, maybe.
Yeah, I’ve wondered about that, too.
Perhaps their blatant, public cheating made it much more difficult for them to do this again in the future.
Or perhaps it just became a lot easier, now that they know that it can work. They’ve been doing this for a long time, and they’re getting good at it.
But it’s easier when you know that you will never have to answer for your misdeeds. If they think that Americans are starting to turn against them, Democrats may have to figure out how to cheat more discreetly. Which would be very difficult. On this scale, at least.
You make a good point. Now that they’re publicly on the side of election fraud, Democrats had better win, so maybe now they really have to cheat.
Or maybe it will be harder now that we’re on to them.
Or perhaps both are true. Which could be very entertaining. And horrifying.
I was just thinking about this too. The 2022 elections no longer seem like a slam dunk.
They will operate by spreading the threat that if we take the House and Senate, Biden will be removed and the dreaded president Trump will be restored to office.
The local elections are going to be horrifically nasty.
The upper echelons of the Republican Party were nonexistent in the Trump campaign. They should have refuted the lies against Trump, and they should have more vigorously gone after Biden. The Biden laptop in years past would have disqualified Biden even within his own party.
I keep waiting for the Never Trumpers to launch a Never Biden movement, complete with “he’s not fit for office” speeches and opinion pieces. They have been strangely silent as the economy sinks.
That means Republicans for the most part. It has been Republican officials who’ve done more to sabotage election investigations than anyone else, they’ve sat on their hands when cases have been laid in their laps, and they’ve mocked and ignored those who’ve tried to expose it, and stonewalled FOIA requests. The myth is that Republicans don’t perpetrate or benefit from election fraud. They do both.
One thing we do know is that they are afraid of the guns so we better make things certain on that issue.
I’ve long wondered if this made sense, at least in the legal world. Does it really matter that someone happened to fail in what they clearly intended to do? I can see a very easy logic that the punishment for a failed attempt at murder should be no less than the punishment for succeeding.
Right. But even more important than the 45 state landslide is that this was possible despite the Press PR against him from the start.
I had always wondered that the Press and politicians didn’t use the word “lie” to describe what they obviously characterizing as a lie. I thought that it was due to traditional standards of propriety, but still it seemed odd. Then after Trump’s inauguration, he wasn’t in office for an hour when the Press broke with this tradition and Jake Tapper confronted Kellyanne Conway with Trump’s “lie” over — of all things — Trump’s estimation of the size of the crowd of spectators. As far as I can recall, this was heretofore unheard of.
And yet just recently, there has been no push-back or fact checking of President Beiden’s statement that according to the CDC:
Now I don’t know about technically using the word “children”, most of us are still our parents children, but when you say the word “kids” this — especially in this context — means young children, say, third- or fourth-graders, like in Uvalde, which was the subject his speech was responding to. I immediately thought, Are children under the age of 10 really dying of gunshots more than automobile accidents and cancer? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. According to the CDC, even going to age 14, homicides kill nowhere near the number of children that die of, say, accidents, or congenital anomalies and malignant neoplasms.
This claim seems to be a clear lie. And yet this claim, along with its blatant political purpose, goes unchallenged, let alone called a lie. Talk about fortifying an election. It started minutes into his presidency.
And what do we get out of it? Never-Trumpers and Trump Derangement Syndrome. I think this one thing, the relentless slandering by the Press, led to much of the literal craziness we see throughout the Left and much of the Right.
Anomalies
96,580
Injury
26,743
Injury
16,218
Injury
19,242
Gestation
80,688
Anomalies
9,058
Neoplasms
8,590
Neoplasms
8,674
35,450
6,908
Anomalies
3,542
6,666
Pregnancy
Comp.
29,637
Neoplasms
6,769
2,523
3,604
Injury
22,167
Disease
2,911
Disease
1,600
Anomalies
3,270
You have to think of it as a field of independent particles each behaving according to local conditions that are in turn a network-weighted integral of the entire field. Some of them will be encouraged and double down, while some of them will feel societal pressure and be less likely to cheat. It’s simple physics. The trajectory will continue downward until the pressure becomes overwhelming and turns it upward again. We are far short of that inflection point. (Just accept that and don’t make me talk about the second derivative.)
The short term downside of this situation is that everyone alive now is cheated of life in a prosperous Republic. Longer term, the trajectory can drive the system out of linearity. If we shed too much on the way to the bottom, we won’t come back up.
Simple physics.
I enjoy bourbon, too!
You must be the idle rich; I’m on the job. All objectivity until 5 pm MDT.
I voted the same Db. Turned out ok for 4 years. Now I hope McMullin gets pounded in Utah.
That’s like a high school election: a popularity contest.
And shows the immaturity of those who fell for it.
“I am not sure you can fix people that care more about the shallowness of a nice public persona over governing well.” This says it better than any other post I have read on Ricochet. I don’t care whether or not you like Trump’s personality. It’s not a popularity contest. The man and his administration did more for America and Americans in four years than the previous four presidents combined. I don’t know that any president ever qualified for sainthood. Get over it! The man was defrauded of his second term and all your pretentious self-absorbed hyperbole about his personality is ridiculous.
Demonstrates is too strong a word. It is suggestive, but no where near definitive. There are a lot of inferences made from the geo-location data, and a lot of incomplete information. Until the device IDs are turned into people and the people examined and interviewed, no reliable conclusions can be drawn. And even if all of the assertions are correct, the ballots were verified as legit before being counted.
My take – the Democrats stole the election fair and square. The Republicans sat on their hands and did nothing while the Democrats used COVID as an excuse to change the rules to their advantage. There was virtually no Republican ground game; many local Republican operations were in shambles because or the Trump-related internecine arguments.
BTW – this argument is yet another reason I despise mail-in voting. It undermines confidence in the process. People should have to show up, at their assigned precinct, on election day, and fill out a ballot. The ballot should be paper, and retained separately for later verification and/or recount. Absentee ballots should be requested in advance, for each election, and be returned by the time the ballots close on election day.
The illegal changes to election laws were neither fair, nor square.
I strongly disagree. The only reason device IDs aren’t turned into people is because only law enforcement can do that.
Device IDs were clearly correlated with people by faces on video. Yeah, they pixelated those for the movie, for obvious reasons. But equally obvious is that the video will lock in law enforcement’s case. When/if they get around to doing so.
Pretty sure those mules could be doxxed without law enforcement’s help, (uh, illegally) if anonymous hackers wanted to.
Demonstrates is the correct word for the level of evidence displayed.
This movie also demonstrates law enforcement’s (and politicians, or at their behest) desire to drag their heels in the face of inconveniently damning evidence.
Which is the way it has been in California for decades. Until “vote harvesting”.
The same program to discredit Trump has been solidified and accepted by more than half the electorate, culminating in the admission (bragging) in the Time article, and the same process is successfully being deployed in regard to elections. It’s emotional, not rational.
Fwiw, to show my bona fides I was for anyone else but Trump in 2016 up until he won the nomination, then I was all in. But still I think most people on the Right wonder why the visceral hatred for Trump. Sure, it feeds the professional Democrat’s purposes and he can be blamed by them for everything today, but why do the Left’s masses hate him so? I figure that it’s been one helluva good propaganda campaign. Why does our own Never-Trumper obsess over him personally so? Would he have even fallen on the net-negative side at all if he hadn’t first had esteemed heretofore conservative writers planting the thought and then reinforcing it with every publication? I say this because that’s the process I’ve seen in play ever since he got the nomination.
Reagan was vilified as stupid, likely to push the button on nukes, and eventually as fully demented — called Ray Gun (not our Ray Gunner). And Bush was portrayed as low-IQ, had a movie made in which he was shown lying on the ground having been assassinated. And this was accepted as permissible by the Left. But even this was an order of magnitude less than what Trump was subject to. (I guess I’m harping on this because there is still a lot of Anyone But Trump floating around on the Right. Yes, he’s old now, but at least he intimately knows the pitfalls and the punishment, things which replacements can only guess at.)
But the perpetual slander worked. It sunk into their minds. I doubt they know where their hatred came from, but they embrace it. And half the country literally hates him. And I’m guessing that 10% of the Right electorate would rather that he fade into a dim memory. Because of mean tweets, essentially.
Now they’re doing it again. The Time magazine article essentially asked everyone on the Left and the Trump-sceptical center-Right to enthusiastically approve, and privately cheer, election rigging. But here too it’s emotional, not rational.
I think that the plan is nearing successful completion. At least the Left half the country will now openly and consciously (if perhaps grudgingly) approve all election rigging as an approved necessity.
The argument being made from the Left is no longer if it happened, but the subtle conditioning is that it is right, proper and necessary.
“Demonstrates” is a very accurate word. They haven’t released the details just yet because they don’t want to interfere with the law enforcement process.
They describe the situation here:
https://rumble.com/v16wiv4-arizona-state-senate-reviews-true-the-vote-presentation-on-ballot-harvestin.html
Or maybe not right and proper, but still necessary.
I’ve been thinking about what you say, and I think my point is that the Left does not want to merely have the voting public grudgingly accept voter fraud as a necessity, but have it actively dislike and disfavor voting as a bad thing. Do Leftists really care about voting? Or do they just want the results, even if by executive fiat.
For example, does the Left really accept fortifying the election as a necessary evil? Or as a new paradigm.
No offense to either one of you but McMullin? At the time and to this day, I believe any vote for anyone other than Trump was a vote for the most corrupt Presidential nominee in my lifetime, Hillary. I was afraid that Trump would be terrible ( he wasn’t) but I knew Hillary would be.
That about says it.
Aye. Hillary was like playing Russian Roulette with a full cylinder. Trump was like having one round in the cylinder.
And at that, perhaps only in 2016, not in 2020.
Very interesting. One might even argue that the punishment for a failed attempt should be greater than that for successful murder. If he failed, then the would-be murderer has motivation to attempt the crime again, so we must punish harder to account for that.
Is the purpose of punishment to prevent crime or to punish it?
Not voting for Trump wasn’t a vote for Hillary, it was not a vote for Trump. McMullin had a narrow and extremely unlikely path to the Presidency and my vote for him meant absolutely nothing in Texas. I wasn’t alone in my vote for him, and my regret stems more from his, and many other NTers, inability to move on.
Actually, let me cast that in terms of something else I’m working on. Do we want to (prevent | punish) X (the observable act | the inferred mind) ?
When thinking about the left it helps to try to see from their perspective:
To be of the left is simply to choose to value one’s own mind over reality. Once one has made that fall, one is continually confronted with threats to the internal order. Perceptions which contradict one’s mental model give rise to “cognitive dissonance”; that phrase is just a nice description of anger. A person of the left is ready to do anything from slander to murder in the service of his own divergent model, and only the fear of punishment constrains him.