At the Michigan GOP conference, which is known for promoting unproven election conspiracy theories, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza will present.
Who is Dinesh D’souza?
At the state conference of the Michigan Republican Party, Dinesh D’Souza, a well-known conservative filmmaker known for endorsing improbable election conspiracy theories, is scheduled to speak. The former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake will also speak at the conference, which is scheduled to take place from September 22 to 24 at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
Debbie and I are in London and decided to stop by and watch some tennis #Wimbledon pic.twitter.com/1xPZcCrDOa
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) July 6, 2023
Since election-denier Kristina Karamo was chosen as the party’s chair in February, the MIGOP has continued to embrace voting conspiracies, as evidenced by D’Souza’s attendance at the conference. Both D’Souza and Kari Lake have spread unfounded allegations that widespread voter fraud tainted the 2020 presidential election, which they claim contributed to Donald Trump’s loss.
‘More’ speakers would be revealed in the near future, the MIGOP promised along with the announcement of Lake as a speaker. According to the party’s conference website, as they prepare for the 2024 elections, these speakers will “challenge the status quo” and lead the party to “a new level of excellence and cultural understanding.”
Promoting election denialism, however, could be a risky course of action. According to States United Action, an unbiased watchdog, less than 1 in 6 of the nation’s races for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state were won by-election deniers during the most recent fall elections. According to a working paper from Stanford University, Republican candidates who disregarded election results during the midterms suffered an average loss of more than 2 percentage points as a result of the spread of the “Big Lie,” as Trump’s unfounded claims are known.
The movie ‘2000 Mules,’ which was released last spring, was D’Souza’s most well-known project. It proposed the existence of an ambiguous network of absentee ballot’mules’ in crucial states like Michigan who allegedly used drop boxes to rig the election in Trump’s favor. Election and cybersecurity experts have extensively refuted the movie’s main claims.
Before ‘2000 Mules,’ D’Souza had been spreading conspiracies, including claims about President Barack Obama’s foreign birth and unfounded charges against Bill and Hillary Clinton. D’Souza received a pardon from Trump in 2018 after being found guilty of a campaign finance crime.
Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran as a Republican for governor of Arizona in 2022, was defeated by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, by 17,000 votes. Lake continues to falsely assert that her election was stolen despite losing in court while contesting her defeat.
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