The final fall of '2000 Mules'

Contrary to all the talk of cancel culture, for a movie to get completely withdrawn from circulation is an extremely rare step- a high bar that Dinesh D’Souza’s '2000 Mules' has managed to clear.

For all the tiresome talk of “that movie could never be made today,” or “they’re going to ban that movie eventually,” and the like, for a film to officially get dropped from circulation is something that rarely happens. 

2000 Mules, a 2022 conspiracy documentary from veteran conservative media figure Dinesh D’Souza, has met that bar. It appears to have committed at least one actionable act of defamation. 

The film lays out a cockamamie conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election, wielding highly questionable geolocation data to allege that the Biden campaign employed thousands of “mules” to stuff ballot boxes and cost Donald Trump the election. 

The assurances in D’Souza’s film have been debunked numerous times. The AP pointed to “gaping holes” in its claims, while the Washington Post called it “the least-convincing election fraud theory yet.” Former Attorney General William Barr  — not exactly a bastion of anti-Trump sentiment — laughed out loud at the claims of the film while testifying before the January 6 Committee. 

(Yes, I have seen 2000 Mules, having caught it when it was released for free at one point on YouTube. And oddly, I once met Dinesh D’Souza, when he came and spoke at my college. He was always conservative — and did some bad, bad stuff as a young man, before the infidelity scandal and the criminal conviction — but I don’t think he was always this nuts.)

Donald Trump, who pardoned D’Souza in 2018, later hosted the premiere of 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, and has continued to cite the film in his continuing claims about voter fraud. 

But now, you won’t be able to see 2,000 Mules anymore because its publisher, the conservative media company Salem Media Group, has agreed to retract and disavow the film, as well as a tie-in book. The book itself had first been withdrawn in 2022.