Happily Ever After: Mike Lindell and Absolute Proof

Welcome to the first installment of what may or may not become a recurring feature here on Unstrung Nerves in which I watch various flavors of conservative zealots attempt to make movies and laugh at how bad they suck at it. That said, it kind of breaks my heart to write about this particular film here, because A) it scarcely qualifies as cinema and B) I feel genuinely ashamed for sitting all the way through it. But I did. This is about the multi-hour election rant and/or “docu-movie” Absolute Proof, which is either Mike Lindell’s batshit fever dream or a triumphant return to form for legendary mockumentarian Christopher Guest.

It would, however, be difficult to intentionally make this movie as funny as it actually was. That’s assuming that Mike Lindell is a sincere Trump cult follower and not, as I would love to believe, the greatest performance artist who has ever lived. Honestly, Sacha Baron Cohen’s got nothing on Mike Lindell, a man who, remember, actually got an audience with a sitting president. But taking him at his word, Mike Lindell’s performance in Absolute Proof — that of a flailing and bizarre commentator in contrast to his more measured, reasonable-seeming guests — shows that we may have actually gotten lucky that our brush with a fascist entertainer in the White House was with Trump and not Lindell. Sure, Trump is an idiotic, dictatorial psychopath, but he also seemed to get bored with the whole “ending democracy” thing and give up part way through in the same way that I got bored and gave up watching The Walking Dead. Trump at least eventually gave in and left the White House voluntarily. Mike Lindell would have had to be hauled out kicking and screaming like William H. Macy at the end of Fargo.

Lindell has continued to beat the dead election fraud horse to the bitter end. I watched him do it, bringing on guests who offered little in the way of proof but plenty of their own insistence that they (as experts) or people they had worked with (who are experts) insist the election was fraudulent, culminating in a magnificent climax that looks more like Google Maps ejaculating than it does “absolute proof” of voter fraud that stole the election from a reality television star who barely conned his way into the office in the first place. Absolute Proof is funny in the same way that Donald Trump is funny: unintentionally and in a way that makes you feel dead inside. You have to laugh to keep from losing all hope to go on knowing that Mike Lindell — who invariably comes across as a rejected early draft of Ron Swanson — has this level of a platform to transmit the sort of toxic bullshit that led to violent extremism on January 6th.

Call it propaganda or stochastic terrorism, Lindell is dangerously unhinged, approaching Alex Jones levels of “unglued from the basic fabric of reality”. The most delusional part of Absolute Proof isn’t even Lindell’s sincere belief that Donald Trump truly won the election by a landslide; it’s Lindell’s ability to, in practically the same breath that he whines about “cancel culture”, proclaim that Absolute Proof is being or has been seen or will be seen by everyone on Earth, including the U.S. Supreme Court, whose members presumably have better things to do than watch the reanimated corpse of a third-runner-up in a Powers Boothe lookalike contest spout nonstop election lies.

Perhaps most telling about Lindell and his philosophy is his apparent belief that Absolute Proof will magically unite the country by convincing everyone that the election was rigged against Trump. Never mind that the very existence of Absolute Proof stokes the irrational fires of ideological division partly driven by a breakdown in the very concept of reality. No, Lindell just knows that when his movie is seen by every single human on Earth, they’ll all agree that Lindell is right and we’ll live happily ever after because “unity”, in Lindell’s eyes, conveniently involves everyone thinking exactly the way he does.

But “unity”, like “cancel culture”, is just a phrase that has been drained of all its meaning, because these days people just use words however the fuck they want. Like truth itself, words are whatever you want them to be. Which is why this television special, which is so egregious that OAN aired a now-infamous disclaimer beforehand, is called Absolute Proof and not Half-Assed Lunacy.

You don’t need to watch this movie. As they say, I watched it so you don’t have to. If you want to laugh at Bizarro Michael Moore, just check out that disclaimer (read: magical lawsuit shield) showing that his movie was too insane for fucking One America News Network, and then watch that two-minute clip of Lindell on Newsmax, the one where the anchor walks off the air rather than deal with Lindell. The implosion of the right-wing is comedy gold, but they will unfortunately try to take down as many people as they can with them on their way out.

This is not Mike Lindell’s first foray into film; Lindell also apparently had a hand in funding Unplanned, an anti-abortion movie that is somehow stupider than Absolute Proof. It’s infinitely more polished and shrewd — probably because it’s not just Mike Lindell exclaiming “wow!” and “the machines!” while sitting behind a make-believe news desk — but it’s just as much poisonous nonsense, this time about abortions being bad. The film uses same faulty reasons that anti-abortion activists always use, packaged not as a series of dry statistics as in Absolute Proof but as a harrowing personal story of one woman overcoming basic human decency to become the kind of person who harasses people outside of abortion clinics.

I hadn’t really intended to spend any time on Unplanned except as an afterthought to the bizarre Absolute Proof, but the more I watch the more outraged I really get. Not the way the filmmakers want me to be outraged; no, instead I’m tempted to, much like the film’s main character, go cry in a closet before I start an organization whose sole purpose is to try to harass anti-abortion Christians out of going to church. Where Absolute Proof is a transparent parody of itself, a reminder of just how ultimately ineffective the Trumpian tactics to disrupt democracy have been, Unplanned is the opposite, a reminder of how effective right-wing attempts to undermine abortion rights have been. The film is an extreme example of the ways that the conversation around abortion has been warped by its opponents.

Unplanned is hard to watch as someone who supports abortion rights, but it’s also hard to watch as someone who believes in logical, sound arguments. But then, the dramatic pretense of the story is supposed to distract from its fallacious rhetoric, blatant emotional manipulation, and outright lies. Maybe the secret genius of the film is that watching Unplanned is a lot like being accosted on the street by a well-dressed raving lunatic trying to talk you into believing that abortion is murder and Planned Parenthood is selling pieces of fetuses for use in Satanic science experiments and George Soros sex cults or whatever these motherfuckers believe these days (yes, there’s a Soros name-drop in Unplanned, because of course there is).

Lindell himself has a cameo in Unplanned, appearing as a very excited construction worker at the demolition of a Planned Parenthood at the end of the film, because closing down a health clinic is these assholes’ idea of a triumphant denouement. Notably, for all the talk about how many other options the women seeking abortion have, Unplanned does not offer any alternatives to abortion, or to the clinic whose destruction they cheer on, and no, just saying “god has a plan” does not count. It’s telling though that when funding this movie and most likely given his choice of cameo Lindell decided he wanted to be the one who symbolically destroys abortion by tearing down a Planned Parenthood sign himself.

The unifying thread of Absolute Proof and Unplanned is not so much Mike Lindell as it is the assertion that individual feelings are the same as facts. In Absolute Proof, beneath the veil of numbers is the chilling idea that Donald Trump must have won because they just know it in their heart; the numbers simply prove what they already know. In Unplanned, the religious beliefs and emotional reactions of the anti-choicers in the film are enough to show that abortion is evil; the evil straw man behaviors of the people involved in providing abortion services simply prove what they already know. This is the essence of modern conservatism: believe what you want to believe, do what you want to do, then conjure “facts” later to justify what you wanted to believe and do to begin with. As with Absolute Proof, there’s an implicit happily ever after in Unplanned, so long as you can be happy just steamrolling over everyone who doesn’t think like you do.

In summary, watch Unplanned or Absolute Proof  if you want to be gaslit for hours on a cinematic scale, but otherwise, read this article and laugh at the fact that Mike Lindell looks and acts like a mentally unbalanced genie granted a Pinocchio-style wish to a Tom Selleck body pillow. And if you, like me, have a hard time laughing at the despicable lies and manipulation of Unplanned, just remember that they need to make films like Unplanned — i.e. they need to lie egregiously — because they don’t have facts, truth, or morality on their side.

As for me, I need to rinse the taste of these movies out of my brain, and I plan to do so with something more pleasant, like Cannibal Holocaust or a documentary about the 2016 presidential election.