2000 Mules, 2000 Elephant Men
by John Kendall Hawkins
Mules frighten me. Stubborn as. They conjure up terror that won't let go from my past. When I think of those 20 Mule Team Borax commercials. Death Valley Days. Ronald Reagan in his hay-days. Days of ever more whitening. And jump forward to 1978, Billy Hayes, muling horse, in Midnight Express, dungeons and dragons, hamama-mia and the Oliver Stone treatment. And more recently, the late stage dreck of Clint Eastwood's The Mule. IMDB description: "A ninety-year-old horticulturist and Korean War veteran turns drug mule for a Mexican cartel." Â ¡Ay, caramba! No wonder Donald J. Trump himself is said, by Mark Esper, to have wanted to "quietly" pablo cruise missile-to-death those "bad hombres" with their tunneling ways.
So, I steeled myself for trauma, as I sat down with my popcorn to watch the event-of-the-year trailer for 2000 Mules, a proudly conspiratorial theoretical explanation for why Donald J. Trump saw his rightful (full of Right) victory at the 2020 presidential electoral polls snatched from him by nefarious, twinkle-toed elements of the Left terrified he might be Hitler, without the paint-brush moustache (there's a rumor now going around that the bunker mental Hitler outraged at his art school's dismissal of his work as talentless snipped his brushes and glued them under his nose in a pique of 'mein kampf' outrage. Apparently, a rose is not a rose is not a rose, dummkopf, they said, pointing to the exit). I was going to sit through the whole film, but not if I needed to cough up the required 29 precious American dollars -- that's a half a shift's beginner wages at our beloved Mickey D's. No way, Jose. I settled for the 3-minute trailer. I feel I got the gist. And goosebumps, too. Check it out and then we'll catch up outside the cinema.
First some production details. 2000 Mules is brought to us by Salem Media Group. Already your arrow quivers in fear. Salem. Fingers pointing every witch way but loose, and then the noose. As with Salem, scores will be settled. Someone is pointing a finger at old Joe Biden, elder of the Demo-less Corporation Party. Ergot among the Liberals is insinuated. A mean girl argot rises to the occasion. And "Media Group" lispers (for these are effete Agnew-esque men) conspiracy right out of the box.
The mood set, we discover that 2000 Mules is a Dinesh D'Souza film. Cringe. Cue the soundtrack from the Bollywood version of Psycho, the musical. D'Souza. Dinesh is the Indian son of a conservative Big Pharma Johnson and Johnson executive and his "housewife," based in Bombay (think: baby powder and oxycontin, but don't mix them up). D'Souza would have been the kind of cracker that that other cracker, Christopher Columbus, was looking for when he discovered America instead -- way off course, some say because he might have been high on drugs and it all looked like India him.
So, yeah, D'Souza, from the Dia tribe (Hi, how are ya? Hi, how are ya? Picture a fire and a circle dance), was on the political warpath in America, long before he became a citizen. One of the first things he did as a student at the troubled Ivy League institution Dartmouth was to write for the The Dartmouth Review and use its broadcast feature to "out" homosexuals on campus. According to David Corn of Mother Jones,
D'Souza's extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s...While he helmed the Review, it published a "lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader...accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree and an assault on affirmative action titled, "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive, Bro," which was written in Ebonics. ("Now we be comin' to Dartmut and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa.") The "Jive" article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right's problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review's advisory board.
So, yeah, D'Souza sho ain't no Mumbai slum dog. And he was causing Liberals in America to circle their wagons eight years before he became a naturalized citizen in 1991.
D'Souza's Wikipedia entry begins with "[he is a] political commentator, provocateur, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist." The last entry is seemingly a red badge of courage among the Heritage Foundation set. D'Souza has written a number of NYT bestsellers -- including the 2010 hit piece, The Roots of Obama's Rage, which, ironically, sat at number 3 on the list at the same time that Obama's Wars, a pro-Obama Bob Woodward bestseller, was at number 1, suggesting immediately a deep and serious partisan divide in the nation among even the literate set.
In addition, D'Souza has made a number of Democrat-scourging films -- including Obama's America (2012), Hillary's America (2016) and Trump Card (2020) -- which remind the viewer that D'Souza comes originally from a country with a still-existing caste system, where just saying No to a marriage arrangement can get acid thrown in your pretty face. D'Souza's family comes from the Vaishyas (commoners) but he think he be from the Kshatriyas caste (moral warriors). He think being upwardly mobile in America make it okay if he be throwing acid-tongue around. He be needing some good ol' American comeuppance.
In 2000 Mules, all the stew ingredients described above (I've left out a description of the spices to spare the reader dyspepsia) are simmering or sizzling or both. The film begins with a Joe Biden two-second hate clang, followed by the lapdog media yelping about how the 2020 presidential election was the "most secure in American history," which, of course, whether or not it is true, was also a decidedly unbalanced MSM (they were all saying it) Abu Ghraib-like bark in the face of Trump's legendary hyperbole. They were tweaking the Clown's nose with his own language. Then we get footage of effete conservatives (thing morons on oxy) talking swamp-time muddy river bullshit about Voter Fraud and segues to CC cameras showing us someone putting what is described as ballots (choices unknown) being "stuffed" at 1 AM into a ballot box on the dark side of town. Some boffo award-nominee snarks, "Don't we all vote at 1 AM?"
Presumably this is a stab at the early voting for Blacks set up in some swing states (the only states that seem to matter any more on the game board). But also, one thinks it might be, for some voters, the only time third-shift workers, using up their break, could posit their provisional throw-away votes. Then another dweeb pipes up with the night's first conspiracy theory: "Then one night, this person, this mule, went across six counties to 27 different drop boxes. I call it the Mexican mafia. Seriously? Because they work like that." Next time, Trumpian specialty cruise missiles ("the taco maker") will be ready for these mules from Death Valley. The tone is set securely.
We segue to a dark intel cum security state control room, like you see in 24 or Berlin Station or even Babylon Berlin (dark Germany in the lead up to you know what), and we see serious men hunched achingly over computer screens ostensibly tracking mules all over the country with high tech stalking gizmos. The company with the quips is True the Vote, a conservatve truth machine that was set up to spread the lie that there in evidence for believing 2020 was stolen from MAGA's own beleaguered Donald John Trump. They support voter ID. "The organization's tagline is 'If you see something at the polls that just doesn't seem right, record it,'" their Wiki tells us.
Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, we are shown fires burning in a Black neighborhood -- presumably of Philly, city of brotherly love. Thousands of mule votes may have been caste there and in Atlanta (think: more fire), we're told. After these insufferables from the lower vowels of the American-Indian caste system twattle on for awhile in their circle of jerks, three infantile megalos pipe up:
Speaker 1: Now we come to the most important question of all. Was the magnitude of vote trafficking enough to tip the balance in the 2020 presidential election?
Speaker2: It's not a leap to say this would have made a difference.
Speaker3: They have ruined Election Day in the United States of America. That's provable. And that's enough for me to fight the left with every fiber in my body.
Every fiber? Gosh darn doings! And that's about it. The film closes with a Batman-esque voice over (think Christian Bale of American Psycho) breathlessly muttering an urgency that is comical and, at the same time, sounds like a clown full of sh*t who can't squeeze out the toxins to save his own life. Here, dear reader, is the author of those famous scribbles of toilet walls everywhere: "Here I sit, broken-hearted / tried to sh*t but only farted." Also, a best-seller.
One more thing should be noted about D'Souza. He was convicted of electoral fraud-related charges back in 2014 when he stuffed New York Senate candidate Wendy Long's pockets full of cash, breaking the law. In fact, it was a felony count he pleaded to. The conviction would make him ineligible to vote for president in many states. But in 2018, DJ Trump came to the rescue, telling Justice to get stuffed, when he pardoned D'Souza, wiping out that felony.
I'll own that 2000 Mules is not my favorite film. The only thing to say about it, before I get off the stoop, is it's a feature of Rumble, the new YouTube competitor platform set up to get around parent Google's video "censorship" nonsense. (Rumblers may have a point here: YouTube can be too politically correct.) Rumble is considered a conservative outlet. It is deeply-funded by Peter Thiel, which is another problem I'll address in the by-and-by. But that conservatism is partially offset, it is said, by the co-optation of the star attraction Libertarian gunslingers, Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul, pushing their flawed, but often-shiny, truth bullets of love. I don't know what money Paul gets from Thiel, but Transparency Kool-Aid is said to get six figures for hosting his sugar-free System Update drinkage.
Pundits from the left were immediately outraged and knee-jerked by coming out with their own trailer, titled 2000 Elephant Men. The rebuttal trailer was 19 times longer than the Repugnican droppings, so I have boiled it all down to the following short excerpt. Here it is, you judge if it balances out the tilt:
Each film has its points and its flaws, like a diamond ring bought at a franchise jeweler at the mall -- not blood diamonds but zirconian, assembly line jobs probably packaged by that third shift I referenced earlier -- that give you pause about saying "I do." What I can't understand is why Pop Corn Joe called Corn Pop "Esther Williams"all those years ago and expected to live another day. Word is, he did the same thing to Putin; called him Esther Williams, crossed the line, then Putin crossed the line, and now they're facing off in the parking lot outside the public project called Ukraine.
The sad reality is that Trump's election was stolen; 2020 was a fraud. Not because of vote stuffing, but because Covid-19 put more scrutiny on postal voting and the system at large and the requisite Black, Latino,Ind'gen, and university-going votes couldn't be dumpstered in sufficient numbers. In short, the usual electoral fraud was prevented (Trump almost won anyway; four states finished with a 1% difference requiring recounts). MSM talking heads don't, apparently, understand the irony of their words, "most secure in American history," strongly suggesting that the others weren't. See Greg Palast.
Final rating for 2000 Mules: Five Ee-yores. Here we go again...
