For those paying attention to detail, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules provides evidence of what virtually everyone knows. Under the cover of COVID, and with the enormous boost from undisclosed financial backers, efforts were taken to deliver for tabulation as many ballots as possible, without regard to their source.

That this investigative work must be undertaken by documentarians and concerned citizens represents the unconscionable failure of our courts to examine the relevant evidence. As Wisconsin’s Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley wrote in her dissent to the majority decision in Trump v. Biden (2020),

The majority’s failure to act leaves an indelible stain on our most recent election. It will also profoundly and perhaps irreparably impact all local, statewide and national elections going forward, with grave consequences to the State of Wisconsin and significant harm to the rule of law (¶ 156 ).

Justice Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, made a similarly pointed observation when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the evidence or the law in the 2020 election cases:

These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules…. The refusal to do so is inexplicable. (Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Degraffenreid 141 S. Ct. 732 [Feb. 22, 2021] cert denied.).

Having failed in the aftermath of the 2020 election to put the legal and factual issues to rest, or even attempt to examine them, we are now faced with a litany of questions and a host of concerns that will, like the cancer they are, metastasize. 2000 Mules throws into sharp relief what the Courts failed to consider and, in the process, may have created a spark for a future reckoning with the disease.

This is not a secret cooked up by a cabal of Trumpists. Time magazine, acting as the Left’s mouthpiece, bragged about successful manipulation of election law and procedures in early 2021 (“The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”).

The Time article, of course, defends the extraordinary COVID-era mutilation of our election laws. But the author’s own words give away the game:

In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEO’s. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans…. Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time…. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”

Given these rather candid admissions, even a bit of “spiking the ball” by the Left, what D’Souza found was predictable. We know, for example, based on the report of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as Special Counsel, that Facebook pumped no less than $10.3 million into efforts to turn the election to Biden in Wisconsin.

2000 Mules confirms that large numbers of ballots were picked up and delivered by individuals to often-unmonitored drop boxes. This certainly appears to violate Georgia law limiting ballot delivery to family members, and Wisconsin law requiring ballots be returned “in person.” But one need not even be concerned about the legality of the exercise to conclude that the mass pick-up and delivery of absentee ballots occurred. The movie verifies by cell phone data what everyone involved already suspected, but did not want to publicly acknowledge.

The unwillingness of the Left and the legacy media to simply acknowledge what happened, like the thief running away from the crime scene, suggests guilt. “Guilt” need not refer to a criminal violation. Rather, it describes a general acknowledgment that the secret mass tracking, gathering, and delivery of ballots to boxes on street corners in the middle of night has the odor of something rotten. That is why almost any person who believes in a secret ballot and open, honest, fair elections, finds the whole 2020 election unsettling.

The Great Source of Free Government

An absentee ballot is not a secret ballot. It can be a secret ballot—if the voter individually takes the time to request the ballot, completes it alone at the kitchen table, seals it in an envelope, and personally mails or delivers it to the municipal clerk. That was the process understood by absentee voting for decades past. But as the Time magazine article so eloquently described, that was not the 2020 election process. Instead, left-wing activists, with a big lift from a billionaire tech mogul, worked to monitor and control every aspect of the process. No law was considered sacrosanct. Every convenience was an opportunity for exploitation. Every effort to question the Left’s tactics was attacked, often by personal invective and always with a viciousness rarely seen in the United States.

The genuine uneasiness the 2020 election evokes is a sign that there remains a good deal of common sense among the electorate. Every absentee ballot is properly viewed with skepticism, because there is no safeguard outside the polling place that cannot be manipulated. Wisconsin statutes acknowledge the obvious in listing the reasons absentee voting is untrustworthy:

The legislature finds that voting is a constitutional right, the vigorous exercise of which should be strongly encouraged. In contrast, voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place. The legislature finds that the privilege of voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse; to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election; to prevent undue influence on an absent elector to vote for or against a candidate or to cast a particular vote in a referendum; or other similar abuses (Wis. Stat. §6.84(1)).

This statement acknowledges the obvious—it is better, safer, and more trustworthy to have individuals vote at a polling place on election day. The list of nefarious deeds prevented by a requirement to vote at a polling place is indisputable.

So, when the Left or the media demand “proof” of actual votes that were cast fraudulently, they ignore the common-sense implications. When you remove all protections against a parade of horribles by mass absentee voting, fraud is inevitable and virtually impossible to prove after the fact. President James Carter and James Baker concluded the same in a Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, Building Confidence in the U.S. Elections (Sept. 2005—see especially pp. 35-46). So did the U.S. Department of Justice in Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses (8th ed. Dec. 2017, pp. 28-9). Mass delivery of ballots, mass absentee balloting, and mass secretive return of ballots all point to activity that is at best unsavory. That millions of people now distrust the 2020 election outcome is understandable. That others refuse to acknowledge the concerns of those millions is inexplicable—the proof is there for everyone to see.

2000 Mules will play an important role in how history regards the 2020 election. Ideally, it will also provide the needed impetus to reform our future elections. When the heat of the present dissipates, it may be possible for well-meaning individuals to address the obvious flaws in our absentee voting process. Given the courts have so completely failed in their duty to address the evidence and the law, it will ultimately be up to others to take action. That action cannot come soon enough.

At the founding of our republic, those who undertook that great task acknowledged the essential requirement for it to survive. “This great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure,” said Alexander Hamilton in a speech at New York’s Ratifying Convention (June 21, 1788). To state the obvious, the 2020 Presidential election was not pure, and its failures haunt us still.