On Wednesday, Ann Coulter published a blog post bashing Dinesh D’Souza’s election fraud film, 2,000 Mules, which Coulter called a “stupid movie” while debunking its conspiratorial premise that “the Democrats cheated.” Oddly enough, the post was published on the conservative website, Townhall, whose parent company Salem Media Group funded D’Souza’s film. Apparently, nobody caught this connection until the next day when Coulter’s post bashing 2,000 Mules was quietly deleted. The URL for the post now contains a 404 “Page Not Found” error.
While Townhall refused to provide a comment to The Daily Beast, who first reported on the deleted post, an employee at Salem Media Group wasn’t so bashful:
When reached by phone on Friday afternoon, a woman in the Salem Media executive office who would only identify herself as “Tracy” snarkily told The Daily Beast of the Coulter column deletion: “Oh, really. That’s interesting. We have been deleted from a lot of Google sites because they don’t agree with us being a religious organization. Is that… illegal too?”
The film has been a hot topic in conservative circles for several months now, but it recently made headlines after making an appearance during the January 6 hearings. During his video deposition, former Attorney General Bill Barr is seen laughing at the film’s premise that cellphone data somehow proves election fraud. Bill called the data “singularly unimpressive” and D’Souza’s mule theory “indefensible.”
Barr’s comment earned him the ire of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who flat-out threatened the former attorney general on his podcast this week. “Bill Barr, we’re coming for you, bro!” Bannon said. “You’re sitting there lying about this. If you had any decency whatsoever … you would have reached out to Dinesh D’Souza before you smeared him.”
(Via The Daily Beast)