Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza will speak at the Michigan GOP conference, which is known for pushing unproven election conspiracy theories.

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Who is Dinesh D’souza?

Dinesh D’Souza, a prominent conservative filmmaker known for promoting unproven election conspiracy theories, is scheduled to speak at the Michigan Republican Party’s statewide conference. The conference, set to take place from September 22 to 24 at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, will also feature former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake as a speaker.

D’Souza’s participation at the conference is emblematic of the MIGOP’s ongoing embrace of voting conspiracies, a trend that has persisted since the election-denier Kristina Karamo was elected party chair in February. Both D’Souza and Kari Lake have propagated baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread voter fraud, which they contend led to Donald Trump’s defeat.

The MIGOP’s announcement of Lake as a speaker was accompanied by a promise of revealing ‘more’ speakers in the near future. The party’s conference website asserts that these speakers will ‘challenge the status quo’ and propel the party toward ‘a new level of excellence and cultural understanding’ as they gear up for the 2024 elections.

Nevertheless, promoting election denialism might prove to be a precarious strategy. Nationwide, election deniers secured victory in fewer than 1 in 6 races for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state during the most recent fall elections, as reported by States United Action, an impartial watchdog. A working paper from Stanford University indicates that disseminating the ‘Big Lie,’ as Trump’s unfounded claims are known, led to an average loss of over 2 percentage points for Republican candidates who rejected election results during the midterms.

D’Souza’s most notable work, the film ‘2000 Mules,’ released last spring, posited the existence of an indistinct network of absentee ballot ‘mules’ in swing states like Michigan who purportedly used drop boxes to subvert the election in favor of Trump. These central assertions of the film have been widely debunked by cybersecurity and election experts.

Before ‘2000 Mules,’ D’Souza had propagated conspiracy theories, including claims about President Barack Obama’s foreign birth and unsubstantiated allegations against President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Trump granted D’Souza a pardon after he had been convicted of a campaign finance felony.

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Meanwhile, Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran for governor in Arizona in 2022 as a Republican, lost by 17,000 votes to Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Despite losing in court while challenging her defeat, Lake continues to falsely claim her election was stolen.