Mike Lee has Dinesh D’Souza movie mindset

Utah Senator Mike Lee on C-SPAN's Washington Journal last week. Photo: C-SPAN

WASHINGTON — In an interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Thursday, Utah Sen. Mike Lee noted his interest in the latest Dinesh D’Souza joint 2000 Mules, which claims that non-profit groups paid volunteers in five states to harvest ballots during the 2020 election to rig the results for Joe Biden.

“That movie does raise significant questions about what might have happened in that election,” Lee told C-SPAN last week. “I think those are questions that need to be answered, and I would love to get the president’s response to it and an explanation for why certain things happened.”

Text messages between Lee and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, published by CNN in April, illustrate the senator’s earlier efforts to overturn the election. Lee eventually came around to certifying the 2020 results.

Various news organizations have debunked the assertions made in the film. Other Utah Republicans have also praised 2000 Mules.

Congressional candidate Andrew Badger and Chris Herrod hosted a fundraiser along with a screening of the movie last week.

When asked by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol about the film on Monday, former Attorney General Bill Barr laughed and said he was “unimpressed.”

D’Souza responded on Twitter, calling Barr “overweight and largely immobile.”

It isn’t D’Souza’s first attempt to influence political discourse. Born in Bombay, he came to the U.S. for college, and after several writing gigs, became a policy advisor in President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

He first made noise in 1995 with his book The End of Racism, in which he wrote that the “American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”

While continuing to write, he moved to filmmaking during the Obama era. His first film, 2016: Obama’s America, grossed more than $33 million and reached more than 2,000 theaters. It was characterized as “almost entirely subjective and a logical stretch at best” by the Associated Press.

At the time, Bloomberg reported that the success of the film had “raised expectations for a flood of reactionary, election-season movies” to be released for “a vast, conservative-minded bloc of moviegoers, whom producers, filmmakers, and studios are racing to reach before they stream into voting booths.”

D’Souza certainly took the film’s response as encouragement.

Ahead of the 2016 election, D’Souza released Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.

Reviewing the film, Alex Shephard of The New Republic wrote, “D’Souza doesn’t even make a credible argument that Bill and Hillary are corrupt, even though in many ways it’s low-hanging fruit.”

In 2018, Death of Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time? was dropped. The film draws parallels between Donald Trump and the 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

D’Souza pleaded guilty to illegally using straw donors to contribute to a New York Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2014, and was sentenced to five years of probation, along with a $30,000 fine and eight months in a San Diego “community confinement center.” President Trump pardoned D’Souza in 2018.

If you’re looking to watch 2000 Mules, you can find it online for $20.