MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Election ‘Documentary’ Flops: YouTube Removed It And Fact Checkers Are Laughing

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Earlier this week, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell breathlessly predicted that if his election fraud “documentary,” Absolute Proof, failed to persuade Americans of his baseless claims of election fraud, we would soon be headed for the apocalypse. It’s a good thing it seems that Lindell is not psychic, because so far his “documentary” is a flop: YouTube removed it, fact-checkers are having a field day mocking the “documentary’s” lack of proof, conservative media network One America News Network (OAN) aired the “documentary” but slapped a harshly worded disclaimer on it first, and the lawyers for the voting technology companies he accuses of conspiring to commit election fraud are watching the whole thing unfold.

On Thursday, Lindell told a right-wing YouTube channel that his “documentary” was a “miracle” that would reunite America as “one nation under God” again, but if it didn’t catch on with people, then the “end times” would be near.

Dominion Voting Systems has already sued Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for defamation for public comments they made while acting as former President Donald Trump’s attorneys attempting to overthrow President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and has sent preservation of evidence letters to Lindell, OAN, Fox News, Trump, and several other media figures and conservative activists who accused them of committing election fraud.

Smartmatic filed a similar defamation suit against Giuliani, Powell, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro. Dobbs, Bartiromo, and Pirro previously aired an awkwardly-worded retraction segment on their shows in response to Smartmatic’s threats of legal action, but they seem to have been viewed as inadequate.

OAN did air Lindell’s “documentary” on Friday — and presumably cashed a hefty check from Lindell to do so — but prefaced it with a remarkable disclaimer that stated, “Mr. Lindell is the sole author and executive producer of this program and is solely and exclusively responsible for its content…This program is not the product of OAN’s reporting.”

MarketWatch noted that OAN’s “lengthy disclaimer” was getting more attention on social media than the film itself, with “Absolute Proof” trending on Twitter as users mocked the dichotomy between the film’s title and OAN’s “it’s just Lindell’s opinion” disclaimer.

Thomas Clare, one of the attorneys representing Dominion in the defamation lawsuits, scoffed at OAN’s disclaimer, calling their decision to air the “documentary” an example of “textbook actual malice.”

“‘Nice try’ by OAN, but it definitely does not relieve them of liability,” said Clare. “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.”

For now, OAN is still promoting Lindell’s “documentary” on their homepage, with a link listing upcoming air times. The legal teams for Dominion and Smartmatic are likely to find interesting OAN’s caption, “Watch Mike Lindell’s documentary exposing election fraud and covering the theft of America by enemies both foreign and domestic,” lacking any such disclaimer and promoting the “documentary” as factual.

Just like Trump, Lindell is facing rapidly dwindling options for social media platforms. Lindell was recently banned from Twitter, on both his personal and his corporate account for MyPillow, for pushing similar baseless election fraud claims.

YouTube and Vimeo both removed the “documentary” from their platforms a few hours after it was posted on Friday. A YouTube spokesperson told VICE News that the video was removed because it “violated our presidential election integrity policy.” The previous YouTube link now displays the message, “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

So far, Facebook has allowed the “documentary” to remain on the site, but has restricted its distribution and attached a warning label denoting that third party fact-checkers have rated it as false.

Other than OAN, Lindell’s main remaining option appears to be the link on his own website, with the video hosted on Rumble, a YouTube competitor that has drawn support from right-wingers who have been banned from other social media networks.

What of the actual content of the “documentary”? VICE News reporter Paul Biest sat through the two hour film, and observed that Lindell’s claims just recycled the failed arguments that Trump’s multitudes of lawsuits flung at dozens of state and federal courts across the country, all of which failed.

These include the claim that 66,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when the number of people under the age of 18 who requested a ballot was actually four, and all of them turned 18 prior to November 3, according to Raffensperger’s office. Lindell also claims that 10,000 fake ballots were driven from New York to Pennsylvania, an unfounded claim based on the testimony of a man who believes he’s being haunted by ghosts. …

Throughout the movie, Lindell interviews various fringe witnesses and what he claims are “cyber forensic experts” that “these machines were used by other countries to steal our election.” These guests included multiple former Rudy Giuliani witnesses including retired Col. Phil Waldron, who made the ridiculous claim that nearly every single vote cast in Arizona’s Maricopa County was potentially fraudulent, and Dominion IT contractor Melissa Carone, the IT contractor for Dominion whose disastrous testimony before the Michigan Legislature went viral in December.

In sum, the movie feels like a bunch of old, thoroughly-debunked claims repackaged as a special report on the worst public access TV channel you’ve ever watched.

Politifact came to the same conclusion, titling their fact-checking post, “MyPillow CEO Lindell’s film not intended to be taken as fact.”

“Does Lindell’s documentary provide what the title [Absolute Proof] promises?” Poltifact asks, offering the blunt answer: “No.”

In total, Politifact ranked five separate claims from Lindell’s “documentary” as “False,” noted one other one was “not based in fact,” and regarding one particularly outlandish claim that the “Chinese Communist Party” had “ownership of the private equity firm whose board controls Dominion,” Politifact linked to multiple other fact-checkers that had debunked that specific falsehood.

The New York Times’ James Poniewozik called Lindell’s film “TV’s latest, most outrageously paranoid conspiracy-thriller” and a “two-hour-plus disinfomercial” in an article titled “The MyPillow Guy’s Fever Dream.”

“The content of Mr. Lindell’s stolen-election case poses a challenge for a newspaper reviewer,” Poniewozik noted, “because it is hogwash, widely discredited hogwash, and it can be irresponsible to spread the specifics unnecessarily, even to debunk them.”

Perhaps the best assessment was by Rafi Schwartz for Mic, merrily suggesting that the Academy Awards should create a new category, “Absolutely bonkers vanity project that made me laugh so hard I almost choked,” because Lindell’s “documentary” would be sure to win.

Declaring Absolute Proof “one of the funniest films of the year,” Schwartz wrote “the Pillow Man has created a piece of absurdist art so unintentionally hilarious that I have absolutely no regrets about spending the better part of my morning watching it. And frankly, that’s about the highest praise I can offer pretty much anything these days.”

And so, he encouraged his readers to watch the “documentary” themselves, if they have two hours of free time, “and feel like diving head first down this incredibly stupid rabbit hole.”