This week:
- The MyPillow election fraud epic, reviewed.
- I’m writing a book about QAnon!
An Inconvenient Pillow
MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell has been hiding out.
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Guarded by what he’s described as a “heavy security” detail of retired Navy SEALs, the Trump superfan has been getting by on three hours of sleep a night, focusing all of his energies on cooking up a “docu-movie” that will prove once and for all that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump.
“I don’t trust anything right now,” Lindell said in an interview with a North Dakota talk radio station this week. “It’s very evil out there.”
On Friday, Lindell released his masterwork: Absolute Proof, a three-hour conspiracy theory bonanza, ultimately cut down to two hours, that exists in a netherworld where the election is still in play and voting machines aren’t queuing up billion-dollar lawsuits against Lindell and his compatriots.
If the documentary fails to get Trump back in the White House, Lindell claims we’re headed toward an apocalypse straight out of the Book of Revelation.
“It’s the end times, we pray and we go to heaven, that’s it, it’s over,” Lindell said in the talk radio interview.
With the hope of averting a rapture, I had the pleasure of watching Absolute Proof on Friday, and I can tell you: It’s bad. Still, the film, presented in four two-hour blocks on One America News paid for by Lindell on Friday, does offer some insight into the current MAGA dead-ender mindset.
Most of Absolute Proof is set at the news desk of a little-known right-wing media outlet even more obscure than OAN. Lindell, who doesn’t seem to have rehearsed his lines or been open to second takes, gestures at PDFs on a screen and invites a rotating cast of post-election also-rans to tell him how spies from various countries stole the election.
‘You guys are going to be absolutely amazed,” Lindell declares at the start.
Three months after the election, Lindell and his crew, which includes viral Rudy Giuliani witness Mellissa Carone, haven’t cooked up one coherent conspiracy about what happened. Instead, each witness flogs the claims that launched them personally to short-lived fame on the right, with Lindell occasionally waving them to hurry up so he can move onto the next segment.
The vibe is like a particularly unhinged house party, with Lindell as an especially antic host. Lindell says he invited self-proclaimed “inventor of email” Shiva Ayyadurai after meeting him a few weeks ago, for example, and lets Ayyadurai do his things for a few minutes before rocketing off to the next guest, who has something totally different to talk about.
Production-wise, Absolute Proof definitely looks like something Lindell produced on three hours of sleep a night. Interviewees’ title cards are misspelled, and Lindell constantly flubs his phrasing—he accuses spies of affecting the election “cyberly,” and denounces Facebook chief Mark “Suckerbuck.” That’s on top of the deliberate but equally inexplicable choices—the music swells like a horror movie when guests are talking, even though tonally the rest of the film is meant to mimic a news broadcast. The film is also riddled with B-roll that goes on a few seconds too long, notably including a man holding a hammer and sickle in a field to ominous effect.
Hanging over the entire vanity project is the threat of crushing lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, the two voting machine companies Lindell and his allies have smeared for months as election thieves. In an apparent bid to minimize their already hefty legal liability, OAN ran a 90-second disclaimer insisting the video was all Lindell’s idea and that OAN itself isn’t making any allegations about the voting machine manufacturers.
For his part, Lindell holds off naming the companies for the first few minutes of the film, referring vaguely just to “voting machines.” By the halfway point, though, he’s in full swing, accusing voting machines of ripping off the whole country. That should leave at least one segment of the movie’s audience satisfied with the movie: the lawyers representing Dominion and Smartmatic.
I’m writing a book about QAnon!
If you like Right Richter, you might be interested in this news: I’m writing a book for HarperCollins about QAnon and all the ways it’s seeping into our politics and culture.
It’s due out later this year—stay tuned!
