Government

Dinesh D'Souza Is Not Sorry For Lying. Is Maybe Sorry You Feel Harmed By His Lies.

Mistakes were made.

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Dinesh D’Souza (Photo by Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images)

Dinesh D’Souza has made a career out of loathsomeness.

From his days at Dartmouth College where he gleefully outed gay students in the conservative newsletter, to taunting the survivors of the Parkville School shooting on Twitter that the failure of an assault weapons ban was “the worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs,” D’Souza has monetized trolling with spectacular success. He even managed to get himself indicted in the dumbest straw donor scheme ever, parlaying his guilty plea into a career as a professional martyr of the Obama administration, with an eventual Trump pardon.

Aside from that little campaign finance hiccup, D’Souza went through life spewing lies and vitriol with virtually no negative consequences. Well, there was that time he got un-presidented from King’s College after shacking up at a Christian conference with a lady who was not his wife and introducing her as his fiancee. But other than that!

And so it probably never occurred to D’Souza that putting out a “documentary” purporting to prove that a vast network of “ballot mules” took advantage of drop boxes to cast hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in 2020 might come back to bite him.

The film “2000 Mules” was a spectacularly boring 89 minutes of D’Souza and his wife squinting into a laptop and exclaiming “Wow!” over and over, as two charlatans from the wingnut welfare outfit True the Vote spewed jargon about geolocation data. The “evidence” consisted of bulk-purchased cellphone records showing the same phones appearing near ballot dropboxes repeatedly — no surprise, since the boxes were located in churches and government buildings — interspersed with grainy security footage of the same two guys casting their ballots on loop as D’Souza spewed false claims accusing them of being “mules.” At the end of the movie, a previously skeptical panel including Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas, and Larry Elder pronounced themselves convinced. And if you can persuade that brain trust…

The movie was immediately debunked, with the publisher Regnery pulping the first draft of the companion book by D’Souza after shipping because it defamed a bunch of non-profits by calling them ballot “stash houses.” And then in 2022, D’Souza, along with True the Vote, Regnery, and Salem Media (which distributed the film) found themselves on the pointy end of a lawsuit by one of the supposed “mules” whose image had been used in the film. Because it turned out that Mark Andrews was legally casting ballots for himself, his wife, and his adult children who lived at home with him. And five minutes after D’Souza showed his face, Andrews and his family started getting harassed by people who believed he’d stolen the election for Biden.

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Judge Stephen Grimberg, a Trump appointee to the Northern District of Georgia, denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss in September of 2023, and discovery seems to have concentrated the mind of some parties. In May, Salem tapped out, putting out a statement apologizing for “the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’ image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family.” They promised to take the movie out of distribution and keep Andrews’ name out of their mouths in perpetuity, after which they were dropped from the suit.

And now D’Souza himself has decided that being sued is no fun at all.

“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” he admitted on his media company’s website earlier this week, blaming True the Vote entirely for the mixup.

“I know that the film and my book create the impression that these individuals were mules that had been identified as suspected ballot harvesters based on their geotracked cell phone data. While all of these individuals’ images were blurred and unrecognizable, one of the individuals has since come forward publicly and has initiated a lawsuit over the use of his blurred image in the film and the book,” he said. “I owe this individual, Mark Andrews, an apology.”

That was not entirely accurate, if you can even believe it. The film itself blurred Andrews’ face and license plate, but the promotional clips aired on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Show and Charlie Kirk’s broadcast were not.

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D’Souza defended “the accuracy of the general proposition of ‘2000 Mules,’” insisting that “a leading Democratic organizer,” had recently “admitted to an undercover journalist that the premise of ‘2000 Mules’ is accurate.” The organizer is not named, and the link to this supposed admission is not included. Nor did he explain why Democrats failed to fire up the fraud cannon in 2024, if they were so successful the last time around.

D’Souza concludes by insisting that the apology comes “not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress, but because it is the right thing to do, given what we have now learned.”

Sure, thing, dude.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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