One morning in Houston, David Lopez-Zuniga had just left his house for his job as an air-conditioner repairman, with the lunch his wife prepared on the seat next to him. As usual, his day was getting started before sunrise, so the lights of the SUV following way too closely behind him were obvious and glaring. Suddenly, the SUV hit Mr. Lopez-Zuniga’s small truck on the passenger side, forcing him off the highway. Mark Aguirre, the driver of the SUV – a former Houston police captain turned “private investigator” – pointed a gun at Mr. Lopez-Zuniga and ordered him to get on the ground.

 

Class, welcome to Conspiracy Theory 101!  In the past, conspiracy theories lived largely on the fringes of society, believed only by kooks and the tinfoil hat crew who steadfastly insisted the earth was flat, the moon landing was faked, and werewolves exist. For the most part, conspiracy theories were isolated and largely harmless back then.

 

After the terrorist attacks on September 11th, however, things started to ratchet up. Conspiracy theorists claimed things like the U.S. federal government was behind the attacks and that the buildings were destroyed not by planes flown into them by international terrorists, but by “controlled demolition.”

 

Next came the conspiracy theory that the deadly mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut never actually happened – a despicable lie that a jury felt was worthy of $1.5 billion in damages, which is the amount they awarded the families of the Sandy Hook victims after they sued Alex Jones, the far-right radio show host and founder of InfoWars. Then came my personal favorite, that forest fires in California were caused by Jewish space lasers (thank you for that one, Majorie Taylor Green!).​

 

Back to our story in Houston, where we last left Mr. Lopez-Zuniga on the ground with a gun pointed at his head. Mark Aguirre, the man who had his gun pointed at a completely baffled Mr. Lopez-Zuniga, was convinced he would find in the truck 750,000 mail-in ballots from the 2020 presidential election, signed by Hispanic children with untraceable fingerprints. < This story is 100% true, we promise. We'll say it again, we could not possibly make this s#@# up. It would kind of be funny if it wasn’t threatening our democracy >.

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What was actually in Mr. Lopez-Zuniga’s truck and on his property – both of which he allowed the police to freely search – was air conditioning equipment. Which makes sense since Mr. Lopez-Zuniga is, after all, an air-conditioner repairman. Mark Aguirre was indicted and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, plus a charge of unlawful restraint, for his assault against poor Mr. Lopez-Zuniga.

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So, here’s the backstory. The Liberty Center for God and Country – a nonprofit organization started by a man named Steven Hotze, a well-known anti-LBGT crusader and megadonor to the Texas Republican Party – paid almost $300,000 to 20 private investigators for a six-week undercover “investigation” into what they were certain was illegal ballot retrievals in Houston. It is unclear exactly why members of The Liberty Center for God and Country targeted Mr. Lopez-Zuniga, but he was certainly not the only one who experienced their vigilante “justice.”

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Hotze – who also left a voicemail with Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s chief of staff during the 2020 protests suggesting the governor “shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting” – has been charged with unlawful restraint, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated robbery, and engaging organized criminal activity.

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Then there was Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 movie 2000 Mules that detailed how paid operatives, or “mules,” allegedly trafficked ballots in the 2020 election – “typically in the middle of the night” – to mail-in drop boxes around the country. According to D’Souza, the mules picked up their ballots “at left-wing organizations called vote stash houses. That’s where they get the ballots and then they go dump them in the mail-in drop boxes…. (the mules) are going, by and large to a group – they’re going to NGOs, or nonprofit organizations. These are deeply nested in these inner cities. These are the people that are sort of cultivating the ballots. They’re the ones that hire the mules.”

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The entire thesis of the film – and most of the “evidence” offered – centered around an analysis of cellphone location data in major swing states that allegedly showed suspicious patterns of behavior near ballot drop boxes. This geolocation data was given to D’Souza by a group called True the Vote, a conservative group based in Houston. True the Vote’s director Gregg Phillips, a former executive with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, was a prolific spreader of election fraud propaganda from the jump.

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In the days following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, for example, Phillips posted on Twitter that he had discovered that more than 3 million people who voted were not citizens, a lie that was then pushed by Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Donald Trump then seemingly used the false information to compose his own Tweet: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

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When questioned about any evidence he had regarding the claim, Phillips responded that he would soon “release all methodologies, data and analysis directly to the public” – which, of course, never happened. After Trump’s tweet, True the Vote, under Phillips’ guidance, released its own statement: “We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states, and the Trump administration can best address this growing problem” – which, of course, never happened.

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The other pieces of “evidence” offered in 2000 Mules included surveillance footage of people putting ballots into drop boxes, as Dinesh says (in a scary voice over equally scary music), “What you are seeing is a crime.” Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the film, claimed that, in less than two weeks in full release, 2000 Mules had “already become the most successful political documentary in a decade,” with one million viewers and $10 million in revenue.

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MAGA-land was delighted!! In May 2022, Donald Trump hosted a screening of 2000 Mules at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and, during that summer, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office screened the movie, as did Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and three other Texas legislators, who sponsored a watch party at a church in Houston. The film was shown three separate times at the Republican Party of Texas’ annual convention.​

 

Unfortunately for Dinesh D’Souza, True the Vote, and the Salem Media Group, the entire movie was total bull, a fact they all finally admitted. Mr. D’Souza admitted in a statement in December 2024: “I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team. If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.” In February 2024, attorneys for True the Vote told a Georgia judge that it didn’t have evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 general and runoff elections.​

 

Even more unfortunate for Dinesh D’Souza, True the Vote, and the Salem Media Group is the fact that one of the men they accused of being a drug mule, Mark Andrews, sued them all for defamation, after being cleared of any illegal voting activity by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.​

 

Naturally, the finger pointing among them started immediately, with Salem Media saying, “We relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, Inc. that the individuals depicted in the videos provided to us by True the Vote, including Mr. Andrews, illegally deposited ballots” – right before they settled with Mr. Andrews “for a significant [confidential] amount.” For its part, True the Vote said it “did not select videos or graphics used for dramatic effect. (Mark Andrews) was not part of the geospatial study in which TTV identified 242 unique devices having visited at least 10 ballot drop boxes – a fact that was communicated to Mr. D’Souza’s team. Despite this, D’Souza’s team included a blurred video of this individual in their ‘2000 Mules’ movie and book productions.”​

 

Even though Dinesh D’Souza said in his statement, “I owe this individual, Mark Andrews, an apology,” his lawsuit with him is still ongoing, as is Andrews’ lawsuit against True the Vote.​​​

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Other examples of conspiracy theories are just heartbreaking. In August 2021, a California father and QAnon follower killed his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter because he believed they had “serpent DNA” and were “going to grow into monsters.”  Killing them, he said, “was the only course of action that would save the world.” (To refresh your memory, QAnon is the preposterous conspiracy theory group that believes Donald Trump is saving America from a cabal of Satan worshipers and child sex traffickers.)

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Sadly, the destruction caused by QAnon’s demented fabrications started years before this devastating event. In early December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch left his home in Salisbury, North Carolina and headed to Washington, D.C. He had heard Alex Jones – yes, the same guy who started the “Sandy Hook Elementary massacre didn’t happen” conspiracy theory – say that Hillary Clinton was sexually abusing children as part of satanic rituals in the basement of a pizza restaurant there, and he was horrified.

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The Alex Jones’ rant he heard went something like this: “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped . . . yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” By the time Mr. Welch left for Washington, the clip of Alex Jones saying this trash had already been viewed on YouTube more than 427,000 times.

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When Mr. Welch arrived at Comet Ping Pong – the scene of the “crime” – with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a .38 handgun and a folding knife, he went through the restaurant room by room, looking for children to rescue. He never got to the basement Mr. Jones referenced because the restaurant doesn’t even have one. < Edgar Maddison Welch was sentenced to four years in prison for his armed assault on Comet Ping Pong. >

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This incident is now known as Pizzagate. The first Pizzagate message was posted on October 29, 2016, by a user named Carmen Katz: “My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner’s device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend’s plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls  . . . We’re talking an international child enslavement and sex ring.”

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From there, the lie sprinted its way through social media, getting the attention of a Twitter user named @DavidGoldbergNY, who retweeted Katz’s post twice, adding: “I have been hearing the same thing from my NYPD buddies too. Next couple days will be interesting!”  Just one of those tweets was retweeted 6,369 times.

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Rolling Stone magazine reported that, “according to a sample of tweets with Pizzagate or related hashtags provided by Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics at Indiana University, Pizzagate was shared roughly 1.4 million times by more than a quarter of a million accounts in its first five weeks of life – from @DavidGoldbergNY’s tweet to the day Welch showed up at Comet Ping Pong.” At least “14 Russia-linked accounts had tweeted about Pizzagate” and “at least 66 Trump campaign figures followed one or more of the most prolific Pizzagate tweeters.”