February 6, 2021

MyPillow's CEO, Mike Lindell, is Donald Trump's number one fan! He also is a huge fan of baseless conspiracy theories that have zero evidence to back them up, which is exactly why he took all that sweet pillow money and invested it in something just as fluff filled — a "documentary" about all the election fraud that took place during the 2020 Presidential election (note: the few instances of fraud were on the Republican side.)

He put this documentary on his Twitter feed — wait, he didn't...he has no Twitter feed. Ok, he put it on the MyPillow Twitter feed! Wait, no he can't - that account was shut down too. Donald Trump definitely put it on his Twit...wait...he doesn't have an account either.

So where did it end up? YouTube and Vimeo. Oh, YouTube took it down. Vimeo also apparently took it down. Facebook has allowed it to stay up, with warnings that third-party fact-checkers have rated it false. They have also restricted its distribution. The only other place it appears to exist on the interwebs is on Lindell's own website.

So about this "documentary" thing. It is called Absolute Proof, and he swears up and down that it proves there was fraud, and Donald Trump actually won the election because votes were flipped, and other countries did something illegal and I don't even know anymore. He is so deep in the rabbit hole of his own delusion right now that it is hard to not watch this and wonder if there is some illegal substance abuse going on.

Leading up to the release, Lindell told the viewers on his YouTube channel that the documentary would "reunite America as one nation under God," and that if it did not work, that the "end times" would be upon us. (Side note: I am sure Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo got excited by End Times talk.)

OAN is in the crosshairs of Dominion and Smartmatic. Both companies have filed lawsuits against right wing news organizations, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and FOX hosts. OAN tried their best to buffer any further legal trouble by playing a nearly two-minute disclaimer at the beginning of the clip (both written and audio.)

The problem is that the documentary thing was over two hours long, so if you turned it on at any point during the video after that, you would not know that it was a paid-for spot, and not a news exposé that OAN endorsed. One of the attorneys for Dominion, Thomas Clare, dismissed their disclaimer, and said that their decision to air the documentary was an example of “textbook actual malice.” He went on to say "nice try by OAN, but it definitely does not relieve them of liability. To the contrary, we warned them specifically and in writing that they would be broadcasting false and defamatory statements of fact if they broadcast the program, and they made the affirmative decision to disregard that warning and broadcast it anyway.” So it looks like that warning is not going to provide much legal protection in court. It will be nice to sleep on a new Smartmatic Pillow while I watch Dominion News Network.

Let's talk about the actual video. How was it? VICE reporter Paul Biest watched it so you don't have to and he was able to summarize the movie in fewer words than the actual disclaimer that OAN played before it aired.

The movie is around two hours, not the three promised. It is filled with false claims that have already been debunked. Oh, and it starts with Lindell pulling a Donald Trump, whining about social media and the media being mean to him.

“I have been attacked the last month relentlessly on social media, by newspapers, by TV shows, by—you name it, I’ve been attacked. They canceled my Twitter; today they canceled MyPillow’s Twitter account.”

EVERYONE CANCELLED LINDELL AND HE IS HAVING A SADZ.

So about his amazing evidence? Lindell claims that “algorithms of these [voting] machines broke… Donald Trump got so many more millions of votes that they didn’t expect, so they had to go recalibrate. That’s why all these states shut down.” To further bolster these claims, he shows slides made on his 1995 Dell Desktop using DOS that show all the "possible errors" in the states that Trump lost by narrow margins.

"Possible errors" include underage voters in Georgia, fake ballots being driven from New York to Pennsylvania, illegal voters in Wisconsin, mail-in voting during the pandemic, etc. Lindell also brings last season's cast of characters to bolster his claims, including many from Rudy Giuliani's "press conferences," like the discredited "cyber forensic experts," retired Col. Phil Waldron and Melissa Carone (who was brilliantly mocked in an SNL skit, played by Cecily Strong.)

To summarize: this movie is a condensed version of all the whackadoodle press conferences, segments on FOX, OAN and Newsmax and a regurgitation of Donald Trump's tweets — packaged as a real documentary. Sadly, it appears no one really watched it, and when I went to look for it online, I was not able to find a copy to watch.

Lindell was self-cancelled, apparently.

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