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May 10, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:15:03

Examining 2000 Mules And The 2020 Election | Ep. 1491

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	The stock market continues its massive drop-off as Joe Biden struggles for an answer.
	The Biden White House finally condemns protesters trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices.
	Sort of.
	And we examine the new documentary about 2020 election fraud, 2,000 Mules.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	That's all the news in just one moment.
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	So, Democrats, as we've been talking about for the last week and a half, ever since the leaked Supreme Court decision on Roe versus Wade, have been betting that when it comes to November, everybody who is going to be voting will be voting on the basis of their position on abortion.
	And this is just not true.
	And the reason that this is just not true is because we are in a time of significant economic turmoil, and it has real ramifications for a huge number of people in the United States.
	Everything from nursing mothers to people with pensions.
	So, big story that no one is talking about in the United States today is that there is a huge shortage of formula.
	If you are a parent of a newborn and you use formula to supplement or use it instead of breast milk, You are having real trouble finding formula anywhere in the United States.
	Bethany Mandel has a piece over at Deseret News about this today.
	She says, Across the internet, as parents struggle to find enough formula to feed their babies, two responses are common from people who think the increasing outcry over the shortage is overblown.
	First, people tell mothers to just breastfeed.
	The others say, make it yourself.
	As a mother of five, one currently nursing, let me point out that any woman who has nursed a baby can tell you there's no just when it comes to breastfeeding.
	It's physically demanding and very often for any number of reasons, physically impossible.
	Some moms have to stay in the hospital while their baby goes home.
	Others have to take medication that makes their milk dangerous for the baby.
	Some bodies simply can't make enough milk.
	Some women have difficulty pumping.
	And then there are infants that need specialty formulas because of health issues.
	I have three kids.
	All three of them had to supplement with formula.
	As a result, fewer than 35% of American babies are exclusively breastfed at six months old.
	Just 15% of American babies are breastfed at age one.
	The others rely on formula as their primary source of nutrition.
	Some people say you should just make formula at home, but here is the thing.
	Well, you could mix evaporated milk, corn syrup, and water, and it might keep infants alive.
	There are a lot of kids who will fail to thrive.
	Some kids have special dietary needs.
	In other words, these formulas are pretty sophisticated.
	And if they're not formulas on the shelves, babies suffer.
	So, what exactly are parents supposed to do now?
	Well, the media apparently are not covering this in depth.
	The White House is talking about how they are trying to activate the FDA on this thing.
	But the simple fact of the matter is that the federal administration has had pretty much nothing to say.
	Last month, Senator Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island, wrote a letter to the Biden administration asking the heads of the Department of Agriculture and the FDA a series of questions, including what steps have your agencies taken to minimize the impact of the immediate shortage?
	When do your agencies expect baby formula inventory to be back to sufficient levels?
	What measures can be taken in the long term to minimize supply chain disruptions?
	But there are really no good answers that are forthcoming from the White House.
	So the inflation and supply chain shortages that this administration has exacerbated, all that has a massive impact on really the nation's most vulnerable people, small human babies.
	And then you have the problems that are accruing in the stock market, largely to pensioners.
	So here's the thing.
	If you're a wealthy person who invests in the stock market and the stock market goes down, you're going to be fine.
	The reason you're going to be fine is because you don't have to access the capital today.
	You just leave the money in the stock market.
	So for me, I have a lot of money in the stock market.
	The stock market's been dumping.
	I have a lot of money in Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin's been having a rough time.
	I'm just leaving it there.
	I don't need to have access to that money right now.
	And so, first rule of finance, do not sell when the market is low.
	But for people who need to access the capital right now, because let's say that they're living on a fixed income.
	Let's say they're living on a pension.
	And their money is tied up in their 401k.
	This is a real, real problem for them.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, state and local government retirement funds started the year with their worst quarterly return since the beginning of the pandemic.
	Things have only gone downhill since.
	Losses across both stock and bond markets delivered a double blow to the funds that manage more than $4.5 trillion in retirement savings for America's teachers, firefighters, and other public workers.
	And here we are talking about public sector retirement funds.
	All of those funds create massive deficits for the states in which they are located.
	Largely because when these funds are created, there is an estimate that is made as to how the funds are going to accrue over time.
	So for example, they will say there's going to be a 5% return on interest.
	There's going to be a 6% return on investment, right?
	They'll use these stats and usually they're very inflated.
	And they inflate the stats so as to pretend that they're not creating massive unfunded liabilities for states like California or Illinois.
	Well, when it turns out that the stock market radically underperforms as it has been doing for about the past year here, when that happens, it turns out that the deficits in these states get significantly worse.
	Retirement plans returned a median of minus 4% in the first quarter, according to data from the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service expected to be released on Tuesday.
	Recent losses further eroded holdings.
	The simultaneous declines in stocks and bonds are inflicting pain on household and institutional investors alike in 2022.
	The S&P 500 has returned minus 13.5% year-to-date through Friday.
	The Bloomberg U.S.
	Aggregate Bond Index, largely U.S.
	treasuries, highly rated corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities returned minus 10.5%.
	What's happening right now is that investors are basically just taking their money and they're sitting on it.
	They're not investing new money.
	They're not putting money into stocks.
	They're not putting money into bonds.
	They're actually sitting on cash because as the interest rates go up, the dollar is worth more, which is also why you're seeing a concomitant decline in the value of Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin tends to fluctuate inversely with the value of the U.S.
	dollar.
	When people think that the dollar is getting inflated, people buy Bitcoin.
	When people think that the dollar is deflating, people sell Bitcoin and they get into dollars.
	More on the cost of Joe Biden's inflation to pension funds in just one second.
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	Pension funds maintain huge portfolios of stocks, bonds, and other assets, wielding significant power on Wall Street, according to the Wall Street Journal, where their purchases and sales can shift prices and investment managers vie for their businesses.
	Their losses can raise costs for governments and workers, squeeze municipal budgets, drive up taxes.
	So, this is having a pretty significant impact.
	The Fed, for its part, is saying that we are on the verge, possibly, of a recession.
	They say elevated and persistent inflation, coupled with a sharp rise in interest rates, are among the greatest near-term risks to the U.S.
	economic system.
	According to the Federal Reserve.
	They also warned that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could affect financial stability.
	The central bank said, quote, further adverse surprises in inflation and interest rates, particularly if accompanied by a decline in economic activity, could negatively affect the financial system. A combination of higher inflation and rising interest rates could weaken the balance sheets of households and businesses, leading to an increase in delinquencies, bankruptcies and other forms of financial distress, which sounds a lot like a bubble bursting.
	Households could be affected by job losses, higher interest payments, reduction in house prices caused by higher mortgage rates, and decreased housing demand, which looks like the real estate problems of 2007-2008.
	Now, I don't think it's going to be as severe as 2007-2008 because I don't think that the These sort of long-term inflationary prospects from the Fed are quite as great.
	I mean, the economy was running really, really strong until just before COVID, and now we have an artificial bout of inflation combined with an artificial supply chain shortage.
	But all of those things said, the prospect that the increase in interest rates that the Fed is going to have to pursue to tamp inflation down, that that is going to tip the economy over to recession, pretty high probability at this point.
	As the Wall Street Journal points out, business credit quality could be eroded by a steep rise in rates that would increase business borrowing costs, which in turn could have negative consequences on employment and business investment.
	Because if it is now more expensive to borrow money, you're not going to borrow to fund speculative projects, and you're not going to borrow to invest.
	You can't arbitrage the difference between the interest rates and what you would expect to receive from the market, and so people just stop borrowing.
	So the Fed says that the vulnerabilities from businesses and household debt are still moderate, However, they warned that a prolonged conflict in Russia could have adverse consequences to U.S.
	financial markets.
	Stocks overall have slid to their lowest in 2022 as the route continued yesterday.
	Technology and energy shares led the declines as the Nasdaq fell more than 4%.
	The Wall Street Journal points out markets have been shaken this year by a flood of investor worries.
	Inflation is running its fastest pace in a decade.
	Economic growth is slowing.
	Federal Reserve is kicking off what analysts anticipate will be its most aggressive monetary policy tightening campaign since the 1980s.
	Few believe a recession is imminent, but few also believed inflation was imminent.
	The labor market has continued to add jobs at a rapid clip.
	Wages are climbing.
	The unemployment rate remains near a 50-year low.
	But economists say there's a growing probability of a slowdown in the coming year, with those surveyed by the Wall Street Journal estimating a 28% probability of a recession sometime in the next 12 months, up from 18% in January.
	By the way, if you extended that timeline out for about a year and a half or two years, which would take you to just before the presidential election, I promise you those numbers are not going to look like 28%.
	They'll look closer to 50%.
	The outlook for the global economy also is looking increasingly murky, according to investors.
	Supply chains already were snarled heading into this year.
	And by the way, China is about to head into new lockdowns.
	According to the Journal, China's trade with the rest of the world withered in April under pressure from COVID-19 lockdowns, sagging demand from overseas, signaling the global economy is losing steam as high inflation eats into consumer spending.
	Which, by the way, is why you were seeing a decline in shares of companies like eBay and Amazon as well.
	People are just spending less money because, frankly, money is more expensive now.
	The pullback in exports that have helped to power China's growth is compounding worries over a world economy already shaken by war in Europe, rising interest rates in the United States and Europe as well.
	China's exports rose 3.9% from a year earlier in April.
	That tumbled from 14.7% growth one month earlier.
	That was the weakest increase in two years.
	It matched the median forecast made by economists polled by the Wall Street Journal.
	Europe's prospects are gloomier still, with the 19-nation eurozone at risk of its third recession in two years, as household incomes collapse thanks to the rising cost of energy, a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions in response.
	A slowdown in China represents another major risk.
	China accounted for 18% of global GDP in 2021, behind the United States at 24%, but ahead of the EU at 18%.
	It accounted for 15% of all global goods exports, according to the WTO.
	China's weakness is a massive headwind for global growth, said Rory Green, head of China and Asia Research at consulting firm T.S.
	Lombard in London.
	Now what you'd want to do, policy-wise here, is make the American economy more lean and mean.
	In other words, spend less money on the government level, incentivize investment by lowering tax rates, relieve regulation, and allow America to take advantage of the fact that China is slowing down and Russia's having trouble.
	Instead, the Biden administration is pursuing global economic policy that is supposed to set things like global corporate tax rates at a minimum of 15%.
	So instead of us taking advantage of the fact that China is weakening, which would be the move right now, China is indeed a global enemy of the United States.
	Instead of doing that, we have tied ourselves more deeply, buckled ourselves more deeply into this car with China heading over this Thelma and Louise cliff here.
	It's very, very bad policy.
	It's very stupid policy.
	And it's having an impact, again, across the spectrum.
	Alrighty, coming up, it's not just that the stock market is taking it on the chin, so is Bitcoin.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Bitcoin is taking it on the chin.
	Bitcoin's price is now down 54% from its high.
	Now, as I've said, I'm a fan of cryptocurrency.
	I own some Bitcoin.
	I own some Ethereum.
	I own it as a long-term investment.
	I had no intention of selling it in the short term.
	Because again, the whole point of Bitcoin is that it is a digital limited resource.
	They're not generating more of.
	So it's sort of like digital real estate.
	So if you hold on to it long enough, then the price will go back up.
	However, the cryptocurrency market is sliding and people are trying to access that capital by selling off.
	Bitcoin fell to $31,000 on Monday evening, a 10% drop from Sunday at 5 p.m.
	Eastern Time, according to prices from Coindesk.
	Bitcoin's price has fallen 54% from its record high of $67,800 in November.
	from its record high of 67,000 in November, 67,800 actually in November.
	And that of course was due to the inflationary worries.
	It's now on track for the worst five day stretch since the five days ending March 16th, 2020 when it fell almost 38%.
	As you will recall, that was the very beginning of the pandemic.
	Ethereum also fell to $2,286, almost 10% below the price on Sunday evening.
	So digital assets, again, people are looking for more solid assets.
	They are simply stocking dollars up at this point.
	And this is what financial advisors are telling people to do.
	I mean, according to the Wall Street Journal, Doing nothing right now is easier said than done, but that's what you should be doing.
	The best strategy in moments of volatility is one financial advisors say that is one of the least satisfying.
	Don't do anything.
	When losses mount, it's human nature to want to do something.
	Behavioral economics has shown.
	But when does it pay to act?
	When should traditional portfolios be scrapped?
	Advisors say whether you do nothing or do something may depend primarily if you are closer in age to To King Lear or Cordelia.
	In other words, for younger investors, if you don't have to access the capital, don't access the capital.
	Just leave it there.
	This is correct.
	I've told people for a long time.
	Buy assets, leave your assets there if you are younger.
	You should be risk-seeking when you are young.
	That is the time to do it.
	But here's the bottom line for Joe Biden.
	None of this is good news.
	All this is really, really bad news.
	And no one believes Joe Biden when he says that his top priority is fighting inflation.
	Because until five seconds ago, he was denying that inflation was even a pressing problem.
	And then he was blaming it on Vladimir Putin and supply chain crises.
	So nobody believes that this president can fix any of this or has any intention of fixing any of this.
	Again, one of the things that you watch in the investment market is that when the market goes down, rich people get a lot richer because they buy up all the assets.
	Like if you had taken my advice back in March 2020, you would have done great.
	When the market tumbled in March 2020, I told my investment advisors to double whatever I was investing in the stock market because when the market goes down, that's when you buy.
	I told everybody.
	You can go back and listen to the podcast.
	I told everybody.
	When the market dumped at the beginning of COVID, if you could afford it, now was the time to buy more into the market because eventually it would be worth more.
	and certainly don't sell.
	Okay, so that is the strategy that you should be taking.
	But the simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to the US government, they are not taking advantage of the fact that some of our global opponents are on the ropes.
	Instead, as I say, they're tying themselves more closely to these failing economies, like the economies of Europe and of China, which is really foolish strategy.
	So nobody believes Joe Biden when he says that he's gonna solve inflation.
	My top priority is fighting inflation and lowering prices for families and things they need.
	Today's announcement is going to give millions of families a little more, a little more breathing room to help them pay their bills.
	You know, we work with Democrats and Republicans and business and nonprofits to make this happen.
	And we're going to keep working to fight inflation and lower costs to all American families for a lot of other things as well.
	Nobody believes this, and the fact that he says it with such wild enthusiasm and articulation is one of the reasons why no one believes him.
	Which is why the Democrats are, of course, attempting to shift the entire conversation over to the abortion debate, which, again, has merely been relegated by the Supreme Court, if this decision turns out to be the decision that's made by the Supreme Court.
	It has merely been relegated back to the states.
	That's all that happened here.
	Mississippi will have different laws than Illinois.
	Illinois will have different laws than Alabama.
	And that's just the way this is going to work.
	Which means it is not, in fact, a national federal issue that is really going to affect elections, which is exactly what the polls are showing.
	But the Biden White House, they don't want to talk about inflation because they have no plan on inflation.
	Their plan, as always and forever, is just to demonize everybody that they disagree with on things like abortion for electoral purposes.
	But it's not going to work.
	Because once again, Americans, broad spectrum, Not in favor of tons of restrictions in the first trimester, in favor of pretty significant restrictions in the second trimester, in favor of basically total restriction in the third trimester.
	Which, by the way, mirrors world opinion in places like Europe.
	And when it comes to places like Mississippi, pretty heavy public opinion demonstrating that people are extremely pro-life.
	In Illinois, nobody is pro-life.
	So the Biden administration banking on abortion to save them here, as I've been saying for days now, I think is really poor strategy.
	And yet this is exactly what you're seeing the Biden administration do.
	So yesterday, Jen Psaki said, Joe Biden won't stand by and not call out the ultra MAGA behavior.
	Ultra MAGA.
	This is their new phraseology.
	It's like Putin's price hike.
	They have these little memes.
	They try to sneak into the media and the media will go along with it.
	They'll start calling people ultra MAGA, not just MAGA.
	It's amazing how we went from Donald Trump is the root of all evil and therefore MAGA is basically white supremacy to, you know, the other MAGA people that maybe there's some MAGA people who aren't, but Ultra MAGA is the problem.
	So I don't know what language they can go to beyond Ultra MAGA.
	Ultra super duper pooper scooper MAGA.
	That'll be like the most extreme crazies, according to these people.
	But Joe Biden won't stand by while Ultra MAGA MAGA Ultra has its way with the country.
	I will No, right now.
	All three elected bodies in the United States right now are controlled by Democrats.
	Here is Jen Psaki.
	He's also not going to stand by and not call out what he sees as ultra-MAGA behavior, ultra-MAGA policies that are out of the mainstream of the country and are not in the interest of the American people.
	Whether that is efforts to prevent a woman from making choices about her own health care, or whether that is Chairman Scott's policy and proposals that would raise taxes on people making less than $100,000 a year.
	Again, this dog ain't gonna hunt.
	Jen Psaki, though, the idea from the Democrats, and this is where they're really gonna get themselves in serious trouble, is they think that, you know, Barry Goldwater once said, extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.
	Moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.
	For the Democrats, extremism in the pursuit of abortion is no vice.
	Moderation in the defense of abortion is no virtue.
	And so they've actually gotten more and more extreme, not only in their rhetoric, but also in their action.
	So, Jen Psaki suggested that we are at risk of completely outlawing abortion in the country, which, I mean, her mouth to God's ears, but no, we actually are not.
	And so because she thinks that this is the risk, this means that Democrats are now coming out and embracing some of the most absurdly extreme policy and attitudes with regard to abortion I've ever seen.
	I think we're at serious risk.
	You heard, you noted, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans in Congress are talking about a national ban on a woman's right to choose.
	There were a number, I think it was something, I can't get the exact number here, but dozens and dozens of Republicans in Congress signed on to the Mississippi court case and advocating for severe restrictions on a woman's right to choose and a woman's right to make choices about Her own body.
	So what exactly is this going to drive Democrats to do in the middle of such extremism?
	What exactly are Democrats going to do about the answer is they're going to start green lighting all sorts of behavior that is really, really egregious, which, of course, shouldn't come as anything strange to most Americans.
	There's the suggestion all the way through 2020.
	That riots were merely people who were a little bit too enthusiastic in getting out of hand over a serious American issue, systemic police racism.
	So when it comes to the defense of killing the unborn, then it's, well, you know, even if people get a little out of hand, you got to understand where they are coming from.
	Already coming up, the Democrats are now trying to get all the senators on record in favor of abortion until kids are like 11 years old.
	This seems like a poor strategy.
	Talk about that in a moment.
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	So on the Democratic side of the aisle, Chuck Schumer, who is the most inept majority leader in American history.
	I mean, I'm having a tough time coming up with a comparison.
	Chuck Schumer is now going to call for a vote, a Senate vote, on legalizing abortion federally, forcing states not to legislate on the issue.
	All the way up to nine months, which is supported by virtually no one.
	Democrats like to say that pro-life's an unpopular position.
	Total pro-choice is a more unpopular position than total pro-life.
	That is a wildly unpopular position in the United States.
	And yet he's gonna try and get senators on record to do what?
	This is crazy talk from Chuck Schumer, politically speaking.
	This is no longer an abstract exercise.
	This is the real deal.
	And everyone's eyes are on them.
	So we can always hope, and we must have this vote.
	Every senator must show where he or she stands.
	So, um, that's a strategy.
	But it's not the real strategy.
	The real strategy is they're going to shout at the justices, try to intimidate the justices.
	So Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who has presided over mass violence in her own city, There's sort of a running gun battle over who was the worst mayor in America over the course of the past several years.
	We had de Blasio in New York fighting with Lori Lightfoot over here, and the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler.
	Eric Garcetti signed in from time to time, but Lori Lightfoot, I think, was the leader in the clubhouse in terms of just being the worst mayor in America.
	So here is Mayor Lori Lightfoot doubling down.
	She tweeted out that this was a call to arms.
	Now, I'm old enough to remember when language like this was considered violent by the media.
	And if you're a Republican who said, say, leading up to the 2020 election, this is a call to arms to defend our elections.
	This meant that you were an extremist who was going to pursue violence.
	Here is Lori Lightfoot using the phrase call to arms and everybody going like, oh, it's all right.
	She's just Lori.
	We can't just be angry.
	We've got to be intentional.
	We've got to be dedicated.
	And that's why I'm calling upon fellow elected officials across the country and particularly my fellow mayors to join me in making the pledge that we made today, which is a justice for all pledge.
	And fundamentally, it reaffirms Chicago as a welcoming city, a city that doesn't discriminate, and a city that's going to stand with women.
	That is her defending a tweet in which she suggested that there needed to be a call to arms for LGBTQIA plus minus divided by a sign, percentage sign tilde.
	That's what she was going to be all about, this call to arms.
	And you're seeing in the media, people doing the same sort of thing.
	So for example, CNN's Laura Jarrett, she actually defended protests outside justices' homes.
	By the way, Justice Alito has now been moved to an undisclosed location, as he should be.
	All of the justices at this point should be in undisclosed locations thanks to the The uptick in violent threats and intimidation efforts that are being made by the mainstream left at this point.
	Here is Laura Jarrett on CNN.
	The justices have security.
	So far, all of the protests have seemed overwhelmingly non-violent.
	There are plenty of protests that happen every single day in this country, around the country, at abortion clinics, blocking women from getting into clinics.
	And we don't cover those as if there's four alarm fires.
	And so, yes, there are going to be protests in front of Kavanaugh's house because people are angry.
	And as long as they stay non-violent, I think for most of the people who are watching it, you can understand where they're coming from.
	So actually, by local ordinance, you're generally not allowed to protest outside people's private homes.
	And there is a difference in nature between protesting outside businesses, like Planned Parenthood, and protesting outside the homes of abortion doctors, for example.
	Going to someone's house is not the same thing as going to their business, as everyone who has a house and lives in a place has ever known.
	But again, the left is now defending this sort of activity on a broad level.
	Sunny Hostin, she did the same thing over at The View.
	Well, I think it is terrible that a justice would have to go into hiding.
	I think it is really clear to the justices now that, as Anna mentioned, 64 to 66% of Americans believe that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade, right?
	And so that being said, maybe these protests and maybe this outcry gives Chief Justice Roberts some leverage for a more moderate approach.
	Because we saw during the hearing that he was looking for a way, a moderate way to handle this case.
	In other words, maybe the intimidation will be successful and actually force the justices to change their opinion by going to their houses.
	Which is against the law, okay?
	It's against the law to intimidate or threaten justices in order to achieve a difference in their opinions.
	So yesterday, Jen Psaki tried to split the baby, literally and figuratively, as always.
	She suggested that, while she was not a fan of protests that violate the law, she's for people peacefully protesting.
	So here's what she actually had to say yesterday on this topic.
	We're certainly not suggesting anyone break any laws.
	I would note that the president's view has long been, and I tweeted this earlier this morning and repeated and made a number of these comments last week as well, that violence, threats, and intimidation have no place in political Yes, we are a country that promotes democracy, and we certainly allow for peaceful protest in a range of places in the country.
	None of it should violate the law.
	No one is suggesting that.
	And it should never resort to violence, to threats, to intimidation in any way, shape, or form.
	But that is what our position is and the President's position is.
	You know what she has not said right there?
	Don't go to their houses.
	And she has no violence, threats, or vandalism.
	So I'm just going to point out right here that it seems as though the treatment of Jen Psaki's comments by the press is very different from the treatment of President Trump's comments on, say, January 6th.
	Because you heard what she said right there.
	She said no violence, no threats, no vandalism.
	But she is in favor of peaceful protest.
	You will recall that what President Trump actually said on January 6th, which led to the idea that he was guilty of incitement, according to the media, was direct quote, everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. And everybody sort of ignored that line because they wanted to claim that he was actively encouraging violence.
	So here is the deal.
	If one of those things is actively encouraging violence, then the other thing is also actively encouraging violence.
	And if one of those things is not, then the other thing is not.
	But the reality is you don't actually have to engage in violence, threat, or intimidation to be violating the law.
	So the Washington Post tried to spin what Psaki was saying into a condemnation of people protesting at houses because the editors of the Washington Post At least still have enough common sense to realize this is a losing issue for them, that the image of people trying to intimidate justices at their homes is an ugly one.
	So they say, quote, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday on Twitter that President Biden abhors violence, threats, or vandalism, and that judges must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety.
	This was a welcome clarification of the noncommittal statement Psaki made on Friday.
	I mean, it's still kind of noncommittal, to be fair.
	And then they point out, a Montgomery County ordinance permits protests, marches in residential areas, but bars at stationary gatherings, arguably such as those in front of Roberts and Kavanaugh residents.
	A federal law prohibits pickets or parades at any judge's residence with the intent of influencing a jurist in the discharge of a duty.
	These are limited and justifiable restraints on where and how people exercise the right to assembly.
	So it seems like the Washington Post is starting to walk this thing back.
	But the fact that they have to is pretty telling.
	And you're starting to see this sort of on all sides, is that the left, in their pursuit of their pro-abortion fanaticism, they're starting to realize that some of the methods that they've taken look ugly to people and people don't like them.
	And so you're starting to see them do things like, for example, try to claim that the leak of the Supreme Court majority opinion here was actually the fault of the right, which is hilarious.
	I cannot imagine a justification by which a conservative inside the court leaked the decision early in order to get people to protest Justice Alito so that he would run away from his house.
	You're going to have to explain the logic of this one to me.
	But this has become one of the talking points in the media left, is that we don't know who did the leak.
	We don't know who did the leak.
	Well, I mean, I can kind of tell who did the leak by your reaction to who did the leak.
	If this had been a leak of Obergefell, for example, early, The leaker would have been castigated.
	It would have been a violation of all norms.
	It would have been the worst thing that ever happened.
	We would know his name.
	He would be prosecuted.
	He'd certainly be thrown off the court.
	Right now, however, you've got members of the left who are celebrating.
	Half the left is celebrating, and half the left realizes it's a bad look, and so they're trying to blame conservatives for it.
	So, for example, you have CNN's legal experts saying, there's no way a liberal law clerk would have leaked this thing.
	No way.
	Well, I mean, I can imagine.
	Yeah, I mean, that is the most probable solution, yes, is that a liberal law clerk leaked this thing.
	The three remaining liberals on the court, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, first of all, from what I know of them, they would never have been party to anything like this, and I doubt that their clerks would have been.
	I doubt their clerks would have been.
	Based on what?
	Based on what?
	You have liberal law professors at a place like Georgetown openly calling for intimidation of Supreme Court justices.
	But you doubt that liberal law clerks would do this?
	Why?
	Based on what?
	You have Supreme Court NPR reporter Nina Totenberg saying the same thing, saying, oh yeah, it was probably somebody conservative who leaked this.
	Uh-huh, sure.
	It can only, in all likelihood, have come from a justice that I think is less likely, Perhaps one of the clerks and the leading theory is a conservative clerk who was afraid that one of the conservatives might be persuaded by Chief Justice Roberts to join a much more moderate opinion.
	And then there's another theory that it was an outraged liberal clerk.
	There's another theory.
	The leading theory, according to Nina Totenberg, is that it was conservative.
	Uh-huh.
	Uh-huh.
	Okay, but here's the thing.
	We know that it was most likely somebody who's on the left.
	Why?
	Because of the widespread celebration of the leak on the left and the widespread consternation on the right.
	We literally had an MSNBC guest named Lori Kilmartin yesterday saying that she wants to have sex with the clerk who leaked this thing and then abort the baby, which just demonstrates full scale how delightful the left is on this issue.
	I would like to find out who the leaker is so I could make sweet love to that person.
	Because that person is a hero to me.
	Okay?
	And if the leaker, a lot of people are saying it could be a conservative.
	If the leaker is a Republican, and if I get pregnant during our lovemaking, I will joyfully abort our fetus and let them know.
	Killing babies is hilarious, guys.
	It's so much fun.
	So, why do I think it was somebody on the left?
	Well, because the left wants to have sex with the people who actually... People on the left want to have sex with the leaker.
	And, or, we shouldn't even be concerned about this.
	Maisie Hirono, the idiot senator from Hawaii, she says that, you know, Republicans, why are they even worried about the leak?
	There's no reason to worry about the leak.
	Stop worrying about the leak.
	Stop it, you.
	All the Republicans talk about is how shocked they are at the leak.
	Well, they're not shocked that women in this country are going to lose the right they thought they had for 50 years.
	And what's going to follow is at least one state after this leak has already passed a law that will make abortion a felony.
	So what are they going to do?
	They're going to go after women.
	They're going to go after doctors.
	We're going to create a whole new crime, federal crime, out of this whole Uh, controversy, if you can call it that, and this is more than a controversy.
	This is women's right to control our own bodies.
	Okay, so, um, yes, probably the leak was from the right.
	Uh-huh, uh-huh.
	Alrighty, coming up.
	You can't trust our media, obviously, because everything is filtered through their prism.
	Great example of that.
	Only a few years late.
	Now the media is figuring out who was behind the Steele dossier, and it is unbelievable this thing was ever taken seriously.
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	If you haven't checked out season two of my show, Debunked, you need to do so.
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	You deserve to know how to answer those arguments, right?
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	So meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has a really, really deep dive today.
	On the Steele dossier.
	The reason that I bring up the Steele dossier is because, again, it is important to recognize that pretty much every story we see is only through the prism of how the media like to cover the story.
	And it remains a stunning fact that the media are extremely left, that they cover for left-wing agendas until approximately two years after that left-wing agenda gets completely blown up.
	This is why on abortion, for example, you literally had a CBS reporter whose job it was to cover abortion who now works as the comms person for a pro-abortion organization.
	Her name is Kate Smith.
	How do you react to the conservatives who say you were biased in your CBS coverage?
	Anyone who doesn't fall by their rules, who doesn't, who isn't anti-abortion is against them.
	So if you're trying to cover this from a neutral point of view and you're including both sides, they automatically think you are against them because they view doctors as anti or excuse me for abortion and they view them as biased even though these are doctors we're talking about so I really reject all of that criticism again I think these people just don't understand how newsrooms actually work they don't have that kind of experience but yeah completely reject that
	criticism. I'm glad that she rejects the criticism Also, the criticism happens to be well taken and well spoken.
	I mean, she literally reported as an objective reporter on abortion, but she says that her pro-abortion bosses were vetting her to make sure that she wasn't pro-abortion.
	Uh-huh.
	I believe it.
	And the reason, again, that I bring that up is because The Wall Street Journal has a long piece today about the Steele dossier.
	The Steele dossier was reported credibly by mainstream reporters for several years.
	It was the basis for the Carter Page FISA warrant.
	It was also the basis for a huge amount of media speculation about how Donald Trump was actually a cat's paw of the Russians leading up to the 2020 election.
	And now the Wall Street Journal basically points out that everybody knew this thing was crap from the very beginning, and it got circulated among a group of friends, then blown up inside the government by a group of people who are like-minded.
	Here's what the Wall Street Journal writes.
	Hours after the publication in early 2017 of a dossier claiming President-elect Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steer the U.S.
	election, a public relations executive in Washington tapped out an email to a client whose company was cited in the document, cast as a villain.
	I'm hoping this is exposed as fake news, Charles Dolan wrote.
	I will check with some folks in the intel world to see if they know who produced this.
	The dossier, published by BuzzFeed News, used codenames to conceal its sources.
	Some were close to Kremlin corridors of power, it said.
	The dossier proceeded to rivet U.S.
	political class, win credibility within the FBI, cast a shadow over the first two years of the Trump presidency, and cost millions of dollars for investigations and lawsuits, only to eventually be mostly discredited.
	One reason was where much of the dossier's information came from.
	Anything but Kremlin insiders.
	Instead, a Wall Street Journal review found, many of the dossier's key details originated with a few people gossiping after they'd been brought together over a minor corporate publicity contract.
	The dossier's author, former British spy Christopher Steele, relied mainly on a Washington researcher to gather information.
	According to FBI notes of an interview with that researcher, Igor Danchenko, he said he wasn't comfortable with the assignment, and some of his sources were old friends, one a former schoolmate, whose information Steele then exaggerated.
	It wasn't until last November prosecutors identified a man they pinpoint as one of Danchenko's most important sources.
	Based on an indictment of Mr. Danchenko for lying to the FBI, one of his key sources was none other than Mr. Dolan, the PR executive who tried to reassure the client.
	The indictment says that Donchenko relied on PR Executive One for what became a dossier note about upheaval on Trump's campaign staff.
	The indictment also suggests that Donchenko drew on PR Executive One, since confirmed to be Dolan, for part of the dossier's most lurid allegations that Russian agents once secretly videotaped prostitutes cavorting in Trump's Moscow hotel room.
	Trump denied that ever happened, denied other allegations in the dossier as well.
	Special Counsel Robert Mueller included no evidence of such a hotel episode in his lengthy report on Russian election meddling.
	Donchenko pled not guilty to lying to the FBI.
	His attorney didn't respond to questions for comment.
	Dolan also declined to comment.
	Steele, who said the dossier was meant as raw intelligence, never intended for public consumption, did not respond to a request for comment.
	How someone like a Washington PR operative could be conflated with a Trump or Kremlin insider goes to the heart of the story behind the dossier, says the Wall Street Journal.
	It is one that can be told in greater detail thanks to particulars of the Danchenko indictment and documents associated with Dolan's work, as well as to interviews with acquaintances of Dolan and Danchenko, which provided the basis for the reporting.
	Couched in the language of conspiracy and professional spycraft, the dossier quickly became the lexicon of opposition to Mr. Trump, was devoured by a country hungry for information about a Kremlin effort to influence elections that was real, but the dossier was wrong in nearly all its salient details.
	The way it was compiled was random, haphazard, and amateurish.
	U.S.
	government investigations found some evidence that Trump campaign held furtive meetings with Russians involved in influencing the election.
	Mueller charged dozens of Russian entities and individuals with engaging in a true-pronged attack of disinformation and hacking.
	But Mueller reported no evidence the campaign conspired with Russia's military intelligence apparatus as it hacked into the email of the DNC.
	The dossier took real events like Trump visiting, such as a Trump advisor visiting Moscow, and expounded on them by describing meetings with high-level Kremlin officials, but there were no corroborating evidentiary details about any of that.
	While investigations and court battles have peeled back many origins of the dossier's claims, any trial of Donchenko could provide further insight.
	The special counsel looking into the FBI's handling of the Russia probe, John Durham, continues to investigate.
	One remaining riddle is whether the dossier's misinformation was purely careless or might have included disinformation sown by the Kremlin itself.
	So basically what happened is that Danchenko and Dolan were moving in the same circles as consultants.
	They and a third friend overseas named Olga Galkina spent hours trading gossip.
	Danchenko passed some of that chatter on to Christopher Steele.
	Steele then at the behest of Fusion GPS put together this dossier, which was then funneled by friends of Hillary Clinton to the FBI.
	And this was all treated as closely guarded Kremlin secrets.
	What brought Donchenko, Dolin, and Galkina together was a marketing campaign funded by the Dolin PR client whose company was cited in the dossier.
	That person was Alexey Gubarov, a Russian internet entrepreneur living in Cyprus, who decided in early 2016 to launch a U.S.
	marketing campaign to burnish the image of his cloud server company.
	Gubarov founded his first company at age 24.
	A decade later, he founded a new one, Servers.com.
	He helped with leapfrog competitors with a global VPN system.
	He hired Galkina as his press secretary and then sent her to Washington, where she hooked up with Donchenko.
	Who hooked up with Dolan.
	And then they all basically concocted all this information, which got funneled to Steele.
	So, it is just a demonstration, full scale, of, by the way, how perverse and bad the FBI was at its job throughout this entire process.
	That this was treated as such realistic information that it was presented, remember, by James Comey to Donald Trump, and that was used as a hook to allow BuzzFeed to release the dossier in public view.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	So, the combination of conspiratorial anti-Trump sentiment and absolute incompetence basically held up the country for a couple of years and allowed the left to claim, for years, that the election of 2016 had been thwarted by Russian interference.
	That was the claim.
	And they still hold to that, by the way.
	They still hold that Donald Trump was not properly elected in 2016.
	Which brings us to claims now on the other side of the aisle that the 2020 election was perverted.
	So, first things to say about the 2020 election.
	My own view of the 2020 election is that there's not sufficient evidence to show that pure election fraud, meaning manufactured ballots, ballots of dead people, ballots of people who didn't actually vote and were filled out falsely, that that twisted the election to the extent that Joe Biden won the election over Donald Trump.
	I've said before that I think that the election was rigged in the following ways.
	One, the media clearly wanted Trump to lose, and so they perverted all the informational dissemination in order to achieve their desired effect, including shutting down the Hunter Biden story one month before the election, covering details about COVID that were directly aimed at Trump, covering it as though it was Trump's fault that COVID was spreading in the United States despite the fact that it was spreading everywhere.
	Completely ignoring Joe Biden entirely for the entirety of the campaign.
	So the media bias was exorbitant and extraordinary throughout the 2020 campaign and really since 2015.
	So that was factor number one.
	Factor number two was the changing of the election laws in places like Pennsylvania in ways that I think were illegal.
	I don't think that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had the power to simply shift how elections worked in the state of Pennsylvania against the Pennsylvania Constitution instead of the legislature, for example, and wildly expand early voting and wildly expand absentee balloting and all the rest.
	So when you shift the rules and you shift the media coverage, that is enough to, in colloquial speak, rig the election.
	Now that is a different claim than the election was rigged through hard voter fraud.
	So there is a, and by the way, the proof is in the pudding as far as the expansion of the voter base.
	I mean, I was looking at this just before the show.
	I was looking at the total number of votes in US presidential elections since 2000, right?
	So for the last 20 years.
	So in 2000, there were about 101 million votes in the election.
	That was because everything was going pretty well.
	We're in the middle of dot-com boom, no major foreign crises.
	There was not even really a perception that Gore and Bush were all that far apart.
	They're perceived as pretty similar in a lot of different policy ways.
	You didn't get high turnout that year.
	I was only 16 in 2000, but I remember that really it was only after the election when it became clear how close it was that people really became fascinated with it.
	By 2004, the number of votes in the election was now 121 million.
	And that was because people have been activated by September 11th.
	Things got extraordinarily partisan after 2000 because the election was so close.
	So a lot more people showed up.
	So here are the total number of votes, rounding, for the elections from 2004 to 2008.
	Okay, so basically within the same range, even as the population expanded fairly dramatically during that period.
	So between 120 and 130 million.
	129 million. Okay, so basically within the same range, even as the population expanded fairly dramatically during that period. So between 120 and 130 million. 2020, there were 155 million votes cast. 155 million votes cast.
	That is an increase of 26 million votes over 2016.
	So that is a massive expansion of the voter base.
	And a massive expansion of the voter base was largely done through early voting and early balloting, which is unprecedented in size and scope.
	In 2020, thanks to the changes of the rules due to the pandemic, some of those rules changed in illegal ways that I think did expand the possibilities for voter fraud.
	But again, in order to prove voter fraud, you have to show that ballots were illegally cast, Not just that they were illegally brought to ballot boxes.
	You have to show they were illegally cast.
	You have to show that people were disenfranchised or that people who are dead were franchised, for example.
	And you can do that sort of stuff with signature verification.
	You can actually see if people complained about, for example, they tried to go vote and it turns out that somebody already voted for them.
	Or you check the voter rolls and you find that a bunch of dead people voted.
	Or you find that a bunch of people who no longer live in the state voted.
	That sort of stuff you can actually check.
	So this brings us to a new documentary called 2000 Mules.
	Now, as I've said for a while, I think the most perverse area of American electoral law is ballot harvesting.
	I think it is horrible.
	I think it is corrupt.
	I think that it is rife with the possibility of voter fraud.
	Basically what ballot harvesting is, is people who are servants of a political party or political point of view, go to other people's houses and pick up their ballots and then supposedly drop them in drop boxes or take them to a mailbox and drop them in for somebody.
	And the problem with this is twofold.
	One, it allows the best funded party machinery to basically just go home to home and then get people who weren't really gonna vote to vote And so basically instead of the voting procedure being those who are motivated to vote, go and vote.
	And then we tally those people.
	It turns into who has the best.
	Active voter mobilization.
	It's not a voter mobilization.
	It's an activist mobilization.
	Go to the door, knock on the door.
	So if you're a Democrat, you'll only knock on Democratic doors and you get a bunch of people who may not have voted or didn't care enough about voting to vote Democrat.
	And if you're really well funded, you then take all of those ballots and you drop them in a mailbox, right?
	That's problem number one.
	So basically voting now becomes almost entirely the outcome of how many doors are knocked on in order to pick up ballots by the activists.
	It's not about convincing people.
	It's not about finding independent people and door knocking them.
	It's about going to people who are registered as a member of your party, but who didn't care enough to vote, and then going and basically pressuring them a little bit into giving you their ballot.
	And so that's problem number one, which I think, again, is pretty corrupt.
	I think everybody should have to vote in person unless you have a compelling reason not to vote in person.
	You're unhealthy, you have a health condition, you're not going to be in the United States during that period.
	Absent those conditions, you should have to take time off and go to the ballot box and wait in line and go vote.
	Because a baseline level of motivation, I think, is useful, frankly.
	Okay, so that's problem number one with ballot harvesting.
	Problem number two with ballot harvesting is when you have activists for a particular political group, if they get an empty ballot, the possibility of them going and punching a Chad, for example, is higher.
	Because they know what their job is.
	It's the possibility of either you go to somebody's house, you knock on the door, and the person's like, who should I vote for?
	You're like, you know what, let me just do it for you.
	Boom, boom, boom, right?
	And you just vote for them.
	Or, you know what, vote for who you want, and then give me the ballot, and then you get back in the car, and don't worry, I'll seal the ballot for you once I'm in the car, and then you go back into the car and you start punching out the, right?
	So that, that, there are a bunch of problems with ballot harvesting.
	It is pretty certain that this is the way a bunch of red districts in, for example, Orange County, California, suddenly shifted blue in the year 2018.
	So, I have a real problem with ballot harvesting.
	It is legal in certain states.
	Now, in other states, it is legal for me to take my family's ballots and drop them off, but nobody else.
	And that happens to be true in a lot of the swing states.
	So the basic thesis of 2,000 Mules, which is this new documentary from Dinesh D'Souza, it is rooted in research that was done by the group run by Catherine Engelbrecht called True the Vote.
	I know Catherine, I know True the Vote.
	I think they do good work.
	So basically they compiled an enormous amount of digital data in the swing states.
	And what they say that the digital data shows is that there are people who are working with unspecified nonprofits And that they were going to these nonprofits, picking up ballots, and then going to multiple drop boxes, which have been instituted purely for the purposes of COVID, and dropping off five, six votes at a time in these various drop boxes, basically in order to perform ballot harvesting, what they call ballot trafficking.
	In order to do this in states where it was not legal to do ballot harvesting or ballot trafficking.
	And that is the basic claim.
	Now, there are a few claims that are not made in this film.
	They're kind of implied, but they're not made.
	And Catherine doesn't make those claims.
	The people she's working with don't make those claims.
	One, that the ballots that are actually inserted into the ballot boxes, into the ballot drop boxes, are fraudulent.
	So there's no actual claim that these are fake ballots or that somebody who is dead voted or that this is all people picking up the ballots of demented people, people with dementia at nursing homes and then filling out the ballots for them.
	They kind of imply it, but they don't actually make that hard claim, which is a distinction between, again, all the ways which I've discussed about the rigging of the election procedures, which I kind of agree with, and the hard election fraud decided this.
	So what the documentary shows is super troubling and should certainly be investigated.
	It also does not even really make the allegation that it was pure election fraud, people manufacturing ballots, people faking ballots, people smuggling empty ballots in in the dead of night to Fulton County in giant boxes and then running them through the scanning machines like we were hearing about.
	Early on, after the election.
	Those allegations are not made in the film.
	So I want to go through some of these allegations.
	Then I want to go through some of the left-wing fact checks of the documentary, which I find pretty non-compelling.
	And then I want to ask a few questions.
	So the 2000 Mules documentary, which again, I think that if you have interest in this sort of stuff, you definitely should watch it because it'll allow you to kind of examine the claims that I'm going to make about the documentary as to what I think is compelling and what I think is not quite as compelling.
	So let's start with the first clip about using geolocating.
	Okay, so the claim here is that they used geolocation data, right?
	Your cell phone can track you, basically.
	And you can use geolocation data to see where people went on particular dates.
	They gathered trillions, trillions of pieces of data about where people were from advertisers.
	And then they were able to basically track people's cell phones.
	And what they could see is that there were a lot of people who were going, apparently, between unspecified nonprofit groups, presumably the groups that were actually doing the ballot harvesting, and then to multiple drop boxes.
	Right, going to 20, 30 drop boxes, which is super suspicious.
	And it does look like you are now trying to essentially perform ballot trafficking or ballot harvesting.
	There's no reason if I'm if I'm going to drop off my family's ballots at a drop box, I ain't going to 20 drop boxes.
	And the idea here is the reason that they're doing it this way, as opposed to just dropping 200 ballots in a drop box.
	The reason that they're actually doing this is because they wish to avoid the the view of the authorities.
	And so they are going to these drop boxes and dropping four or five ballots off at a time.
	And they're doing this hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times.
	So here is Catherine Engelbrecht discussing what exactly geolocating was used to do here.
	These techniques are used every single day by law enforcement.
	Across the country, we bought 10 trillion signals.
	So, what was the criterion that you set?
	Final decision was, they had to have been to 10 or more Dropboxes, meaning unique visits inside of a space, and five or more visits to one or more of these organizations.
	Let's identify a large number of Dropboxes and multiple trips, and that way we're going to catch Not all the offenders, right?
	But the worst offenders.
	Okay, so the basic idea was that they drew kind of boxes around the drop boxes, and then they drew boxes around these non-profits, and they could see how people were moving.
	This is the claim with regard to geolocating.
	Now, as I'm going to say in a second, I'm not an expert on geolocation, so I don't know, you know, how specific geolocation is.
	My understanding is very, very specific.
	At least specific enough to tell whether people went by the Dropboxes, whether they stopped at the Dropbox, whether they stopped at the non-profit, or whether they were just driving by is a different story.
	But if you can see a pattern of travel that shows people, and the only path that they are taking that day, right?
	It's not like they're just driving around the city and they happen to pass these things.
	They're going to every Dropbox and they're driving past every Dropbox.
	That looks really, really suspicious.
	Okay, so they actually do this at one point in 2000 Mules.
	They actually show a mules movement through what they call these people mules, like drug mules, because they're ballot mules, supposedly.
	This is in Atlanta.
	What you see here on the screen is a single person on a single day in Atlanta, Georgia.
	They went to 28 Dropboxes in five organizations in one day.
	What are the orange dots?
	Those are Dropboxes.
	That's super suspicious, obviously.
	If you have one person who's stopping at 30 drop boxes, that's really, really, really suspicious.
	And then they make claims that there are tons of people who are doing this in, for example, Philadelphia.
	There are lots of people in Philadelphia who are doing this.
	They say literally over a thousand people who are doing this in Philadelphia.
	In Philadelphia alone, we've identified more than 1,100 mules at rates well beyond anything we'd seen.
	closer to 50 drop boxes each.
	Okay, so they're saying that all these people were stopping at dozens and dozens and dozens of drop boxes. Now, the truth is that Trump actually did better in Philadelphia than he did in 2016. It was Philadelphia suburbs that turned Pennsylvania in favor of Joe Biden.
	Okay, so those are the basic, the main line claim that they make is that the number of mules who are carrying these ballots and then dropping off the ballots, they do some basic math and they suggest that basically the margin of victory in every single swing state is due to these quote unquote Here's what they suggest.
	Georgia, 250 mules, averaging 24 dropbox visits and five illegal ballots per drop.
	That's 30,000 illegally trafficked votes, far more than the 12,000 vote difference between Trump and Biden.
	So Georgia, with 16 electoral votes, Moves over into the Trump column.
	In Arizona, the numbers are roughly the same.
	200 mules, averaging 20 dropbox visits and 5 illegal ballots per drop.
	That's 20,000 illegal votes.
	Again, these illegal votes are substantially more than the 10,000 vote margin that gave the state's 11 electoral votes to Biden.
	In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania alone, 1,100 mules.
	Averaging 50 dropbox visits and 5 ballots per visit, that's 275,000 illegal votes.
	Again, comfortably exceeding the 80,000 vote margin between Trump and Biden.
	So, Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes goes for Trump.
	Okay, so the supposition now is being extended.
	So this is my problem with the documentary.
	I think that there are dots they're not filling in.
	You can question all the ballot harvesting.
	You can take for granted that all the geolocation data that they're using is actually true.
	As we'll see, many of the fact-checkers don't.
	I have doubts about how the fact-checkers are doing this.
	That does not mean that all of those ballots are illegal votes, right?
	So Dinesh calls them illegal votes right there because they are presumably illegally picked up and dropped off.
	This is the claim that was made in Pennsylvania, by the way, which I think actually had some veracity, which is that the procedures used in Pennsylvania were illegal.
	That does not mean that these are quote unquote illegal votes, meaning that they were all cast fraudulently or that they are fake or anything like that.
	Right.
	So that the claims are distinctive and they are.
	And again, it means rigging in a different way.
	It leads to the possibility of voter fraud, but it is not proof of actual voter fraud.
	It is proof of really, really bad and possibly fraudulent voter procedures.
	Not quite the same thing.
	Okay, so now I want to go through the actual fact checks.
	There are two major fact checks that were done of 2,000 mules, of which I'm aware.
	One was from PolitiFact, and one was from the Associated Press.
	The one from the Associated Press has gotten more play.
	So here is what the reporter for the Associated Press, Allie Swenson, says, quote, This is based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts, and improper analysis of cell phone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm somebody deposited a ballot into a Dropbox, according to experts.
	So, claim.
	At least 2,000 mules were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes in key swing states ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
	The fact.
	TrueTheVote didn't prove this.
	The finding is based on false assumptions about the precision of cell phone tracking data and the reasons someone might drop off multiple ballots according to experts.
	True The Vote has said it found some 2,000 ballot harvesters by purchasing $2 million worth of anonymized cell phone geolocation data, the pings that track a person's location based on app activity in various swing counties across five states.
	Then, by drawing a virtual boundary around the county's ballot dropbox in various unnamed nonprofits, it identified cell phones that repeatedly went near both ahead of the 2020 election.
	If a cell phone went near a Dropbox more than 10 times and a non-profit more than 5 times from October 1 to Election Day, True to Vote assumed the owner was a mule.
	It's named for someone engaged in an illegal ballot collection scheme in cahoots with a non-profit.
	The group's claims of a paid ballot harvesting scheme are supported in the film only by one unidentified whistleblower said to be from San Luis, Arizona, who said she saw people picking up what she assumed to be payments for ballot collection.
	Experts say cell phone location data, even at its most advanced, can only reliably track a smartphone within a few meters, not close enough to know whether someone actually dropped off a ballot or just walked or drove nearby.
	So Aaron Striegel, professor of computer science at University of Notre Dame, said you could use cellular evidence to say this person was in that area.
	To say they were at the ballot box, you're stretching it a lot.
	There's always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.
	Ballot drop boxes are placed in intentionally busy areas, increasing the likelihood innocent citizens got caught in the group's dragnet.
	Now, True to the Vote, for its part, says that they didn't do this.
	They say that they filtered out people whose pattern of life before the election season included frequenting non-profit and drop box locations.
	So in other words, if it were people who were just consistently driving to work past these places like over and over and over, They didn't count them.
	So they're saying they only counted people whose pattern of life changed from October 1 to January 1, which is when, or the first week of January, which is when the Georgia election for Senate took place.
	So I think that that claim happens to be kind of weak.
	And also the government uses cell phone surveillance data all the time in a variety of law enforcement contexts in order to sort of figure out where people are.
	Truth or Vote also highlighted Dropbox surveillance footage that showed voters depositing multiple ballots into the boxes.
	OK, we're going to get into this in one second, because that sort of video is like, again, this is a dot that just is not connected in the documentary.
	Maybe Truth or Vote has evidence that that is more than what was shown in the documentary, but it should have been shown in the documentary, if so.
	OK, so continuing this fact check.
	The AP says in Philadelphia alone, Truth or Vote identified 1,155 mules who illegally collected and dropped off ballots for money.
	The facts, the group hasn't offered any evidence of any sort of paid ballot harvesting scheme in Philadelphia.
	Truthvote did not get surveillance footage of drop boxes in Philadelphia.
	So they based this on cell phone location data, according to researcher Greg Phillips.
	That's the guy whose voice you heard earlier.
	And then the claim that all of this was, would have been enough to switch votes in the 2020 election.
	That ignores the fact that some of these votes would have to be shown to actually be fraudulent.
	Okay, so that is the AP fact check.
	Again, I'm sketchy on how the AP is describing cell phone surveillance data.
	I'm not an expert in this.
	It seems to me like they're using fungible arguments with cell phone surveillance.
	Like, it's close enough to determine whether you were in contact with somebody else with COVID, but it's not close enough to determine whether you were actually near a Dropbox.
	And again, True the Vote makes claims that if true, the Associated Press does not rebut.
	Things like we actually filtered out people who have regular patterns of travel that take them past these drop boxes in non-election circumstances.
	PolitiFact does sort of the same thing.
	So I'm going through the fact checks because, again, I want to show that the fact checks, I think, are a little bit scanty.
	And then I want to talk about my own questions about the documentary and where investigators, if they're serious, should actually look.
	So, the Poynter Institute's PolitiFact, a left-wing outlet, they basically start by just ripping onto Nash, which is useless.
	I mean, how about talk about the actual claims made by the film?
	They say True The Vote didn't respond to our questions.
	The group's founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, told Newsweek her group obtained geospatial information and ballot Dropbox surveillance video from counties and cities in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
	She said her team cross-referenced the two to determine who visited Dropbox locations zones multiple times.
	DeSouza said on Fox News that the movie identifies 2,000 mules harvesting in total something like 400,000 illegal votes, more than enough to tip the balance.
	D'Souza's argument ignores that in many states it's legal to drop off a ballot on behalf of another voter.
	Yeah, but it's not legal to drop off 200 ballots on behalf of 200 voters who are not members of your family.
	In 31 states, someone other than the voter is allowed to return a completed ballot on behalf of another voter, but generally those have to be family members or designated persons.
	There have been isolated cases of fraud, like a North Carolina Republican in a 2018 congressional race, says PolitiFact.
	It's possible some people in 2020 collected and returned mail ballots in violation of state laws.
	D'Souza's portrayal of the practices leading to fraud on the scale of 400,000 illegal votes is not supported by evidence.
	In fact, True Vote told Wisconsin lawmakers they aren't alleging the ballots were illegal, but that the process was abused, right?
	This is what I'm saying.
	is that the documentary does not make the claim that I think a lot of people are attributing to the documentary.
	In other words, the process is corrupt and people are violating the law in how they are moving these ballots.
	But that does not mean that the ballots are being cast by dead people or that they are being punched by somebody in the back room somewhere.
	Engelbrecht said, there's no way to know who the votes were cast for.
	What we do know is the claim that the 2020 was the most secure election ever is false, which again, I think is a fair claim by Engelbrecht.
	The University of Wisconsin-Madison Political Science, Professor Mayer, he says, it's conspiracists thinking they're interpreting data that confirms their pre-existing conclusions.
	It's a zombie claim no matter how many times you kill it, it keeps coming back.
	Well, that is not a particularly convincing statement by the professor.
	And then PolitiFact says, well, you know, if such a thing were happening, we probably would know about it by now.
	Well, that is not exactly edifying.
	I mean, I'm sorry, but that's not a really great explanation.
	So your claim is it didn't happen because if it had happened, we would know about it.
	But if you had made any claim about this for two years, you were banned from social media.
	So, yeah, I don't think so.
	Trudeau and the Georgia Republican Party in 2021 made claims about ballot harvesting in Georgia.
	The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said there wasn't enough evidence to proceed on that allegation. State officials said cell phone data that allegedly showed 279 cell phones tracked multiple times within 100 feet of an absentee drop box was not evidence of a crime.
	So basically they're saying we can't substantiate the crime here.
	Okay, so this, and so apparently True to Vote say that they are going to release more information in the coming weeks.
	So, my first thing that I'm gonna say here is, I can wait for more information and see what is substantiated.
	Here are the open questions.
	Okay, so I think that there are open questions about this.
	Open question number one.
	Why not just name the non-profits deploying the so-called mules?
	Right, that needs to be answered.
	Right, Dinesh, True to Vote, they need to release the names of the non-profits that supposedly are making the payments.
	So that there can be a full-scale investigation of these nonprofits, and so we know who we are talking about right here.
	We need to know the name of the nonprofits.
	If people are engaging in allegedly criminal behavior by going to more than one of these Dropboxes, which presumably would be criminal behavior, we need to know the names of these people.
	This is one of the big questions about the documentary, is they show video, because there is surveillance video of a lot of these Dropboxes in places like Georgia.
	And they'll show people acting super suspicious, right?
	Walking up to these drop boxes and wearing gloves and then dropping off the ballots and then taking off the gloves and throwing them in the garbage.
	I don't think that's about COVID.
	Okay, obviously something weird is happening.
	And then you have pictures, you have video of people taking these ballots, putting them in the drop box and then taking picture of the drop box that they dropped in.
	Now, the innocent answer there, theoretically, is I wanna show my family or the authorities that I did vote and so here is me doing it.
	Or the non-innocent answer is I need to show the people who are handling me that I actually dropped off the ballots in the way that I say that I did.
	But the one thing that the documentary doesn't actually show is one person going to multiple Dropboxes and showing them at multiple locations with a Dropbox.
	Which would be pretty prima facie evidence of a crime.
	If it shows one guy going to seven different drop boxes at one o'clock in the morning, it's very difficult to come up with any alternative plausible explanation for why you're doing that other than that you are engaging in an illegal ballot trafficking scheme.
	So the documentary doesn't do that.
	If that footage exists, it should be immediately released.
	I mean, they should be putting out that footage because that would be almost irrebuttable.
	One person, like, that would be, you'd have to have law enforcement investigate that sort of criminal activity.
	Okay, so those are a couple of open questions.
	Who are the nonprofits?
	Who are the mules?
	Why aren't we seeing any video of one person?
	Like, we see that map in the documentary.
	Why don't we see that person going to the 28 Dropboxes or whatever it was, right?
	Why not attempt to track down the mules and ask them about it, right?
	The documentary doesn't actually, presumably they know the identities.
	I mean, you can see license plate numbers in some of these videos.
	Why exactly was there no attempt to contact the mules, knock on their door, and ask them about any of this?
	Now, I understand that True the Vote is not a criminal investigative unit, but if you're going to do a documentary and have journalists pursue this sort of thing, then presumably you need to give the names out of the people who are suspected of doing this thing and then go and ask them the question as to what were you doing and get their answer on all of this.
	The other thing that I kept wondering here was, are there any comps in non-swing states?
	So, presumably, there is cell phone data that is—they only gathered the cell phone data from the swing states.
	If they'd gathered the cell phone data from, say, a deep red state like Mississippi or Alabama or West Virginia, or a deep blue state, Would it show similar patterns of movement between nonprofits and the Dropboxes?
	Because if so, then that would actually demonstrate that maybe the cell phone data isn't that reliable.
	Meaning that if you're seeing cell phone data that seems to suggest ballot harvesting and ballot mules in Mississippi, Then it would be fair to assume that there's not a lot of ballot trafficking going on in Mississippi.
	It's a heavy red state.
	There's not even a purpose to ballot trafficking in Mississippi, presumably, or in New York or in Illinois, in non-swing districts.
	It only makes sense to have a scheme like this if you're trying to swing a swing state.
	But do we have any comps?
	Did they gather any data from these swing states?
	If so, again, I don't know the answer to these questions.
	I think these are questions that need answers.
	So if so, if it turns out that Cell phone data seems to show people doing this in like every state, then the conspiracy theory doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
	Or at least the, I don't want to call it conspiracy theory because it doesn't seem like conspiracy theory as much as it does like an attempt to gather data around a story.
	The story doesn't make a ton of sense.
	If it turns out that all over cell phone data is just showing people moving repeatedly past nonprofits and past drop boxes.
	Okay.
	The biggest question of all, right, which is why can't they show evidence of any fraudulently cast ballots?
	The ballots themselves.
	This is the big question.
	So it seems to me that what they show here, if you take all of it at face value, and if the research is as good as it seems to be in terms of the cell phone data and all that, why don't they show that any of the ballots are fraudulently cast?
	Not that they weren't fraudulently carried or illegally carried or illegally moved from location A to location B.
	I mean, it also occurs to me that if you're going to, if you're going to drop off 200 ballots in the dead of night, I'm not sure why you would go to a ballot drop box as opposed to just going to a mailbox and dropping it off there.
	But put that aside.
	Let's say that they are using these drop boxes because they're more secure and they know the votes are going to get counted that way.
	Fine.
	Why is there, like, there are ways of figuring out whether ballots have been fraudulently That are not generalized.
	So how many dead people voted, for example?
	And there's always the claim that there are lots of dead people on the voter rolls and people can abuse that process.
	Fine.
	But the people have moved and people can abuse that process.
	Fine.
	All of that should be easily verifiable.
	So you should be able to find, forget about how the ballots were moved from point A to point B, you should be able to find in many, many, many cases, presumably, actual voter fraud, right?
	Not illegally trafficked ballots, but actual voter fraud.
	There are no allegations of that in the documentary.
	So what this leads me to believe is number one, you need further investigation of this sort of stuff.
	Number two, we need more evidence of person A is actually at 10 different ballot boxes, not just the cell phone data, video of a bunch of people doing that.
	Not video of individuals going to a ballot box, dropping off five ballots and leaving.
	That's not enough.
	It may be suspicious.
	People may be acting in weird ways doing this at 3 a.m.
	That's not, like, if you're in court, a defense lawyer would be able to tear that apart pretty easily.
	What you need is actual evidence of people going to multiple Dropboxes that isn't just the cell phone data moving past the Dropboxes.
	Also, I don't know enough about cell phone data to tell whether there's a major time delay.
	Is somebody spending five minutes at the Dropbox and then moving on, or is it second by second, the cell phone moves past it?
	Also, if somebody is carrying two cell phones, or a pager and a cell phone, or a computer and a cell phone, like, where is all this data coming from?
	All these are open questions which require more explanation.
	So I guess what I would say is an answer that's going to make nobody happy.
	I think that the data is really interesting.
	I think that it's really suspicious, for sure.
	I don't think that it's dispositive that this alone shifted the election.
	Or that, and when I say this, I mean fraudulent ballots, or that the election was stolen in the sense that actual fraudulent ballots made the difference between victory and loss for Donald Trump in these states.
	I think that the conclusions of the film are not justified by the premises of the film itself.
	There are a bunch of dots that need to be connected.
	Maybe they will be connected, but they haven't been connected in the film.
	And also, I think that the complete dismissal by the left of the allegations made in the film is unconvincing.
	So, in other words, more information necessary, and I hope that law enforcement does take a more serious look at the cell phone data, and at any tape.
	Truth of the Vote says that they're going to unleash more data here.
	So, let's see more data.
	That is my basic take on 2,000 mules, and I think that, you know, we'll see what more comes out.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with more content.
	In the meantime, go check out The Michael Mueller Show.
	That's available right now.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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