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Movie Chain Owned By Trump Donor Releases 'Documentary' Promoting Trump's Big Election Lie Around The Country

Movie Chain Owned By Trump Donor Releases 'Documentary' Promoting Trump's Big Election Lie Around The Country
@MastermediaIntl/Twitter; Scott Olson/Getty Images

One of the country's largest movie theater chains Cinemark became the only major chain to show the documentary 2000 Mules, a film by far-right propagandist Dinesh D'Souza that promulgates former Republican President Donald Trump's "Big Lie."

The film has sparked widespread controversy for its easily disproven and absurd conspiracy theories alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, for which there is no evidence.

The film's name derives from a conspiracy theory pushed by D'Souza and a Texas non-profit that claims 2000 so-called "mules" for the Democratic Party stuffed ballot boxes in 2020 in order to win the election for Democratic President Joe Biden.

There is of course no truth to this theory.

But Cinemark's CEO Lee Roy Mitchell, a long-standing donor to the Republican Party aligned with the Koch Brothers, has chosen to push it out to Cinemark locations across the country anyway.



D'Souza's absurd film rests on a supposed trove of cellphone location data purchased by far-right organization True the Vote, which has been intimately involved in plots to overturn the 2020 election.

That year, True the Vote filed lawsuits alleging election fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, then withdrew the suits a week later.

In his film, D'Souza, who was convicted violating federal election law in 2014 and pardoned by Trump, claims the purchased cellphone location data proves the ballot-stuffing fraud claims because it shows the same voters returning to ballot boxes multiple times during the 2020 voting period.

The data proves no such thing--ballot boxes are frequently and purposefully placed in high-traffic areas that people visit multiple times in order to make voting more convenient.

The claims D'Souza makes in his film to make his interpretation of the location data seem more credible--like that the same data analysis was used to solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl--are also false.

More importantly, the owner of the purchased location data has said that the conclusions D'Souza's film draws are categorically false.

So why is Cinemark showing this absurd film? It likely ties back to its CEO, Lee Roy Mitchell, a prolific donor to Trump, Republican politicians and right-wing misinformation platforms, including those promulgating the Big Lie.

Mitchell is also a key cog in the Koch Brothers' financial engineering of Republican politics, and a supporter of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was in Washington D.C. for the January 6 insurrection and has been involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

On Twitter, people were disturbed by the news.













And many called for a boycott of the theater chain.












Beginning this past weekend, 2000 Mules was showing in at least 169 Cinemark locations. The chain operates in 42 states.