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June 1, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:51:00

Sidebar with "2000 Mules" Director, Dinesh D'Souza! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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Time	Text
	You all have gotten so used to starting with an awful Twitter video of Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden, Teresa Tam, or something, that you were expecting it now and to come straight to me.
	Hopefully it's a delightful surprise.
	I didn't have any interesting video to start this stream off with, and I don't think we're going to need anything that's going to be...
	There will be nothing that is going to be as interesting as this stream.
	Dinesh D'Souza, he's been in the news recently because of the documentary, 2,000 Mules.
	And for anybody who hasn't seen the documentary or doesn't necessarily understand the title, 2,000 Mules refers to the alleged people who were allegedly carrying more than one ballot, allegedly for the purposes of...
	Depositing many ballots in drop boxes, who are referred to as mules.
	You know, you have various types of mules that carry out, allegedly, illicit activity.
	And the documentary is fascinating.
	We're going to talk about the documentary itself, among other things.
	You go to Wikipedia, and you look up Dinesh's Wikipedia entry, and it would almost be fun.
	To do one dedicated episode of people responding to the accusations in their Wikipedia entries.
	But we're going to do a bit of an intro on both YouTube and Rumble.
	And then we're taking this over exclusively to Rumble.
	Because, obviously, there are things...
	We can't say the five-letter F-word.
	You know, you got the four-letter F-word, which is the one we grew up with.
	You got the six-letter F-word.
	Which is allegedly the one that Justin Trudeau used in Parliament to describe political adversaries.
	And I think it's the six-letter F word with two G's in the middle of it.
	And now you've got the five-letter F word, which rhymes with Rod and Todd and starts with F, that you can't mention on YouTube because the Ministry of Truth, the proverbial disinformation government's platform, says you can't talk about it.
	Because there are certain things which historically have been so unheard of, such anomalies that they don't happen.
	And if you think they happen, it must make you a theorist of the conspiring nature.
	So we're going to do a little intro.
	I see Dinesh and Barnes are in the background.
	We're going to do a little intro, just get to know Dinesh's elevator pitch, maybe childhood.
	Then we're going to shut the stream down on YouTube.
	And go over to Rumble exclusively.
	Here you see these things.
	Standard disclaimers, by the way.
	Red Viking.
	Viva, you make too much content.
	Can't follow up.
	Red Viking.
	My wife says the same thing.
	And I think she might be right.
	But my problem is I can't even break it down to put the clips out, to put the highlights out.
	But, yeah.
	Okay.
	Superchats, they're going to be irrelevant after the first 15 minutes.
	We're going to go to Rumble.
	Rumble has these things called Rumble Rants.
	20% goes to Rumble.
	80% goes to the creators, so you can feel better on both fronts.
	There might be election fortification discussion here, so I might have to actually...
	On YouTube, there will be no medical advice, legal advice, election fortification advice, but on Rumble, we're going to say what we really think.
	Post the Rumble link, please.
	Good point.
	This is it.
	Hold on just one second.
	While everyone trickles in here only to be referred over, I'm going to put the link in the pinned comment now that I know how to do it.
	Boom.
	No, stop.
	Stop moving, chat.
	Pin message.
	There we go.
	Boom.
	The link to the Rumble page is pinned.
	Now, without further ado, four minutes in.
	I said it would be two to four minutes.
	I'm going to bring in...
	I'll bring in Barnes first.
	I'll bring in Dinesh.
	I'm going to put Dinesh at the top.
	I'm going to go at the bottom.
	And Dinesh, how are you doing, sir?
	Hello.
	I'm going to let everyone tell me if the audio levels are good.
	Dinesh, we're going to go over a lot of things, talk a lot of things.
	Everybody knows my MO.
	For anybody who might be watching, who might not know who you are, and I doubt that's going to be very many people, the overall 30,000-foot elevator pitch before we get into childhood, how you got to where you are, before we close this on YouTube and really have the discussion on Rumble.
	Elevator pitch, who are you?
	Well, I was born in Mumbai, India.
	I grew up in a middle-class family.
	I came to the United States at the age of 17 as an exchange student.
	I was fortunate to be admitted to a good college, Dartmouth College.
	And then I kind of caught the Reagan bug, and in my 20s, I became a young policy analyst in the Reagan administration in the White House.
	I worked in think tanks for about 20 years, so-called research foundations.
	I was a little bit of a pointy-headed intellectual, published a range of books.
	And then about 10 years ago, I made my first political documentary.
	It was about Obama, kind of the unknown story about Obama.
	And now I've made six political documentaries and one feature film.
	And this latest film, 2000 Mules, is, I think, perhaps my most important in that it touches on a topic of fundamental importance to a democracy.
	Namely, do we have one at all?
	What was life like at Dartmouth and how much was it?
	A shock from growing up.
	Well, I arrived knowing nothing about the cold and really not being properly equipped for the freezing New Hampshire winters.
	I also was in high school right on the Mexican border in Arizona.
	And having had a good education in India, I thought, you know, these American kids are unbelievably dumb.
	But then when I got to Dartmouth, I realized that this was a completely different caliber of student who had gone to a completely different caliber of school.
	And so it was a wonderful experience for me.
	Actually taught me critical thinking in a way that I had never learned in India.
	And it was kind of my introduction to the American dream, just the abundance of opportunities in those Ivy League colleges.
	Of course, many of them have completely betrayed their original mission, but there was still something of the old Dartmouth when I went there, and I got a very good education there.
	If we can back it up even well before that, you were born and raised in Mumbai.
	When did you leave India?
	In 1978, at a time when actually India was doing very badly.
	It was the begging bowl of the world.
	Everybody in my generation wanted to get out.
	The smart kids all went to America to come to university here.
	Some people, like my brother, joined a merchant marine and went on board a ship as a cadet out of Singapore.
	So people were basically fleeing the country in droves.
	Now, India is different today, but in the India that I grew up, the basic message was, if you want to have a life, you need to leave.
	Now, how often have you gone back to India?
	I've gone back probably 20 times.
	I mean, my family is all in India.
	See, I came alone.
	So my parents were in India.
	They're dead now.
	But my brother and sister both live there.
	They have families there.
	So it was my custom to go back every year or every couple of years.
	But of course, I haven't gone since COVID.
	So I'm looking forward to my next trip.
	And now, judging from what I read online, it says you were raised in a middle-class family in India.
	Your father was an executive for Johnson& Johnson.
	What does that childhood look like?
	In Mumbai, India, for, you know, people who have never lived anywhere but North America, what was life like as a child, as a middle-class family compared to, you know, lower, I don't know what it would be, lower class.
	What does that life actually look like on a day-to-day basis?
	Well, the way to understand India is that...
	Unlike the United States, which is sort of more of a pear-shaped society with a relatively small group of people way at the top, the majority in the middle, and then a relatively small population of poor people at the bottom, India is more of a pyramid, a giant group of poor people at the bottom, and then a decent-sized middle class.
	Quite big now, but when I was growing up, it was still a small sliver of society and then an even tinier group of wealthy and affluent people who basically ran the country.
	To grow up middle class in my generation was, by and large, not to lack anything.
	I never missed a meal.
	I never went hungry.
	But on the other hand...
	Basic amenities that we take for granted in America, I did not have in India.
	For example, we didn't have hot water.
	We didn't have a shower.
	We had a radio, but we didn't have a television.
	We didn't have a phone.
	There was a seven-year wait in the socialist government of India to get a phone.
	So we were on the waiting list for pretty much all my growing up years.
	And we finally got a phone after I already left India.
	But my uncle had a phone upstairs.
	And so we'd get a phone call.
	They'd call his house.
	We'd all go running upstairs to answer the phone.
	So, you know, this was India.
	Of course, we didn't see it as any form of deprivation.
	In fact, we saw ourselves as quite privileged because there were people living on the street who didn't know where the next meal was coming from.
	And we mainly compared ourselves to them.
	Now, in terms of religious beliefs, how has that progressed over your life?
	My family was originally Hindu but converted to Christianity several generations ago.
	The reason I have the last name D'Souza, which is a Portuguese name, is because when my ancestors converted, they were probably converted by Portuguese missionaries.
	The Portuguese, by the way, had colonies in India in a place called Goa.
	And typically when the Indians converted, they took the Christian name of the person who converted them.
	And so I have an Indian first name, Dinesh.
	Which kind of means God of the sun in Hindustani.
	And then my last name, D'Souza, is a Portuguese name that was obviously...
	I don't have any Portuguese ancestry or blood, but it reflects the conversion experience of one of my ancestors.
	By the way, going back a couple of centuries.
	And how many languages do you speak?
	Just two.
	I spoke, by and large, English at home.
	So this is the language of the Indian middle class.
	It's the business language in India.
	Pretty much anywhere in India you'll find people who speak English, and of course more today than even then.
	But then we spoke on the street, government officials, you hail a cab, you go on a bus, you have to speak Hindustani.
	So English and Hindustani were my two languages growing up.
	Now, how difficult was it breaking into the documentary space?
	Because I've had friends that are from Hollywood who tried to do it and said that the Capitol and the distribution networks, all of it was so tied up in liberal or left-leaning ideologies that it was very difficult to fund conservative films to even get it to its audience.
	I think the problem I would describe this way, that creative people by and large are good on the creative side, but they don't know how to raise money.
	And then you have a separate group of people who know how to raise the money, but they don't know how to make a movie.
	And then if you find people who are creative and you happen to have the business skills and they can raise the money and make the movie, they don't know how to market it.
	So, there are all these different elements.
	Now, if you're on the left, if you're Michael Moore, you go to a studio.
	They give you $10 million.
	You make the movie, and then all you do is hand it over to them, and they will book you on every conceivable show.
	You're on The View, you're on The Today Show, you're on Good Morning America.
	So, your path is sort of rolled out for you already.
	You only have to do one thing, and that is make the film.
	But on the conservative side, you need to have some legal expertise and get the documents.
	You've got to raise the money.
	You've got to make the movie.
	You've got to have the...
	Production values.
	And you've got to understand what makes these films work.
	I mean, a film is basically an entertainment.
	And I cannot tell you how many people come to me and say, make this film.
	It's a very important message.
	And I say, well, yeah, but people don't go to the theater for a message.
	They go to the theater to be entertained.
	Now, if you entertain them, you can smuggle in all kinds of messaging and people will happily digest it.
	Hollywood, by the way, understands this.
	They put all kinds of messaging into their entertainments.
	But you can never lose sight of the fact that people are going to the movies to have fun.
	Well, I know that people of ill intent are going to clip that section right there and then twist it to your documentary, 2000 Mules, in terms of suggesting that...
	There was stuff there, you know, meant for entertainment but not for entire accuracy.
	But that's the segue into me saying goodbye to YouTube.
	Everyone watching on YouTube now, 2600, go over to Rumble.
	The link is the pinned comment.
	And I'm going to remove from YouTube and then go to Rumble to make sure we're still there.
	Removing?
	Are you sure you want to remove?
	Remove.
	This is always nerve-wracking.
	We're going to close this.
	Dinesh, give me one second.
	I'm going to see that we're still live on Rumble.
	And by the way, that was not a slight for the accuracy of the documentary.
	I think it was phenomenal.
	Why do I not see it live?
	I do see it.
	Yes.
	Okay, good.
	Well, I can stop sweating now.
	No, Dinesh.
	Go for it, Robert.
	I was going to say, it seems like Rumble presents an opportunity.
	The Rumble-locals combination presents an opportunity for a distribution platform that allows for more less left-dominant monopoly ideological films in the documentary space to be made.
	And that you sort of blaze the platform or the path for that.
	Do you think, is there some accuracy to that?
	Oh, this is huge.
	And because having made all these documentaries and having developed a formula over the years for how to roll these out and how to basically try to get our money back.
	And this is the hardest genre.
	You know, if you go to a food court in a mall, there's 100 people sitting there.
	There are probably two or three of them who would ever go to the theater to see a documentary.
	Now, a bunch of them will go see a romantic comedy or a drama or a superhero film, but a documentary is a very kind of a niche audience.
	But having said all that, with this latest film, it's the first film I'm releasing in an age of censorship.
	And so I said to myself, hey, you know, I can't put the trailer on YouTube.
	I can't buy ads on Facebook.
	And if I put the film on Amazon Prime or Apple iTunes, who knows, someone might pull it down in the week of its release.
	So I cannot take that risk.
	I'm only going to put the film on uncancellable platforms.
	And then to my great delight, along comes Rumble and Locals.
	And they say, hey, you know, what about the idea of releasing your film on Locals?
	And Rumble will promote.
	And they talk a little bit about the economics of this from the point of view of a creator.
	Anyone who makes films knows that, by and large, if you make a dollar, you're lucky to get your hands on 40 cents of it.
	Typically, you put a movie in a theater.
	A theater ticket is $12.
	By and large, the producers of the film get about five of that 12. So this is the customary experience of film creators.
	But on Rumble and Locals, it's not like that.
	You make a film, you make a dollar, they keep 10 cents, you get 90. Wow.
	So the whole economics are completely different, not just from my films, but anybody's films.
	And so I was very excited about the idea of kind of unleashing the first ever film, kind of putting locals into the movie business, so to speak, and trying to demonstrate that we could create a model that's economically viable.
	And so we've done that.
	I mean, I don't know exactly what our number is on locals.
	But it's somewhere upwards of $4 million on locals alone, just on that platform.
	And for anyone who knows documentaries, these are very big numbers.
	I mean, the film is well over $10 million, but $4 million of that is coming from a single platform where, again, the creators get to keep the bulk of that money.
	And now I'm not asking this question to determine profit.
	From a technical perspective, I'm interested in the documentary.
	What goes into it, the cost?
	Like, what is the cost of making?
	You've done a bunch now.
	What is the budget?
	Where does it go to?
	How do you raise the funds to do it?
	We make probably more expensive documentaries compared to most people.
	I would say that the average documentary that's, you know, a typical full-length documentary, I'm not talking about a 15-minute documentary, but someone who makes a film, they're going to spend typically around $500,000.
	I would say that's about the average number.
	We spent $1.5 million to make this film, which is a low number for me.
	All my other films are typically in the $3 to $5 million range on the production side alone.
	Now, in addition to that, we borrow money.
	It's called P&A, Prints and Advertising.
	We borrow money to market the film, and that's a loan.
	Which we generally try to pay back very quickly with a pretty high interest rate.
	But if you pay it back in like four to six weeks, you don't end up paying a whole lot of money.
	So that's the economics of these films.
	So typically with this film, it cost us a million and a half to make.
	We borrowed $3 million to market it.
	So we're $4.5 million all in in terms of the cost.
	The marketing is twice the budget of the documentary itself.
	Yes, and it should be.
	It should be because the key here is to get the message out and to get people to come see it.
	So I think that's actually an appropriate ratio.
	Now, to what degree?
	I mean, you make your first film and then you get the wonderful experience of the politicized Department of Justice and that whole experience.
	How much did that...
	Like, you know, James O 'Keefe talks a lot about going through that politicized process kind of radicalized him.
	In other words, he could have been a more conventional, inside-the-institutions kind of conservative, maybe just a Fox News guy, etc.
	Instead, he went out on his own.
	He went independent.
	He'll challenge any narrative, no matter who it upsets or offends.
	You've done much the same since then, but how much did that experience help inform that, help shape that?
	It was absolutely critical.
	And in fact, it has made me incomprehensible to my old friends, because I was a creature of the conservative movement and the Republican establishment.
	I mean, nobody could be more mainstream than me.
	My first job was at the Heritage Foundation.
	I spent 12 years at AEI.
	I was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
	I was in the Reagan administration in my 20s.
	So I came up the Buckley Road, so to speak.
	And all my friends were the people at National Review, the people at the Weekly Standard.
	I was regularly published by Bill Kristol.
	I was kind of a protege of his dad, Irving Kristol, who was giving me career advice in the AEI dining room.
	So that's my background.
	And so it wasn't until I made the movie about Obama.
	That I realized that because the movie reached such a wide audience, see with a book, if you sell a hundred thousand copies, you're like number three on the New York Times bestseller list.
	And I thought I was doing amazing with my books.
	But suddenly I released my first film about Obama and it makes thirty three million dollars in the box office, in the theater.
	So three million people went to see it in the theater alone.
	And I suddenly realized.
	This makes me a dangerous figure at a completely different level.
	Because I would stand in the theater and I'd see some, you know, Hispanic guy with really short hair and his four kids.
	And I'd say to myself, I'd never see that guy, you know, in the line at Barnes& Noble, you know, at a book signing for one of my books.
	And yet there he is, you know, walking out of the theater in tears and fired up.
	And, you know, so I realized that the movies have a certain kind of talismanic power.
	But then I also realized that they have the ability to really tick people off.
	Because in my Obama film, I found myself right in the middle of Obama's world.
	See, I didn't do some...
	Intellectual pontification about Obama.
	I mean, I went to Kogelo, the site of Obama's family homestead.
	His grandmother told me, if you want to interview me, you've got to bring a goat.
	And so in the movie, I'm dragging a goat to Obama's family homestead.
	I'm interviewing his brother in a slum in Nairobi.
	And so I think, you know, I made him look bad.
	And it really, it really annoyed him.
	And so for a trivial violation, which is essentially I exceeded the campaign finance limit by giving too much money to a college friend of mine, they came down on me and I suddenly realized I'm, you know, here I am an immigrant.
	And it's, you know, it's United States of America versus Dinesh D'Souza.
	I mean, they have unlimited resources.
	They've got 40 lawyers on the other side of the table.
	And man, I realize that there's an element of the gangsterization of American politics that I never saw before.
	It was completely alien to my previous way of thinking about America, my civics book ideal of America.
	So I think I've traveled much the same path as James O 'Keefe.
	I could have gone into my shell, but I just decided to go the other way.
	I gotta read this because I pulled up the Wikipedia description of the movie, Dinesh.
	It gives you the 2016 Obama's America, second paragraph.
	The film was panned by critics.
	Reviewers described the film as politically partisan and as, quote, a nonsensically unsubstantiated act of character assassination and, quote, unlikely to sway undecided voters or Obama supporters.
	The film grossed.
	$33.4 million in the United States, which makes it one of the highest-grossing documentaries of any kind of all time.
	Well, let me tell you what was my malevolent action in the film that supposedly was extremely unfair and the critics were screaming about it.
	I was making the argument that Obama, far from being a typical civil rights guy, a sort of Selma and Montgomery, a Martin Luther King guy, was really coming out of the anti-colonial environment of the 1960s, an environment that went back to Kenya, to the world of his dad, who was very active anti-colonialist.
	And I found all of this in Obama's book.
	And I thought it'd be fascinating in the documentary to quote from Obama.
	But then while I was skimming on Amazon looking for his book, I realized that Obama himself had read his book in Audi.
	And so what you have in my movie 2016 is there are two narrators, me and Obama.
	And so the voice goes from my voice.
	And when I'm talking about Obama, I don't have to quote him.
	You hear Obama.
	And so, and then all the critics were like, how dare you do this?
	How dare you quote Obama?
	And I'm like, I'm giving you Obama telling you his own story.
	Just listen to it.
	It's very different than the idea you have about Obama.
	So it was the authenticity of the film that unnerved people.
	And I would argue the same thing with 2,000 Mules.
	What scares people is not that the film is manifestly false.
	If it were the case, they'd laugh it off.
	The reason they're doing 10,000 word critiques in the Washington Post.
	It's because they are trying to fight this film at every level, every little detail.
	They're even attacking the special effects of the film, arguing that those are not authentic because they don't represent the original research conditions in which this kind of work was done.
	And when you were considering doing this film, there was a lot of institutional conservatives that are talking about, hey, let's just move on, let's just go past it.
	And I remember arguing all the way back to people, you know, Purdue and other folks down in Georgia at the time when they were going to do the runoff elections, that the recount was the runoff, that they didn't understand how important this was to the base or important to constitutional democracy's functionality going forward.
	What gave you the incentive to say, I'm going to go ahead and go down this path, even though some institutional conservatives would rather it just die a quiet death?
	Well, you know, I think ironically, It's my very skepticism that helped me here because I was one of those people who was, you know, very suspicious right after the election.
	But then when I listened to the quality of the evidence that was brought forward for fraud, I was like, man, this is really not sufficient.
	I mean, even Sidney Powell's affidavits, I'm like, what are you going to do?
	Produce Mr. X and Mrs. Y?
	Who are they?
	How do we know what they're saying is true?
	So this is never going to end well here.
	And when people said to me things like, well, how, you know, Trump won the bellwether counties and therefore we can't believe that he lost the election.
	I was like, well, I can.
	I mean, normally something strange, but strange things can have a plausible explanation.
	So maybe Trump got more working class votes and maybe he got more...
	Minority votes.
	But maybe he upset more suburban women and lost votes in the suburbs to equal the votes that he got.
	So I can see a pathway that he lost.
	And I also realized from the little I knew about election fraud that the courts typically use the principle that is called the but-for principle.
	In other words, but for this alleged fraud, would the outcome have been different, yes or no?
	And if the answer is it wouldn't be different, then courts are unlikely to take it seriously because even if it's true, it's not enough to tip the balance in the election.
	So as the months went along, I kind of thought, well, you know what?
	This case is going cold.
	We're probably never going to know the truth about what happened in the 2020 election.
	That's where I was until the two principals of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, Greg Phillips, came over to our house now about, I guess, almost a year ago exactly.
	And they said, we got some stuff to show you.
	And they began to talk to me about geo-tracking.
	And I was intrigued.
	I thought the whole thing is fascinating.
	Of course, we all have some experience with phone notifications.
	So this, I thought, look, at least this is understandable to me.
	I can get my head around it.
	When I see people talking about cyber experts and China hacking our election, look, I'm not a cyber expert.
	I am in no position to know if that's even true.
	And so I don't want to be in a competing, you know, here are Mike Lindell's cyber experts and here are the cyber experts on the other side.
	And well, gee, you know.
	How are we going to know who's right?
	But in this case, I thought this is fascinating because the idea of tracking your phone is a novel way of looking at a problem.
	Essentially, what True the Vote was doing is taking something that is used in many other fields, the intelligence field, the defense department, used by the CDC, used by law enforcement, and saying, okay, we're going to take the same technology, we're going to apply it in exactly the same way.
	To ballot trafficking.
	So I found all that intriguing.
	But as a filmmaker, I wasn't really sold until I saw the video.
	Now, the video, I think, in terms of the intellectual or legal case, is less important.
	In fact, we don't have video from every state.
	The video is very spotty.
	Many places didn't take video.
	Some places turned off the video.
	Other places have the video camera, but it's pointing at a tree.
	It's not even pointing at the Dropbox.
	So I look at the video as you're lucky to have it.
	And where you have it, it does completely corroborate the geotracking.
	But this is a case that's based on the geotracking.
	But as a filmmaker, I thought, if I'm going to do kind of a whodunit...
	It's really cool to be able to show the criminals breaking into Fort Knox.
	And the video cinematically is important, even though it is nothing more than the icing on the cake.
	So I think it was when I saw that evidence that I realized, look...
	I'm looking at a completely different caliber of evidence than I've seen before.
	And really what I want people to do is forget everything that they know or think they know about election fraud and look at this movie with just an open mind and your own open two eyes.
	And that will be sufficient.
	And so I saw it as a very interesting argument.
	I then had to take it to Salem Media.
	They were not sold on this at all because they know about the wall of censorship.
	They're a public company.
	They've got five or six very prominent national hosts.
	They didn't want all of those guys to get banned.
	So this was a very tricky project to navigate precisely because of the wall of censorship that has been erected around it.
	Well, so that's a good point.
	But the censorship from the media, the left-wing media, I think we can understand.
	The unwillingness of the GOP, or I guess they're called rhinos, now I think I understand the term, did you palpably feel the fact that there were a great many people, in theory, on the Republican side who said, don't do it, and who pressured you not to do this?
	No, not like that, because...
	I operate in a very independent zone.
	And I sort of created that zone for myself after my experience with the Obama administration, because I realized that if you become a victim of any kind of political targeting by the left, they can always go to your boss and demand that you be fired.
	If I'm at AEI, you've got to get rid of this guy.
	He's making AEI look bad.
	And so I realized I'm going to create my own company.
	I'm going to create my own pool of investors.
	I'm going to develop my own kind of movie model, which I amusingly call recycled philanthropy.
	I go to investors.
	I say, give me money.
	I'll work really hard in the market to give it back to you so you can give it back to me again to make the next movie.
	And so that's the thing.
	You don't have to keep giving me new money.
	I'll have the same dollar running around the block five times.
	We'll make five movies with the same money.
	But I created the independent space for that to happen.
	Now, I did know that since I lived in the Reagan years, Trump and Reagan are very different.
	Trump had many people in the GOP who not only didn't like him, but wanted him to lose.
	A very remarkable experience in the Republican Party.
	Normally, Republicans stick together, but in the Republican...
	Not just the so-called rhinos, because my old friends aren't rhinos.
	They're conservatives.
	But they're conservatives who are very anti-Trump.
	They regarded Trump as an imposter.
	They don't like his type of conservatism.
	Their conservatism is of a different stripe.
	They were a little bit happy that he lost.
	And they were even happier that he lost, but the Republicans didn't do badly down the ticket.
	So in a way, the 2020 election was the perfect outcome for them.
	And so the idea of revisiting it, some of them, I can almost hear them shrieking like, Dinesh, like, why are you opening this can of worms?
	Everything kind of turned out all right.
	Now, Biden's a disaster.
	We can beat him the next time around.
	But we don't have to beat him with Trump, do we?
	Yeah.
	The other thing is, when I first got down there in Georgia...
	And people called me in from the White House because they were unhappy with what was happening.
	And I found Trump caught in this sort of catch-22, that he was either being represented by corrupted inside lawyers, and there was lawyers who were representing the other side, representing the Secretary of State in the case of Georgia, representing state officials in other states.
	So they were kind of compromised.
	They had done some of these secret deals to liberalize the way in which the ballots would get distributed, the way in which they would get counted, all these massive drop boxes that really just kind of came out of...
	Nobody ever really fully approved them in a traditional way.
	So you have this flood of ballots going out, flood of ballots coming in, all the chain of custody is gone.
	And Trump was caught between insiders he couldn't trust because they were compromised by their other allegiances.
	And many of them had the same politics.
	Like everybody around the Secretary of State in Georgia, it was clear they're of the type you're talking about.
	They wanted Trump to lose and everyone else to win.
	Or he, I called him crazy outsiders, that he got caught between one of the two.
	People who are going, you know, theories that you would never be able to prove in court, theories that could make you look laughable if you didn't get it right, theories that might have been coming from untrustworthy sources, and theories that when Richard Barris and others, Matt Brainerd and I, you know, we'd done the research, the data didn't really quite back up.
	And what the data pointed to was a lot of illicit ballots.
	But I called it constitutionally questionable voters.
	Casting a ballot in a constitutionally questionable manner and the canvassing and the counting of the ballot not being done in a constitutionally consistent manner.
	And those three areas, and that most of it was through illicit ballots.
	Illicit ballots being sent out and coming back without clean chain of custody by either people who weren't qualified or they cast a ballot in a method that wasn't qualified.
	And that's what your film focused on is what was the medium for that?
	How to achieve that?
	How do you pull that off?
	And then how do you track it?
	I thought the geotracing was a genius mechanism.
	Now, did you find fascinating that the same, like, New York Times, Washington Post, other publications, who used geotracing and talked about it and related to January 6th about exactly where somebody was and this and that, suddenly said that, you know, geotracking doesn't work.
	You know, it's like three, four, five miles away.
	Some of these kind of answers and claims.
	Were you surprised by some of their response?
	Because, like, I found their response not only weak, but sometimes absurd.
	But it showed the success of the film and the success of the ideas presented in the film.
	But were you surprised at the...
	Not surprised that they would respond the way they did, but that they would make these kind of easily incredulous and rebutted arguments?
	Well, I think what happened was with the media when this first came out, generally they've been successful in dismissing any theory as a conspiracy theory.
	End of story.
	We don't even have to discuss it.
	Just the latest nonsensical conspiracy theory.
	So when the movie first came out, I would say that the left deployed its B team, which is some 20 and 30 something fact checkers.
	And they look at the movie and they see two things.
	They see geotracking and they see video.
	And they'd love to attack the video, but then they're informed that this is the official video of the state of Georgia.
	So they realize, oops, I can't really attack that because Georgia already has that video.
	If the video was somehow bogus, Georgia would come out and say, well, that's not real video, but they know it's accurate.
	So we can't go there.
	All right, well, all that's left is geotracking.
	So then they say, they do what they do.
	And people need to know their technique.
	Their technique is, how do we make the case that geotracking is kind of dubious?
	And their answer is, let's start calling around to professors.
	And they'll call around, and one guy goes, it's accurate.
	Oh, shoot, hang up the phone.
	Let's call up another guy.
	So this guy goes, well, I have an article here that says it's only accurate to 30 meters.
	Okay, let's go with that guy, because after all, if it's 30 meters, the guy could be going to a library nearby.
	So that becomes the expert that's then trotted into the PolitiFact fact check.
	Now, it turns out that that expert is reading an article from 2009, and of course, geotracking is a completely different place a decade later.
	And moreover, We're not talking about an area where you need to be precise to within, you know, 12 inches.
	We're talking about proximity to a dropbox.
	The other part of the thing that True the Vote did, which I think was really a genius move, is they set a very high bar.
	Because had they set the bar of, let's say, Let's measure people who went to two or more dropboxes, which would kind of make sense.
	You only need to go to one.
	Even if in Georgia you're dropping off the ballots of your five family members, why would you need to go to more than one dropbox?
	But they said, all right.
	If we say it's going to be two, some guy is going to come forward and say, you know, I put my ballot in the first box and then I was walking by the second box.
	I had to tie my shoe.
	You know, I got stuck there.
	And so you're calling me a mule.
	I'm not a mule.
	So truth of all, enough of this nonsense.
	Let's set the bar at 10 or more drop boxes.
	And that means, and remember, these aren't mailboxes, right?
	So you don't go there to put in your bills or your utilities.
	No, the only thing you put in these boxes are ballots.
	And so by setting the bar high, you don't catch all the offenders, only the most egregious offenders, but you eliminate a lot of these nonsensical counterarguments.
	Because again, let's say you're within 10 feet of a dropbox or 20 feet of a dropbox.
	What's a valid reason to be within 20 feet of 10 or more drop boxes in the voting period, and then you're not within those drop boxes at any other period?
	Only in the voting period, you're within 10 to 12 feet, let's say, of 10 or more drop boxes.
	And Dinesh, part of the methodology for determining the mules was not just 10 or more drop boxes, but then also in conjunction with having visited one of the 501c3...
	Places of business in the same day?
	Yeah, this is the key point, is that once you identify your population of mules, you can now follow what's called their pattern of life.
	So in other words, you're now seeing that they don't just go from box to box to box.
	They go from one box to another, but at some point they run out of ballots and they need to go get more.
	So then they go to a third location and you're like, what's that location?
	Ooh, it's a left-wing inner city organization.
	So evidently, and other mules are going there too.
	So now you know that the mules aren't coming up with their own ballots.
	They're not like making them at home.
	They're picking up the ballots at these vote stash houses, as we call them, and then going on these mailman type routes from one Dropbox to another.
	And the reason, of course, that they don't go to a single dropbox and put 200 ballots in is it will create an unnatural spike in the number of ballots the next morning, which will immediately be noticed.
	So they know that and they're instructed to disperse the ballots around so no eyebrows or suspicion.
	Yeah, I remember when we were breaking down some of the internal data, including John Lott and other people who helped out with this.
	Like, it was extraordinary turnout by, like, nursing home.
	Like, you'd have nursing homes blocks apart.
	One of them would have 60% turnout.
	The other one would have like 98% turnout.
	You know, the kind of turnout you just never see.
	I mean, I remember telling people, in fact, beforehand, I wasn't sure what happened in the election.
	I was concerned about certain things.
	But I remember looking at the Roy Moore election and finding the same anomalies of different types.
	They had been testing this out at lower levels.
	But, like, I would look at precincts, similar areas, and see unusual turnout.
	I mean, I used to do political campaigns all the way back to the 90s.
	You used to be on the Democratic side.
	You'd go to different.
	Democratic precinct chairman.
	You'd pay certain people certain amounts.
	They would deliver X number of ballots.
	And the beauty of this system...
	The problem for them was you couldn't trust.
	Let's say you paid $10.
	George, get them out there.
	Go vote.
	Here's our ticket.
	Make sure you go vote this ticket.
	You don't know whether they do it when they get in there.
	Maybe they forget.
	Maybe they just do their own thing.
	The beauty of mail-in ballots is you can check in those ballots yourself.
	That's where there was anomalies about these ballots and the rest.
	But the whole key to being able to pull it off...
	Was the drop boxes and mules.
	That's the key to making sure you don't trip any alarms early.
	That's the way you transition these ballots into an illicit mechanism of doing so.
	What has been some of the follow-up in terms of...
	I know there's a lot of investigation activities.
	There's other people crowdsourcing activities.
	What has been some of the response to the film in the sense of...
	We'll get later on to some legal reforms that can happen, but what, in terms of practical actions, have taken place like in Arizona and elsewhere?
	Well, the film does what a film can do, and it doesn't do what a film cannot do.
	So sometimes people are demanding of the film that it do things that it can't do.
	So, for example, we can't raid the stash houses.
	That's going to have to be law enforcement.
	As you know, Robert, through the vote, by doing the geo-tracking...
	They have the cell phone IDs of these mules.
	Each of our cell phones has a unique and distinctive ID.
	It's not the cell phone number.
	It's the cell phone ID.
	But it's not the name of the mule.
	So what law enforcement does typically is they go to a judge.
	They get a warrant based on probable cause.
	And there's plenty of probable cause in the movie.
	And then you go and unmask the mules.
	You go to the cell phone provider.
	They give you their names.
	You go see these guys.
	You go, hey, listen.
	You know, who put you up to this?
	Who organized this?
	Now, the thing to remember here is that it's not just that True the Vote came up with a brilliant guess.
	They had a hotline.
	And somebody came to them in Georgia, a whistleblower, who said, basically, you didn't use this language, I'm a mule.
	I do this.
	And they go, really?
	How much do you get paid?
	$10 a ballot.
	I got even more in the runoffs.
	And are you alone?
	Are you like a clever entrepreneur?
	He goes, are you kidding?
	There's a whole operation doing this.
	But he goes, but I don't want to be involved.
	Don't use my name.
	I'm not going to come forward.
	I don't want to get beaten up.
	I'm going to disappear after I've told you this.
	So Truth of Vote realized, listen, we can't use this guy.
	We don't even have a name.
	But what we can do is we can use this geo-tracking to see if we can validate what this guy is saying.
	If there's a big movement of all these people doing this, that should be trackable through their phones.
	So that's what, if you're thinking of this as a scientific experiment, the hypothesis comes from the whistleblower.
	And then True the Vote develops an experiment, the geo-tracking, and then the video in rare cases.
	It's almost like...
	You know, the video will tell you if your geotracking is solid, because quite frankly, if your geotracking shows that Robert Barnes' phone is at Dropbox number 3 at 2 a.m. in the morning, and that happens to be a Dropbox that has a camera, you should be able to go look at that exact time, and there should be Robert Barnes stuffing ballots in the box, and sure enough, there he is.
	That's really, I think, what makes the movie so persuasive.
	And so coming back to the fact checkers, they made a big mess in their first round of attacks because they said stupid stuff that was not even believable to the ordinary reader.
	And that's why they realized we now need to bring in a sort of A-team, you know, Philip Bump of The Washington Post.
	And let's bring in bring in some guys who can make more sophisticated critiques of the movie and.
	Dinesh, if I may, and this is not because I think there's any legitimacy to it, it's just to talk about the A-team of fact-checkers.
	Can we see this article from...
	Jan6.com.
	I don't know how legitimate this website is, but when you get into the...
	Talk about character assassinations that you're accused of in your Obama documentary.
	Dinesh D'Souza, convicted of election fraud, releases new film, 2000 Mules, investigating election fraud in 2020.
	Dinesh D'Souza pled guilty to felony election fraud in 2014.
	We'll get to that later.
	then they go through the alleged fact check, whatever, but you know, assassinate the character, then get into the purported fact check.
	Dinesh, one of the major criticisms of the documentary was that all you had were, what was it, a half dozen videos?
	Maybe 12 videos of individuals allegedly putting in more ballots than they should have been putting in.
	If this were as rampant as you say it is, you should have had more video evidence.
	What's the response to that?
	Well, yeah, sorry.
	Well, it's very important to realize how little video is truly available.
	There are whole states, Wisconsin, that took no video at all.
	Now, remember, it is required in the election rules that you do video.
	These states said, we'll do it, we're going to do it.
	They didn't do it.
	Even the Zuckerberg money had the condition of doing video surveillance.
	There are other places, Arizona, Maricopa County, where they had video cameras and they were turned off.
	They were not functioning.
	As I mentioned, there are other places where you have cameras, but they're not pointed at the Dropbox.
	And so you can see absolutely nothing.
	Most of our video is from Fulton County, Georgia.
	There's some from Arizona.
	There's a little bit from Michigan.
	But almost think of it this way.
	Out of every 50 Dropboxes...
	Two or three have surveillance.
	So our expectations have to come out of that.
	It's almost like, if I can give an analogy, you have a serial killer who goes to 10 different homes, kills 10 different people, and leaves his physical DNA at all of them.
	Obviously, in our case, we're not talking about physical DNA.
	We're talking about digital DNA.
	But let's grant the validity of that analogy.
	However, only one of the 10 homes happens to have a video camera.
	And so you notice that he got to that home at three in the morning.
	You turn on the video camera.
	You look at three in the morning.
	There he is.
	So just as expected, the guy is on the scene and the validity of the DNA evidence is solid.
	In fact, most people will tell you in a murder trial that the DNA is better than the eyewitness evidence because the DNA doesn't lie.
	Now, obviously, with a cell phone, I can give the cell phone to my wife, and maybe she's at the Dropbox, but that my cell phone is at that location is not open to reasonable doubt.
	So then along comes Ben Shapiro and others, and they say, listen, I want to see a video of the serial killer in all the 10 homes.
	And I go, listen, if all the 10 homes had a video, they had cameras, and I couldn't show them to you, this would be a serious defect of my case, because I can tell you they were there based on the phone.
	They should be on the video.
	But if I'm telling you that only one out of ten places had video, then all that you can reasonably ask is show me that at the exact time that the guy is supposed to be there, that he was there, and sure enough, I can show you that.
	So there are some limitations in the film, but they're not limitations because...
	I'm holding the video or I'm not deploying the evidence.
	It's that the evidence is not available due to the negligence of the states in doing their job and putting proper video cameras.
	I mean, think about it.
	We have video cameras every Home Depot, every mall, every ATM.
	This is not that hard to do.
	And I think in some cases it's probably deliberate as to why they didn't do it.
	Well, I have no doubt about that.
	We were complaining as soon as we hit the ground in Georgia that that wasn't available and were shot.
	Trump had been told.
	That there was a whole team watching videos.
	And the reality, I mean, you document one of the whistleblowers in there from the runoff.
	The reality is there was very few people watching any of it.
	The other thing that was supposed to have happened, and this is what I say is the great additional corroborative proof of your film, is if these ballots were legitimate ballots.
	What I told the president from the beginning of the entire election contest.
	I said, look, if they let you do a signature match check, then you can know that they have confidence in the outcome of the ballots.
	I mean, a bunch of Michigan candidates on the Republican side are getting kicked off for what?
	Signature matches.
	Barack Obama's, you know, got his state Senate beat by kicking everybody off off signature matches.
	So the whole check throughout the whole legal process was you don't have to worry about fraudulent ballots in these mass mail-in elections because the signature has to match the secret confidential signature on their voter file.
	And as soon as we got into Georgia...
	That was our first request.
	Just let us look at some signatures.
	Let's make, and we try to even low-key it.
	We just want to make sure everything's on the up and up.
	And what I told the president was if they let you do it, they believe in the election.
	If they don't, that means they don't even believe in the confidence in the election.
	To this day, no single county in a single state that was contested has allowed a single signature match check to occur.
	So if they really believe these ballots were valid, then they would do that.
	It's required to even get on the ballot.
	They match the signatures.
	How can it not be required to count a ballot?
	So I have no doubt the corroborative proof was there.
	The limitations you have is a combination of what the state didn't do, what, unfortunately, the Republican National Committee said they were doing, but quite frankly fell on their face, failed to do, and those combinations.
	And I think it was deliberate.
	I mean, for example, we just tested out in Georgia, had a hypothesis.
	I said, take a look at where there was an overvote.
	In the 2018 governor's race, because the lieutenant governor in Georgia filed suit complaining about Stacey Abrams getting more vote than them, saying that must have been an anomaly.
	Instead, my suspicion was Stacey Abrams had a very good political machine in Georgia, knew how to get out the vote, so to speak, in Georgia, and said, see if the same overvote pattern occurs.
	In 2020, same precinct, same area, same like nursing homes, apartment complexes, mail drops.
	I mean, people aren't supposed to be able to vote out of a mailbox, and yet that was happening all over Georgia.
	People weren't supposed to vote in two states.
	That was happening in Georgia.
	There are other things.
	But the most egregious one was unusual apartment complex turnout.
	Unusual nursing home turnout.
	Unusual mailbox turnout.
	What is it?
	Those are concentrated places where somebody could gather a whole bunch of ballots and could take them to one of these locations that made sure it was signed in a certain way, and then they sent it out to their mules and distributed.
	You know, multiple levels, so you have a breakup in chain of custody, but also a breakup in potential culpability in a sense of who could spot what, when, where, and how.
	I mean, and we found that exact overlap.
	The same places there was an unusual overvote in 2018 for Stacey Abrams, there was an unusual overvote for Biden in 2020.
	So there's many corroborative pieces of evidence that support the core theme of the story that you present.
	And what's interesting is I'm yet to see the media talk about any of that.
	They talk about anything but that corroborative evidence.
	One of the problems, I think, when I'm looking at the critiques, even by guys like Ben Shapiro and others, is they rely on one or two things.
	Either they don't have a good understanding of election law.
	That's pretty common.
	And so you literally have fact checkers say things like, you know, Dinesh is confusing ballot harvesting with fraud.
	No.
	I recognize that there's about 25 states that allow ballot harvesting of some sort.
	Now, there are very few states that allow you to give your ballot to any Tom, Dick, or Harry.
	Typically, you have to give your ballot to a family member.
	If you're confined in a facility to a caregiver, only in California and a couple of other states can I just go to my neighbor and say, you know what, here's my ballot, you go drop it off.
	But even in California, I cannot go to my neighbor and say, here's my ballot, I'll give you $50 if you drop it off.
	Because the moment money changes, hands issues a bribery.
	So paid ballot trafficking is not the same as permitted vote harvesting.
	That's the key distinction lost in this whole debate.
	The other thing about it is guys like Ben Shapiro will say, well, could it be that these were legal ballots that were merely delivered in an illegal way?
	Now, this is a kind of very interesting kind of Harvard hypothetical, but then you have to use common sense and say, wait a minute.
	If you're talking about 10 ballots, then by some miracle, you know, these legal ballots could have ended up with this left-wing organization.
	They just said, okay, we'll drop them off.
	Frankly, you wouldn't need a mule in the middle of the night to do it, but nevertheless.
	But the point is, how do hundreds of thousands of legal ballots?
	Turn up in the possession of left-wing partisan organizations that in many cases by law are forbidden from any kind of explicit electioneering for any party or any candidate.
	The IRS could not be more clear about this.
	How would that process even occur?
	So no, these are not legal ballots.
	You get them in apartment complexes.
	You get them in nursing homes.
	You get them in campuses.
	You get them from homeless shelters.
	There are 20 different places to get these fraudulent ballots.
	They're fraudulent ballots delivered in a One of the things that people miss throughout the whole process is if a ballot...
	For example, those Michigan gubernatorial candidates don't get to argue, well, this person meant to have me on the ballot.
	If they didn't strictly conform to the rules...
	They don't get on the ballot.
	The same rules apply in the election contest.
	If your ballot is cast in an illicit manner, it doesn't count.
	That's on you to make sure, as a voter, to make sure you cast it in a legal manner.
	It doesn't matter if you intended to vote for Joe Biden anyway.
	You got to cast that in the constitutionally correct manner, which is the rule set by the state legislature when it concerns a presidential election.
	And that's what I always kept telling people.
	All we got to show is there's more legally dubious votes.
	Then there was the margin of victory.
	That's been the legal standard for election contest in every single state forever.
	We don't even have to prove somebody intentionally was out to defraud the election.
	Just prove, hey, you have a constitutional obligation to vote in the right way.
	You didn't do it.
	Your vote is in doubt.
	In fact, I mean, Democrats have been doing this.
	They did this to get people in the Senate, Minnesota, other examples of this.
	Strict compliance.
	The same strict compliance would have shown that the presidential election was in doubt and there was more questionable ballots.
	And there was the margin of victory in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and probably Michigan.
	I just think in the analogy of evidence, admissible evidence obtained illegally is inadmissible.
	So, I mean, to say it would otherwise be a legitimate ballot, except it was delivered in an illegal manner, that makes it, as Roberts qualifies it, a constitutionally inadmissible ballot.
	Yeah, the evidence would have been good.
	Had we gotten it legally?
	But Dinesh, I mean, this is the interesting thing.
	The fact checkers try to hold against you.
	Let's call it the dearth of video evidence.
	And part and parcel of your documentary as to the potential election fraud is that where there ought to have been video surveillance, there wasn't.
	That in and of itself is a problem.
	I didn't misunderstand that part of the documentary.
	Yeah, I was simply saying that to demand...
	The presence of video, where video was never taken, is an unreasonable demand.
	And the analogy that I gave of the serial killer, if only one of the 10 homes had surveillance, you would only reasonably expect that in the one case where he showed up at that home, we see him on the camera.
	And if you do, case closed.
	The DNA is definitive in and of itself, and the video is there when you expect it to be there.
	Now, you wish that the other homes had the surveillance, but if they didn't have it...
	Then it becomes a moot point.
	So that's not a defect of the documentary at all.
	I wish I had more video.
	I wish the states took more video so I would have more video.
	But look, you know, when I first came across this whole line of argument, I thought to myself, the bad thing here, I'll tell you what I think is the weak point of the whole documentary.
	And the weak point of the documentary is acknowledged in the documentary, which is to say...
	To definitively prove this fraud, it would be nice to be able to reverse engineer the process and go back and find those ballots and look at them.
	But you can't do that because once the ballot is taken out of the envelope, the two pieces of evidence are permanently separated with the name and the signature on one side and a plain ballot with just the markings on the other.
	And you can never go back and put those pieces back together again.
	So that's the weakness of the documentary.
	It's actually the weakness of any case.
	But the good news is that from a law enforcement point of view, it's kind of like, even though you don't have the body, it's disposed of permanently.
	What you do have is the potential perpetrators.
	And so if you can get the perpetrators to fess up and talk, that's another way that you can bust the case.
	And that's all we're saying in the documentary.
	The people saying things like, well...
	You didn't solve a murder.
	We can't solve a murder with geo-tracking.
	At best, you can identify some potential suspects.
	Or, you know, why didn't you take your case to the Supreme Court, Dinesh?
	Well, because there are 10 intermediate steps that have to occur before these things happen.
	There has to be, the mules have to fess up and say, these guys paid me, they put me up to it.
	Then you go talk to those guys and they go, well, we got the money from those guys and they told us we had to do this.
	That's how the process finds its way into court.
	Well, and that's why the election rules have prophylactic rules, is for what you're identifying.
	The concern is that people would get rid of the evidence.
	And so we put these rules in place that if the canvassing, I mean, we impose these on every government around the world.
	It's part of the Election Assistance Commission rules.
	It's part of the OECD rules.
	It's part of Election Observer rules, which is the canvassing of the ballots, which is that before they even open the ballot, there's supposed to be a protocol that's imposed.
	This includes checking the chain of custody of them.
	The ballot, Cheney, making sure the signatures match or at least an opportunity to do so, making sure there's nothing unusual about the ballot envelope, etc., before you separate the ballot from the envelope.
	And that canvassing process didn't happen here, not consistent with the rules set by the state legislatures, which was the constitutional requirement in a presidential election.
	And that's the other thing that I see it.
	Like what Viva's point is, if there was nothing weird going on here...
	Then why aren't they video-caming everything?
	If there's nothing weird going on here, why aren't they doing the canvassing in the correct manner?
	If there's nothing weird going on here, why aren't they allowing observers to meaningfully observe the process?
	In Georgia, they promised them, hey, we'll let you do a signature match check.
	Then at the last minute, revoked it.
	Never did it.
	No signature match check ever happened.
	Front end, back end, at any time.
	Why go through those protocols unless there's something illicit up?
	That you see the reasonable inferences is something problematic is taking place.
	The other aspect of this that I tell people when they use the Ben Shapiro and some other people legal ballots argument is like, who who really wants to vote for the presidential election is going to give their ballot to some stranger to drop off in a box someplace?
	Right?
	You know, that's not someone who's really conscientious about making sure their ballot counts does.
	That's, like, I never understood.
	And what is your understanding of the explanation for Dropboxes?
	Because I never understood.
	I was like, all you're doing, what, you can't deliver it to the mailman?
	All they're doing is breaking up the chain of custody, which is critical.
	The chain of, okay, it used to be limited number of ballots get printed.
	It's only at the ballot you come in.
	And the reason for that is to make sure that extra ballots don't somehow magically end up in the ballot box at the end of the night.
	By doing it this way, they completely interrupted with a chain of custody.
	I've yet to see in any of the rebuttals to your film any justification for why drop boxes even existed in the first place.
	I've never seen one.
	And, you know, to add to all the things you said, you go, you know, if all of this is legitimate, I would add this.
	Why can't we publicly discuss it?
	I mean, the very fact that this issue became a taboo almost immediately, and almost immediately, there was a kind of mantra.
	And look at the mantra, right?
	Here's the mantra.
	This is the most secure election in history.
	Now, let's leave aside 2,000 mules.
	Let's say I had no evidence of fraud.
	And I just went up to someone, a senator or head of the election bureau, and I say, how do you know that this is the most secure election in history?
	Have you done a comparison between this election, 2020, and every previous election, or at least let's go back to the last 10, to show me that the volume of fraud in this election was less than in any of those elections?
	And if you haven't done that, if it hasn't even been attempted, How can you then dogmatically proclaim that it's the most secure election in history?
	You don't know that.
	You're just saying it.
	And then, if somebody questions you, you're calling them a big liar.
	And you're trying to get them thrown off social media.
	Or worse.
	So from the very beginning, there was a kind of fetid dogmatism that surrounded this topic.
	And I think what 2,000 Mules did is it brought a level of empirical rigor to this that stunned the left.
	And they realized that their normal mantras don't work.
	And so they've been working really hard to take the film down, I think, without any substantial success.
	Not that they can't...
	With any theory, you're going to be able to score a point here and a point there.
	So, you know, are the gloves for fingerprints or are the gloves for COVID?
	So we say, no, the gloves are for fingerprints because you don't see the gloves early on.
	And the fact that you don't see the gloves early on and then they emerge later shows...
	That it is more likely that the gloves are not for COVID.
	Otherwise, you'd see them the whole time.
	But, you know, you can argue about these kinds of things.
	The strength of the movie is putting all the pieces together.
	And...
	Go ahead.
	I just got to say, I ask one thing to the chat.
	When I bring up a Rumble rant like this, it says, Great show.
	Glad Dinesh is here.
	Great job all.
	Does everyone in the chat of Rumble see this highlighted comment?
	Or is it only me on my screen?
	One for yes, I see it.
	Two for no, I don't.
	And then I'm going to see if I've been an idiot this entire stream.
	But Dinesh, okay.
	They have to call it a conspiracy theory.
	They have to forbid the discussion.
	Much like they did with COVID potentially originating in a lab in Wuhan, China.
	Man-made.
	Has to be called a conspiracy theory.
	Shut people up.
	Shut people down.
	When I go to your Wikipedia page, it calls you a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
	And one of the conspiracy theories...
	It alleges you have promoted or propagated is that Obama was not born in America.
	First of all, I'd like to have the discussion.
	I've never been able to have the discussion.
	There were issues about his birth certificate, and I'm not trying to get you to get in trouble or promote something.
	Explain the theory, the issue, the problem with Obama's place of birth, your involvement in it, and what flack you took for it, and ultimately what your position on it is.
	First of all, my position on this has been the same from the very beginning and has never budged one inch.
	I have never in any way been associated with the so-called birther idea that Obama was not born in America.
	I have never written that.
	Those words have never come out of my mouth.
	The idea that I am a birther of that sort is a flat-out lie.
	Flat-out lie.
	I have never taken that position.
	Now, in my movie on Obama, I raised a different question, which is...
	There is something about Obama that seems un-American, that seems to come from someplace else.
	And I said, this is why the birthers seem to have so much fire behind them, because they go, yeah, that's because he wasn't born here.
	And I go, no, that's not it.
	That's not the thing.
	What you're missing is that Obama, although born here, born in Hawaii, and his mom was an American, so he's an American citizen.
	But what's happened is Obama, from a very young age, was obsessed with the dad who abandoned him at birth.
	How do we know this?
	Let's look at the title of Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
	Not dreams of my father, but dreams from my father.
	I, Obama, got my dreams from my dad.
	And Obama talks about his kind of intense journey to reconnect with his dad.
	Obviously not with his dad in person.
	His dad was dead.
	But with his dad's ideas.
	So that he, Obama, could be worthy of those ideas and push them forward.
	So this is what I'm arguing.
	It's Obama's philosophy comes out of the third world.
	By the way, a third world anti-colonial movement that I know very well.
	I grew up in all that.
	So this was in the air in India in the 1960s and 70s.
	That's why I recognize it so clearly.
	So look at this malicious lie that makes its way.
	Dinesh is, you know...
	Guilty of the conspiracy theory.
	I defy them to provide one shred of evidence that I have ever said that Obama was not born in America.
	It's not true.
	Have you been surprised at the scale and scope of censorship?
	Like, you know, I mean, I've seen it.
	I mean, I used to go up to Dartmouth when I was a kid.
	I worked in the conservative review.
	I used to hang it, you know, a whole bunch of that stuff.
	And I remember, and I went to Yale for a couple of years before left in protest.
	And it was, you know, I was there at the beginning of this stuff, but it wasn't really taking off.
	Not like it is now.
	Not only this combination of safe space culture, but I call it old, almost communist style.
	This is not the free speech movement of the 1960s Berkeley left.
	This is the 1930s popular front total control mindset left.
	But have you been surprised at the scale and the scope and the spread of censorship and that these critical, essential, fundamental topics can't even be publicly discussed in most big tech platforms?
	Yeah, I've been deeply shocked by that because if I think back to the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, the United States in its cultural and intellectual life was run by a kind of, I would call them the classical liberals.
	They weren't conservatives.
	On the contrary, the universities were run by liberals.
	When I came to Dartmouth, it was run by liberals, but it was run by liberals of the old stripe.
	Radical leftists, but they were a minority.
	They didn't run any department.
	And I could tell that they were using words like free speech opportunistically.
	What they meant is free speech for us, but we don't believe in the principle of free speech.
	In fact, we'd be happy to suppress our opponents if we could.
	But I thought not to worry.
	Those guys are never going to be running the asylum.
	But what I realized as I got a little bit older was that that older generation retired and moved on.
	And so this younger generation...
	It came into the seats of power and began to perpetuate itself.
	And that's when censorship...
	But again, even when I saw it on the campus, I thought to myself, it's not going to make its way into the larger culture.
	The campus is becoming itself a kind of insane asylum inside a larger area of freedom.
	But then, of course, these very same people graduated.
	They all went to work for Netflix.
	They went to work at the New York Times.
	And so you had people in the so-called professions that rely on free speech, like comedy and creativity and journalists who become champions of censorship.
	I mean, what a surreal world where people whose lives depend on being able to speak freely nevertheless are perfectly happy to shut down the speech of other people because the quote offends them.
	Unbelievable.
	Who was it, the Russian guy who gave the speech on how many generations it takes to turn a country communist?
	Saludson?
	The chat will know quickly.
	But the way you describe it, and you describe it in real time, you start off with the universities, eventually they graduate, they become part of the administrative state, they become the leaders of the state, and that's it.
	Two to three generations, you turn a country from a free country into one that thinks censorship is virtuous.
	Have you had experience with that in Canada lately?
	No comment.
	Dinesh, someone had asked actually what your position is on what's going on in Canada.
	How familiar are you with what's going on in Canada?
	Well, I'm just familiar enough from social media to see that it seems like some of these tyrannical trends are well established there.
	And even the, you know, there's something about the American spirit that rebels against all of this.
	But I know that there are other societies where these things are taken to be normal.
	I mean, sometimes I'll talk to my brother in India.
	And he goes, Dinesh, if you said those things that you are saying in America about the U.S. government in India, somebody would come to our house and break your legs.
	I mean, that's just taken as an accepted way of life in that country.
	And people, you know, they live with that.
	They're not free to that extent.
	But that's why, you know, in some ways I fell in love with this kind of American tradition, which was summarized by the cliche that, you know, I don't agree with you, but I defend that you're right to say it.
	And the idea that...
	These very American norms and guardrails of our society have suddenly been just so rudely kicked over has come to me with something of a shock and just increased my determination.
	One reason, quite honestly, I like this movie isn't just because of the evidence it provides, but it's also because of the way in which it pushes against the walls of censorship.
	And embarrasses them.
	It makes it more difficult.
	So it's like, okay, I'm going to start putting up authentic mule videos on YouTube.
	Are you going to just take them down, even though there's a state surveillance video of the state of Georgia?
	You're going to take it down?
	Why?
	Because it's disinformation?
	Or is it because it's information?
	Yeah, I've had fun with some of the, especially like the gloves on the video, just...
	One example.
	But it's just fun to interact with some of these folks who want to raise questions about it.
	I'm like, well, why are they wearing gloves?
	And they're like, well, it's COVID, COVID.
	And it's like, okay, aside from the timing issue, why do they take off the gloves as soon as they drop off the ballots?
	Because they're done, Robert.
	They're done.
	Did the movie disappear?
	I mean, did it vanish after the ballots were gone?
	No.
	Were the ballots uniquely COVID-infected?
	There's nowhere else around them that's going to get COVID?
	They were done going to old persons' homes to collect ballots, so they don't need the gloves anymore.
	They know they're going home to their own house.
	Some of the explanations of the write-offs made no sense.
	But actually, Dinesh, just for everybody who hasn't seen the movie yet, How did you get the data on the phones?
	You purchased it from...
	How did you purchase it?
	Yeah, this is something I didn't know, but it turns out that when we download these apps onto our phones, we are basically giving away our privacy.
	We're agreeing, we're consenting to have this data collected.
	Aggregated, so-called, and sold.
	And there are about 40 prominent aggregators that collect this data.
	Now, it's obviously used by law enforcement and by governments and intelligence agencies, but it's also commercially, you can buy it on the open market.
	And that's why, for example, when you're in CVS, you know, not only does CVS know you're in the store, they know which aisle you're in and what you're looking at.
	That's because they buy this data.
	So all the truth about did is they went to one of these aggregators.
	They did what's called a geofence, which is just drawing a circle and saying, this is the area we want.
	This is the time period.
	And you buy the entire cell phone traffic.
	Now, obviously, you need the expertise to run a search algorithm to say that of these 10 trillion things of data, I am looking for this.
	But yes, I was kind of astonished myself to realize that you can not go to Walmart, but you can go on the open market to one of these aggregators and buy that kind of data.
	It really, think of the possibilities.
	I mean, to give you a wild idea, in Atlanta, right about the time of the election, there was a murder in Piedmont Park.
	A woman walking her dog was killed in the middle of the night.
	There's no physical evidence of a perpetrator.
	Nobody saw anything.
	You or I could go by the cell phone traffic of that park.
	On that day, between, let's say, 12 midnight and 5 a.m. in the morning, we could actually have the cell phone IDs of the five devices that were in the vicinity of that park at the time of that murder.
	And so we could almost become detectives on our own and try to solve that murder.
	Now, obviously, we wouldn't still have the names.
	Law enforcement would need at some point to get involved.
	But the very idea that we can do this came to me with such astonishment.
	But not only is this stuff available, but it's completely legal.
	How much did it cost for the data, if I may ask?
	Do you know how much they, like, for commercial purposes, how much people pay to get that?
	Oh, Dinesh, do you know how much that data cost for True the Vote paid to get it?
	Yeah, so True the Vote spent about a million dollars.
	They bought the data from October 1 to Election Day.
	They also bought additional in Georgia for the runoffs.
	And they only bought in five areas.
	They bought in Atlanta, which covers about four or five counties.
	They bought in Phoenix, a little bit in Yuma.
	They bought in Detroit, the greater Detroit area, Milwaukee, and the greater Philadelphia area.
	That's it.
	So those were, of course, the critical areas where the 2020 election was decided.
	Yeah, that's where I've told people that if you expanded this, also, this goes to what Bill Barr, frankly, did not do.
	Told everybody that he was doing an election fraud investigation and cleared it.
	I knew he hadn't because there was a bunch of us there on the front lines of it, and we never heard from anybody at the Justice Department or the FBI.
	There was some conscientious Trump underlings that were trying to do some things, and they were scolded and told not to.
	So this shows what Barr could have done.
	And if people want to see samples of it, just look at what they've gathered with January 6th.
	I mean, they've tracked every single person, where they were, when they were, how they were, using the phone data.
	And so this is what could have been done, should have been done.
	Now, have you heard from any, I know there's been some follow-up in some counties.
	It seems to me there's a lot of places where a lot of people, smart.
	Prosecutors who want to prove their independence and that they're going to get to the bottom of this.
	There's a lot of people.
	I mean, this is a county-driven process.
	Any county could open up in this investigation.
	Any county could look.
	Because the way I described the whole election was what happened is they unlocked the safe, left the door unlocked, and told everybody, by the way, we're leaving for two weeks.
	The safe's unlocked.
	The cash is in there and the door's unlocked.
	They kind of outsource the fraud.
	So that's why you get these sporadic things.
	You'll get some communities, real problems, other communities, because you got some people that said, I'm going to beat Orange Man bad, I'm going to beat evil Hitler, and I'm sitting in my nursing home, and I'm an employee there, and I'm just going to help some people vote, right?
	Because I'm doing it for the good.
	I could get Hitler beat.
	Don't I have an obligation to do it?
	That kind of thing.
	Where's the next county over?
	I mean, this even happened in Tennessee.
	There were counties that always vote together, that voted opposite.
	I was like, that doesn't make any sense.
	And county after county we looked at, it was the county that had unusual pro-Biden voting patterns had unusual voting patterns.
	And it was just more votes, not the same constituency voting differently for the first time in 100 years.
	How much have people followed up on this in that context in terms of action?
	I know a lot of people followed up just using things like the Open Records Act, which is how you can get videotapes.
	Everybody can do their own version of this.
	The ballots are all digitized, so we should be able to look at the ballots.
	They still haven't released them.
	People can use that.
	So I thought that was another important part of the film, was use the Open Records Act to...
	Become your own investigator.
	But how much have law enforcement followed up on the discoveries of the film?
	So far, an investigation in Georgia, whose status is a little questionable to me because of the internal politics of Georgia.
	People like Raffensperger are so committed to the idea of a secure election.
	Are they really driving the investigation forward?
	Are they actually holding it back?
	I don't know.
	In Yuma, Arizona, something quite promising.
	I think there's going to be probably multiple arrests over there.
	They have 16 separate fraud investigations that are underway right now.
	Now, the majority of these areas, these are heavily Democratic areas.
	And so the local political establishment, the local sheriff, these are going to be basically Democrats.
	Think about it.
	Michigan, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, Philadelphia, the same thing.
	So with a couple of exceptions, which is Georgia, which has a Republican establishment.
	Probably the single figure who's the most important who could make something happen will be Brnovich, and that is the attorney general in Arizona.
	And interestingly, it is even in his political interest to do something because he's in a Senate race, and he's up against candidates who are challenging him for doing nothing on the issue of election integrity.
	If I were true the vote, and I'll make this suggestion to them.
	I think they should expand.
	Because, look, if I were a fraudster and cheating, I'm not just going to cheat in these areas, right?
	I wouldn't cheat everywhere, but I would cheat in Florida.
	I'd cheat in Ohio.
	I'd cheat in North Carolina.
	I'd cheat in Nevada.
	I'd cheat in all the places which are kind of close, where I think that a few added thousand votes are going to put me over the top.
	The cheating may not have worked, but I would still try.
	So I think that if True the Vote did...
	Bought geodata in these places, they're going to find a whole bunch of mules.
	And many of these places do have Republican secretaries of state, Republican establishments.
	And so there are prosecutable offenses there, but I think it would require a new round of research.
	And that would be beyond the scope of the movie itself, but a very logical next thing to do with much more potential for having this actually be cracked down on.
	Dinesh, we have to get one elephant out of the room, or at least discuss the elephant in the room.
	Everyone talks about it.
	It was in the fact check.
	Your felony conviction for voter...
	What was it?
	Voter fraud?
	Voting fraud?
	No.
	But anyway...
	It was for...
	What was it?
	It was for...
	Campaign contribution.
	I'm sorry.
	Exceeding...
	I don't know how they got you on a felony conviction for this.
	I mean, I understand how they got you on it, but I want you to explain it so I can ask my questions.
	You were nailed hard with the full force of the system for allegedly exceeding the lawful limit of individual campaign donations because apparently, whatever it was, $5,000 per person, you...
	By the allegations, by the interwebs, told friends you would reimburse them if they donated to the campaign, which you did afterwards.
	And how does anyone find out?
	How did this happen?
	How did you get convicted or plead guilty to a felony?
	You're eight months in a midway home or whatever they call it.
	I need to know all these details, but especially I need to hear the story from you because I've read the details.
	I can play it out in my head, but I want to hear it from you.
	Okay, so here's a little bit of context.
	When a kid like me comes to America from India and leaves my family behind and essentially never goes home, what happens is in reality you create in America surrogate families.
	And so I had a group of conservative friends at Dartmouth who became sort of my extended American family.
	One of them was a young woman named Wendy Long, who years later in New York decided to run for the U.S. Senate.
	It was a completely quixotic, improbable campaign, obviously a heavily Democratic state.
	But there was a Dartmouth woman, well, Kirsten Gillibrand, who's the current senator from New York.
	And so Wendy Long decided, I'm from Dartmouth.
	I'm going to challenge her.
	I'm like, Wendy, don't do that.
	But she's like, I'm going to do it.
	So I said, I'm like, OK, I'll help you.
	So I gave Wendy the $10,000 that I'm allowed to give under the campaign finance limit.
	So I knew I was maxed out.
	But what happened is I released my film on Obama and I'm running around the country promoting the film.
	I'm in Dallas.
	I'm in St. Louis.
	And what's happening is Wendy, whose campaign is in desperate straits, is calling me.
	Hey, Dinesh, can you serve on my finance committee?
	Hey, Dinesh, I'm meeting with some Indian doctors.
	You know, you're Indian.
	They're Indian.
	Can you sit down with them?
	Maybe they'll give me some money.
	And I'm like, I felt bad that I couldn't help a friend of mine whom I'd known for 20 years.
	So I came up with a cockamamie scheme.
	I called up two of my friends.
	I said, hey, do you like Wendy Long?
	Give her $10,000.
	I'll reimburse you.
	It was kind of my way of pitching into the Wendy Long campaign.
	I knew she was going to lose.
	So this had nothing to do.
	I didn't have nothing to gain.
	I didn't even tell Wendy Long I was doing it.
	Somehow, the government finds out.
	Now, this is a first-time offense.
	There's no quid pro quo.
	I don't have anything to gain.
	Normally, these campaign finance laws are there for that.
	If you're trying to buy a judgeship by filtering all these straw donations, the law then goes after you, and rightly so.
	You're trying to get a tax benefit for your company.
	That's what the laws are there for.
	But in my case...
	They decided, let's prosecute this guy to the full extent of the law.
	But even the full extent of the law doesn't allow you to do very much because in all of American history, no one has actually been locked up for doing what I did.
	Not one person ever.
	So they come to me and they say, and I say, they say, did you exceed the campaign finance law?
	And I go, guys, you know, I did.
	And I should get, obviously, the same penalty as anybody else who did that.
	And they go, not so fast.
	Do you realize we can get you on bank fraud?
	And I go, bank fraud?
	What bank fraud have I done?
	They go, well, you took the money out of your bank account.
	Bank fraud.
	Then they go, we're also going to get you with mail fraud.
	And I go, mail fraud?
	And they go, yeah, because you put your check in the mail.
	And so they were literally trying to add charges upon charges and tell me that if I didn't plead, I would be facing years in prison.
	I would never, you know, I wouldn't be seeing my daughter at a time when she was in her teens.
	So they try to ruin your life and they use the bludgeon of additional charges.
	Which is nothing more than redescribing the same thing in five different ways.
	And then they say, and then when you plead, they go, look, he admitted it.
	He admitted he did it.
	And of course, I always admitted I did it.
	But my point was, you're selectively prosecuting me.
	You're prosecuting me with a rigor that is never applied to anyone else.
	You're doing that because I'm a political opponent.
	It says that right here in my FBI file, you're red flagging me as a political opponent of Obama.
	So this is in a nutshell what my case was all about.
	And so I decided, look, I'll take the plea.
	I got the overnight confinement, which I did uncomplainingly.
	And then when I was on my long five-year probation, in the middle of that, I got the pardon, which was really not important from the point of view of the penalty.
	I'd already done it.
	But it was more just that it cleared my record.
	It meant I could vote again.
	So that, in a nutshell, is a full and accurate account of my...
	Yeah, for those that don't know the context, bundling is extremely commonplace.
	So it happens every single law firm, happens every single, a lot of big business firms, happens everybody.
	And what is if you have a bunch of lawyers, you can find out a way to make it quote-unquote legal.
	That's it.
	But bundling happens all the time.
	And they took a very small bundling case that had no consequence and blew it up into the biggest campaign finance case.
	Ever.
	And it was, you know, Preet Bharara, infamous for his politicized, politically motivated prosecutions when he was running the Southern District of New York under Barack Obama.
	And I think still constitutionally, I mean, they made a good decision in the Cruz case.
	I have never liked campaign finance caps because my argument has been all it will do is be politicized and weaponized, you know, have transparency, let everybody know who's given to what.
	But the whole point, as you note, the only constitutional basis for any of these laws is quid pro quo corruption.
	My view is that that should be superimposed on every civil fine and criminal prosecution.
	If you can't prove quid pro quo, you shouldn't be allowed to punish anyone for laws that are only considered constitutional because they're supposed to be constricting quid pro quo.
	They've used these cases.
	They've almost never used these cases in actual quid pro quo cases.
	I mean, the Clintons walked on the Chinese bundling that was off the charts.
	I mean, that was bundling to a whole new level.
	I mean, the Clinton Foundation, this is the same Southern District of New York, can take its time to go after you and could never find time for the Clinton Foundation.
	Somehow all those millions and millions and millions of dollars to someone who is Secretary of State to the Foundation at the time she's Secretary of State is just kosher.
	I mean, it is a sad disgrace.
	I think the only upside of it is like with James O 'Keefe, it awoke you up to certain problems in our system that you've worked hard to expose since then.
	I mean, look at Zuckerberg.
	I mean, I give $20,000.
	I'm locked up for eight months.
	This guy puts almost half a billion dollars into the 2020 campaign.
	He has his own leftist activists infiltrating election offices.
	He's using financial leverage on cities and counties, basically saying, if you want my money, you've got to put all these drop boxes out there.
	And if you don't do that, I'm going to take my money back.
	I mean, the idea that a private citizen can exercise that kind of power over a nation's election process is unbelievable.
	And yet, it's perfectly, this is a guy who's able to get away with it.
	Dinesh, I just want everyone to appreciate that the extent of your crime was two people donated $5,000 and you agreed to reimburse them for their donation to the campaign, thus exceeding your $5,000 or $10,000 limit.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Everyone, you can judge accordingly.
	I mean, to me, it's nuts.
	I question as to whether or not, you know, you could have actually raised dishonest arguments as opposed to admitting to it.
	Whether or not going for a trial, if you would have gotten the same treatment that Michael Sussman got benefit of the jury, who knows?
	But the one thing, it still blows my mind.
	I need to know what it looks like.
	He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house near his home in San Diego.
	Five years probation, $30,000 fine.
	2018 issued a pardon by Donald Trump from Wikipedia.
	Eight months in a halfway house?
	So a halfway house is a federal confinement center.
	It's like a prison, but it's not a white-collar or a blue-collar prison.
	By and large, when people complete their prison sentences, it's intended to be a transitional facility.
	To keep you under confinement, but prepare you to be released back into society.
	That's what these confinement centers do.
	Now, in my case, I wasn't there 24-7.
	I was sentenced to check in in the evening at 7 p.m.
	I slept in a dorm with another 160 generally hard-end criminals.
	A lot of them had served 10-15 years, but this was the end of their sentence.
	We slept in dorms.
	And we ate prison food.
	And I checked out in the morning.
	So I was allowed to get out in the day and go work.
	But I checked back in at night.
	And this went on for eight months.
	I obviously couldn't travel or do any kind of speaking or any of that other stuff that's part of my normal life.
	And so I got to meet some very interesting characters that I wouldn't normally have met in the course of ordinary life.
	And I saw a slice of America I would never have seen otherwise.
	I'm going to say, this is my own neurosis.
	This is my own life talking.
	That sounds like, I mean, to sleep somewhere else for eight months sounds like hell on earth.
	It sounds like summer camp, but the worst kind.
	What was that experience like?
	Who did you meet?
	What were some memorable experiences?
	And do you consider that to be, I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, is that value added to your life right now?
	Are you actually thankful for that experience?
	Well, it was traumatic when I was going through it, particularly at the beginning.
	I mean, basically, you know, I'm a sheltered kid.
	I mean, I'm not somebody who's used to that kind of rough street life.
	And you have guys here.
	I mean, you had, you know, white supremacists who had tattoos on their back.
	They were in white gangs.
	You had black gangs.
	You had Hispanic gangs.
	People talked to me about the Mexican mafia was in the, you know, confinement center.
	So interestingly, it was immediately obvious to people that I was...
	Sort of a different kind of animal.
	And I remember a very amusing conversation early on where a bunch of these guys were telling me, the first thing you have to do is tell people what you did.
	And so they're like, one guy's like, I did this.
	I was a coyote.
	I was a drug smuggler.
	I was this, I was that.
	What do you do?
	So I'm like, well, I exceeded the campaign finance law.
	And they were like, well, what does that mean?
	And I'm like, well, I gave money to a college friend of mine who was running for office.
	And they were like, yeah, and then what?
	Then what?
	And I'm like, no, that's it.
	That's what I did.
	And they kept thinking that I had taken somebody else's money.
	It was really hard for me to explain that I was giving away my own money.
	They couldn't understand how that could possibly qualify as some kind of an offense, giving away too much of your own money.
	So these guys just begin to start laughing their head off.
	First of all, they accuse me of lying.
	And I'm like, no, I'm not lying.
	That's actually what my case is about.
	And so eventually they began to treat me as just this very odd character who was among them.
	But they treated me quite well.
	I never felt I was in real danger.
	In fact, if I can be honest with you, I felt in far greater danger of the of the people who ran the facility putting drugs in my locker or something like that than I did of any of the so-called criminals that I was with.
	Now, speaking of using the Rumble and Locals platform to help create new distribution mechanisms for dissident media in the era of big tech censorship, how have you found using Locals in general?
	In other words, I know you've been doing live streams, and I find locals that, you know, I like the community aspect.
	I like the interactivity.
	I get a lot of information from the other board members.
	How have you found the locals' experience?
	Well, I was an early bird to Rumble, but kind of a late bird to locals.
	And so when Rumble was just getting going, and, you know, Bongino and I were two of the earliest kind of conservatives to migrate to Rumble.
	We were very determined to help build up Rumble.
	And so we're very involved with Rumble from the early stage.
	I've invested in Rumble, so I know the Rumble guys really well.
	And then Locals came to me much later.
	In fact, just a few weeks before the film.
	And I came on board at Locals, but I had kind of a small following at Locals.
	And so I was just kind of getting into the Locals feel of things.
	But now, because of the movie, I've developed a big following on Locals.
	And so I actually want to be much more active on that platform and produce a lot more original content for my followers on Locals.
	But I haven't been doing that to date.
	It's just something that's now developed thanks to the movie.
	So the movie, in a sense, has given me a more enduring presence on Locals and more of a reason to create content that's exclusive.
	You know how it is.
	If you've got 40 followers on Locals, you're like, oh, man.
	But once you've got a big following, you're like, Like, wow, I've got an audience here that I'm now going to develop unique content for.
	Oh, go for it, Robert.
	I'm just trying to find something.
	How much does it present?
	Like, I've explored the possibility that campaigns can use, locals, other ways to use locals, this sort of creative community, a place for ideas, a place for curated content, but also a place that could be almost a permanent funding mechanism of its own kind.
	That if it presents an opportunity that, okay, now I have this base and audience, I don't have to go through the traditional film or television distribution deals.
	I don't have to go through the liberal gatekeepers.
	I don't have to go through the institution.
	I can go straight to a locals audience that could constantly, continuously fund this because they're the target audience in the first place.
	How much do you think that possibility exists?
	I mean, you know, if somebody decides that they can make a feature film for a couple of million dollars, And release it on Locals exclusively through the Rumble Locals platform and show that they can make that viable, it suddenly begins to threaten a huge infrastructure.
	You know, it's almost like if you were to take online education and somebody could figure out a way to create a Harvard-quality education using the best scholars in the world online.
	Except instead of offering it for $80,000 a year, you offer it for $1,000 a year.
	Think of what a reverberation that will send through the entire higher education establishment worldwide.
	Because anyone in the world can now suddenly get a Harvard education for $1,000.
	You blow up the whole model.
	You've created the academic iPhone.
	And so I'm always looking for ways in which some of these...
	The crusty old industries have become so vicious and so intolerant and so incestuous and so insular that blowing them up is a great public service.
	But you don't blow them up in a purely destructive way.
	I think you know what I'm saying.
	You create new platforms that create better ways and ways that are favorable to the creator.
	That's what I love about Locals is it puts the creator in the driver's seat.
	And so in that sense, it's very consistent with the original spirit of the Internet.
	What do you have on the horizon next?
	You've made arguably one of the most, well, not arguably, one of the most profitable documentaries ever on Obama.
	You've broken new ground with your documentary 2000 Mules.
	Do you have any political aspirations?
	No.
	I'm now just working to finish my book, 2,000 Mules, that will kind of elaborate the argument of the documentary.
	There are things you can do in a book that you can't do in a film.
	You can kind of cross the T's and, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's and provide further documentation, answer counter arguments and so on.
	So I'm going to do that.
	But, you know, I really enjoy this creative space.
	And I'm also doing something.
	I'm in a space where there are not a lot of people.
	That are doing this.
	At least not on my side of the aisle.
	So, for me, it's unappealing.
	If I become a congressman, I'm one of another, you know, 250 of them.
	So, to me, that holds no appeal at all.
	I feel like I'm doing something that's more unique.
	And I just intend to keep doing it.
	It's too much fun.
	And this give and take, there's a mud wrestling element to this kind of argument.
	But I guess I'm one of those pigs who likes to rollick in the mud a little bit.
	Any ideas of what your next film might be?
	Yes, I'm interested.
	Well, I'm looking at the issue of January 6th, only because I think that there is a huge untold story there.
	I still don't know what it is.
	And I think to make a good documentary, you typically start out with a suspicion, a supposition, a hypothesis.
	And then you relentlessly pursue it.
	But you have to always be open to the fact that it's like any experiment.
	It's not going to pan out and you have to be willing to walk away if that's the case.
	And that's been my approach.
	That's why it's so annoying to me to be called a conspiracy theorist.
	I've never advanced a conspiracy theory in my whole life.
	My theory about Obama was the opposite of a conspiracy theory.
	In fact, it was Obama's own theory of where he got his ideas.
	And so if you ask someone to make an actual list, Well, thank you for reminding me, Dinesh.
	I'll bring up a few.
	Obama, we discussed.
	The next one was, apparently, you supported a conspiracy that the Clintons had murdered people, which is a very different statement than saying the Clintons had people murdered.
	We have the Clinton body count.
	I mean, I don't even know how to ask you this question.
	I mean, what's your take?
	Do you think it has ever occurred in the history of politics that a politician has wink-wink, nudge-nudge, been happy when someone got killed?
	Has it ever been the case that the politician has had other people murdered?
	Yeah, let's just start with that.
	Well, I mean, you know, I would say that I think it is possible.
	I would look at something like Robert Caro's work to see...
	The politician that would come closest to this, in my opinion, would be somebody like LBJ.
	But again, once again, just to address this flatly, I have never in my life ever suggested that the Clintons...
	Murdered anybody?
	Had anybody murdered?
	I have never even gone close to that kind of allegation.
	And if you ask someone to support that by quoting from my work, either from my words or my writing, they would not be able to do it.
	So these are just brazen lies about me that I've never said that are recycled from one venue to another.
	Oh, Dinesh is a birther.
	Dinesh is doing this.
	Nonsense.
	I mean, I've put out...
	You know, millions of words in my books.
	And you think if people are going to make these things, they'd be able to say, well, you know, Dinesh, I wrote a book called Hillary's America.
	Go pick that book up.
	Find the quotation in there where I'd not only say, but even imply that the Clintons killed anybody.
	You'll never find it.
	It's not in there.
	What does your family think about, both the family in India and the family here?
	Think about everything you've been through in the past 10 years or so.
	Well, I must say my parents went to their graves a little baffled as to what it is I'm actually...
	They couldn't believe that their mild-mannered son, who was just basically a really good student back home in India with a lot of interest in economics and math, is somehow in this kind of knock-down, drag-out fight with all these powerful figures in the U.S. government.
	You know, I'm being...
	You know, I'm on CNN and, you know, here's Anderson Cooper and he's like, Dinesh, you know, it took some very powerful people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump to get you off the hook.
	And I go, well, yeah, but it took some really powerful people like Obama to get me on the hook in the first place.
	So my parents are watching all this and they're like, how did our son get in the middle of this?
	So I don't think they ever figured it out.
	It's very difficult to discern American politics from that far away.
	But I think my Dartmouth friends and so on are sort of, they just view with great amusement that all of us have become so active in politics going back to our Reagan days.
	And so it's fun.
	It's fun to look back over the years and see the way things have changed.
	Not always for the better.
	Dinesh, I got to get one last one.
	D'Souza has also promoted a conspiracy theories about Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros, including the false claim that Soros had collaborated with the Nazis, that Soros has sponsored Antifa, a left-wing anti-fascist movement.
	Dinesh, I'll even spare you a little uncomfortable part of this.
	That Soros collaborated with the Nazis is not a disputable fact.
	The only question is whether or not his participation, what he did as a 13-year-old to survive, can be called collaboration or coercion.
	But just preface that, Dinesh, to respond to the last one that I'll address, that we'll raise tonight, what have you said about George Soros as to whether or not he sponsored Antifa or any of the left-wing organizations?
	That's a fact.
	I mean, look, it's ridiculous.
	That's not a conspiracy theory.
	If you look at the group called Refuse Fascism, which is one of the leading sort of Antifa groups, George Soros and his organizations have put money into Refuse Fascism.
	So Soros is a very, I mean, I admire him as the sort of, he's a zealous entrepreneurial funder of a whole bunch of left-wing causes.
	I'm sure he's very proud of it.
	His son is now doing it in his place.
	And so it seems very odd that something, and again, coming back to the issue of the Nazis.
	I'm being faulted for doing nothing more than showing an exact segment of the 60 Minutes interview in which Soros was talking to, I believe it was Steve Croft, and they were discussing this exact issue.
	And Soros was actually talking about how the experience of collaborating with the Nazis shaped him for his whole life because it taught him that he had to learn to manipulate and operate in very difficult environments and survival was the name of the game and that he applied those theories to his economic...
	projects that came down the road.
	So again, this is a case where I did nothing more than attribute to Soros the very things that Soros himself That's not a conspiracy theory.
	That's simply Soros talking about his own younger life.
	Now, I agree.
	His degree of culpability at the age of 14, he was a teenager and so on, is obviously open to reasonable debate.
	Yeah, I think what shocked people, even the 60 Minutes, was his emotional response.
	I mean, like in Israel, a lot of people who survived that have deeply emotionally conflicted sentiments.
	It came out in various trials of people that were alleged to be Holocaust participants.
	But not Soros.
	I mean, Soros was like, why would I be bothered by this?
	He seemed almost baffled by the question.
	And I was like, either this guy's on the spectrum or he's on the sociopath spectrum.
	Because that's a rather terrifying response.
	I get, hey, you're a teenager.
	You're trying to survive.
	I get it.
	But when you're older, you don't look back and say, geez, he seemed to have no reflection on it at all.
	I found it one of the most disturbing interviews I'd ever witnessed.
	Because I don't agree with his value system in general.
	He's the biggest donor to left-wing disruptive causes all around the globe.
	I mean, all throughout Europe.
	Ukraine has been his pet project for forever.
	I mean, half the reason we got a war there is because Georgie Boy wants to play with the country.
	But all of these dynamics went after the other.
	But what's also fascinating is that they elevate somehow his Jewish identity as if it matters.
	Soros himself has said it doesn't matter.
	And it's like this is not, you know, Bill Gates is not Jewish.
	Any theories about him being up to bad stuff has kind of been proven over the last two years.
	We can't trust what he's doing.
	And there's a reason why he's the number two donor to the World Health Organization.
	It's like when people say, oh, it's a conspiracy theorist.
	Gates is proud of this.
	And the question is whether you agree with his agenda or don't.
	But he's chosen to have a disproportionate influence on health global policy.
	And so, yeah, it is fascinating how much they do this.
	How much have, as you've gone through sort of start off the young conservative intellectual tradition...
	Politically active tradition into what I would call more of a populist conservative intellectual tradition.
	It's still infused with the intellectual hue that you have, but a populist style, populist issues, populist audiences, trying to reach that ordinary everyday person, not just the writer, not just the academic, not just the policymaker.
	What's that been like as you've gone through that transformation?
	Well, I still, you know, even though I, you're right, I think that is true.
	And I find that I am, I have found an audience.
	So, for example, my wife, Debbie, is from the Rio Grande Valley in the south part of Texas.
	She was born in Venezuela, but she grew up in south Texas.
	It's Hispanic country down there, working class Hispanic, largely Democratic, by the way, although starting to move toward the center and toward the right.
	Now, when I go down there, I'm always amazed I have all these fans down there.
	And they're not where I would normally.
	So I have a populist constituency, but I also strongly believe that...
	Conservatism and the Republican Party do need an establishment and do need elites.
	The problem is our elites are rotted.
	So we have the wrong kind of elites.
	We need elites because we can't put people in the Supreme Court who haven't gone to good law schools and haven't been good judges and come up through academia and through the system.
	So we shouldn't be too dismissive of elites, but we just want elites that are on our side.
	And similarly, we want an establishment that's a little more responsive to what ordinary people are saying.
	And I think the democratic establishment, interestingly, is more responsive.
	I mean, if I was Michael Moore, I made this exact same film in 2016 about how Trump stole the election.
	Every Democrat would be screaming, right?
	But here I have Steve Scalise on my podcast a few days ago, and he's like, well, you know, some people have mentioned 2,000 mules.
	Can you send me a DVD?
	You know, so, I mean, the film's available for download.
	His constituents are talking about it, but Republicans are so slow on the uptake.
	It takes like three months for them to like watch the film.
	And so...
	You know, to some degree, I've learned a certain amount of patience.
	I'm like, you know, I'm not going to be too hard on these guys.
	I know this is how they are.
	They're really slow on the uptake.
	But I'm confident that, you know, even if the rhinos, even, I mean, if, you know, if Lindsey Graham saw this film, he'd know something was up.
	He'd know something's wrong.
	Marco Rubio, the same.
	So I don't, I have a reasonable amount of confidence that the mainstream of the Republican establishment, when they see 2,000 mules, they'll recognize there's a problem they need to deal with.
	Well, actually, perfect segue to this question.
	If Trump runs again in 2024, do you obviously support him?
	I wouldn't say obviously.
	And in fact, to be honest, I don't generally support candidates at all.
	And I certainly don't support candidates in the primary.
	I don't endorse people.
	I stay out of all that.
	I'm really more in the ideas side of republicanism and conservatism.
	Number two.
	I was very careful in this film actually to not make it all about Trump.
	If you contrast my film with the movie called Rigged, which was made by Dave Bossie, that movie is 45 minutes long and has like a 10-minute interview with Trump.
	If you look at my 90-minute film, I don't think Trump is in the film for more than three minutes.
	I was very clear.
	I wanted to make this a film about the integrity of the election process.
	And I thought if it's all over, if Trump's all over it, it's going to look like it's some kind of a Trumpian manifesto or no.
	It's not that.
	It's an independent film.
	Yes, of course, Trump ran in 2020, so he, in that sense, is a subject of the film.
	But I'm not going to make this seem like it's all about Trump, because actually, it's not.
	Has there been any improvement in the institutional conservative media covering the film and the topics of the film?
	Part of it I get, I get Fox got burned by some of the associations.
	Some of us told Sidney Powell and others, God bless them, not to go down certain paths, and they did, and they got people into trouble.
	I always considered, I said every great crime needs a great red herring, and I thought Dominion was a great red herring.
	I was like, even if you believe it, you'll never be able to prove it.
	So you're just going to gut yourself in the process and so forth.
	But it's still, I thought they overreacted to getting hit by some of those things.
	So now they're terrified of it in general.
	Has Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Fox, a lot of the conservative institutional media, have they started to come around to at least saying the words 2,000 mules on the air?
	I know a lot of people at Fox.
	Almost all of them are on board with 2,000 Mules.
	They all know it's real.
	They would like to talk about it on the air.
	I don't even think...
	I speculated for a while about this legal theory that you have, and I think there is something to it.
	But I don't think it makes sense in the end because this film is not about the machines.
	It doesn't even mention Dominion.
	And so, in fact, so far from it being a legal liability for Fox, it actually helps Fox.
	Because let's say Fox goes into court and cannot prove it's the machines.
	All Fox has to say, well, listen, we're journalists.
	We got it wrong on the machines, but guess what?
	We weren't entirely wrong about the fraud.
	Check out 2,000 mules, right?
	So I think something else is going on.
	And I think that some of the public reports of a deep feud between Murdoch and Trump have more to do with this.
	I think that Murdoch decided early on, I'm done with Trump.
	I've had it with this guy.
	I'm going to use all my power and all my platforms.
	Let's remember, who owns the Wall Street Journal?
	Rupert Murdoch.
	Who owns the New York Post?
	Rupert Murdoch.
	Who owns Fox?
	Rupert Murdoch.
	Who has the kind of power that could call Arizona without even 5% of the vote coming in?
	Who has the kind of power to tell every host at Fox you cannot mention the word 2000?
	Who has that kind of power?
	I mean, so I think you come back to the scene in The Godfather where they go, you know...
	It's Barzini.
	It was Barzini all along.
	And that's my theory about Fox.
	Again, it's speculative, but it makes sense of the facts because the Wall Street Journal is towing the exact same line on Fox.
	So I don't think we're dealing with some intellectual crisis on the right.
	We're just dealing, I think, with some kind of a high-level feud that is percolating its way down in a very, I think, damaging and unfortunate way because we can't talk about a legitimate topic.
	Because you've got this crazy business going on on the upper floor, so to speak.
	I never knew that Rupert Murdoch owned, or News Corp, whoever it is, owned Wall Street Journal.
	Fox and Wall Street.
	And the New York Post and some key British publications.
	Murdoch is by far the most influential conservative media guy.
	He's kind of like the hearst of the right.
	And if he gets a burr on some issue or person...
	For the most part, he's done a good job of not blacklisting individuals and ideas, but there'll be like three or four.
	I mean, there's a certain friend of ours in Austin, Texas, who might be on that list.
	But there's a couple of people that, for whatever reason...
	Murdoch gets upset.
	Murdoch and Trump have been at each other back and forth.
	Make up, then at each other, make up.
	At each other, make up.
	No surprise there.
	Trump almost sunk Fox branding in January of 2016.
	When he went after him, all of a sudden they dropped 40 points in the equivalent of their Q rating.
	Trump showed that he could be the big gorilla and how he used that has always been in debate.
	That would make some sense.
	I think it's unfortunate.
	this is a libel-proof film.
	There's nothing in this film that's going to get anybody sued.
	It's not there.
	Nobody's making specific statements about a specific company that they can't back up.
	That's not there.
	This is on film, on proof, and there's no specific false claims about anybody.
	So no one has to worry about promoting 2000 Mules being a libel suit.
	Well, so let's, um, can we close it out?
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I was about to Dinesh.
	Where can people find you?
	Not that they need me to do it here, but we'll do it anyhow and pin the comment.
	Where are you at on social medias?
	Well, I'm just at Dinesh D'Souza on Twitter.
	I'm on pretty much all of social media, certainly on Facebook and Instagram and so on, but I'm very active on Rumble.
	I'm very active now on Locals.
	And the movie website, if I can mention, 2000mules.com.
	So just the number 2000mules.com.
	And I say that because the movie is only on these uncancellable platforms, right?
	It's not on Apple iTunes.
	It's not on Amazon Prime.
	So the website is like a one-stop shop if you want to download it.
	And of course, 2000mules.locals.com.
	2000mules.locals.com.
	You can either join my channel and you'll get the movie for free.
	Or you can just order the movie and then stream it and watch it.
	And that's how I did it.
	Dinesh, Robert, stick around.
	Everyone in the chat, I didn't get to the Rumble rants, but I've screenshotted them, so maybe I'll try to address them tomorrow.
	Thank you.
	Stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you all.
	This was amazing.

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