William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Will Selber at The Bulwark: Ever since the “Stop the Steal” campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the relentless barrage of election lies from Donald Trump and his allies have been like a river carving a gorge out of a mountain, dramatically reshaping the land long after the water itself has passed. Conspiracy after conspiracy appears, roars across social media at top speed, then is exposed and falls apart. But the dissipation of the individual conspiracies—the foundering of the court cases, the recantations from media companies that spread them, the eye-popping defamation settlements—do nothing to rebuild the trust already eroded as they flowed by. Among Republicans, belief that the 2020 election was stolen is more fundamental than ever—carved into the bedrock.
When Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2,000 Mules arrived on the scene in 2022, it was an immediate MAGA smash—a “masterpiece of meeting market demand,” as WaPo’s Philip Bump put it earlier this year. It purported to prove 2020 absentee ballot fraud on a massive scale. Its ridiculous claims were debunked almost immediately, but that didn’t matter—it became a tentpole of the 2020 MAGA mythology at once. Trump described it as “the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”
Now its distributors are retracting it. Here’s the New York Times:
More here.
