Right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza, recipient of a Trump pardon after his conviction for breaking campaign finance laws, is raising campaign cash for his son-in-law, first-term Rep. Brandon Gill.
Gill, a MAGA influencer who campaigned on a promise to be Trump’s biggest booster in Congress, won a crowded primary last year with help from Trump’s endorsement. It seems likely that Gill’s relationship with D’Souza, and his work on D’Souza’s discredited election-conspiracy movie “2000 Mules,” helped him get Trump’s blessing.
D’Souza’s email pitch for campaign contributions touts Gill’s role in promoting “2000 Mules,” even though the movie’s election-fraud claims have been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked—so thoroughly in fact that last year the right-wing Salem Media Group apologized for the movie’s promotion of false claims and announced it would stop distributing both the book and movie versions.
Last year, the right-wing group True the Vote, whose analysis was at the core of the movie’s claims, “told a Georgia judge that it doesn’t have evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 general election and a runoff two months later,” as AP reported.
In December, D’Souza himself “acknowledged that its findings were based on a faulty analysis,” the New York Times reported, even though D’Souza continued to claim without evidence that somehow “the underlying premise of the film holds true.”
“Brandon helped me EXPOSE the STOLEN 2020 election, working on my film ‘2000 Mules,’” D’Souza writes in his fundraising email. “While the fake news media refused to report the truth, we made sure millions of Americans knew what really happened.”
D’Souza refers to Gill as a “conservative warrior” who is waging “war” against “the forces that seek to reduce America to TYRANNY!” – by which he seems to mean the mainstream media and federal judges who rule against Trump’s lawbreaking.
Gill’s approach to political discourse is every bit as thoughtful and nuanced as one of D’Souza’s propaganda flicks. Earlier this year, he told supporters that “the entire staff” of National Public Radio “hate you,” adding, “They hate Christians. They hate conservatives. They hate this country.”
