I had never given any credence to claims that the Democrats "stole" the 2020 US election until I was introduced to the work of Indian-born US commentator and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza at Tucker Carlson's Sydney show last month.
Excerpts from his 2022 film, 2000 Mules, showed clip after clip of security camera footage of people turning up in the dead of night to drop handfuls of votes into open-air ballot drop-boxes.
This footage, married with mobile phone location data tracked the movements of individual phones, to and from these unattended voting boxes.
To my Australian eyes, using thousands of unguarded open-air drop-boxes made a sudden and unexpected mockery of the Democrat mantra of the 2020 election as "the most secure in history".
The people who exposed how this was done gained their expertise using the same methods to build forensic evidence for criminal trials. They showed D'Souza how Democrat-aligned non-profit organisations paid registered voters for their blank ballots, and paid them for putting the filled-out forms in the boxes.
The security footage showed changing tactics during the voting period.
Mules began shooting pics on their phones to prove they lodged the votes, rather than dump them as some had been doing. Then when a mule was arrested by fingerprint, they began using disposable gloves, often binning them afterwards, all on camera.
2000 Mules argued that well more than half a million of these votes in just four close states gave sufficient electoral college votes to the count that elected Biden. Take them away, and the election was Trump's.
I was stunned.
Host Clive Palmer was his usual gauche but determined self. Carlson was something of a revelation, given I knew him only through the mainstream attacks on him. He was rational, quick-witted and self-deprecatingly funny.
"Dinesh Joseph D'Souza is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist, author, filmmaker and convicted felon who received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump for his crimes," said Wikipedia, a good place to see what the public is told to think.
D'Souza, a political observer from the start, had his first book published at 23 in 1984. His first documentary was in 2004. His felony sentencing in 2014 was a $US30,000 fine and eight months in jail for splitting $US20,000 in campaign donations for a Republican candidate in 2012, when the personal limit was $US10,000. The (Bill Clinton-appointed) judge said there was "no evidence" of (politically motivated) "selective prosecution". Some might see things differently.
For me, the obvious ease of fraud in 2020, and the hostility to questions by D'Souza and others put the post-election controversy, especially the events of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol, in a new light.
Now the US is on knife-edge after the attempted assassination of Trump; at a time when America-backed NATO is at war with Russia over Ukraine, and US-backed Israel is killing tens of thousands of Palestinians after a Hamas attack that was not an isolated incident, but another episode of a battle between Jews and Arabs that began well before Israel's formal creation in 1948.
I was not surprised that Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 after her "basketful of deplorables" comment, but the idea of Trump horrified me, and his presidency was as erratic as most expected. But when I read the criticisms of 2000 Mules - that the phone data was not precise enough, that the footage had been enhanced, that they found one "mule" who was legitimately lodging family ballots, but ignoring the endless line of people arriving to vote at two in the morning - I smell desperation.
When CNN's fact checker concludes as "baseless" the idea that "leaving ballot boxes in public parking lots invites fraud", I can only wonder what world they live in.
Next time you see an official dismiss something as a "conspiracy theory" or "fake news" without confronting the evidence, examine the facts yourself. However, this is likely to raise further questions about the way "democracies" work.
We might be on the edge of World War III, but it could be a Second American Civil War that really kicks things off.
