At a time when Fox News is making headlines for spreading various unsubstantiated theories calling into question the legitimacy of the last presidential elections in the United Statesthe popular television program Saturday Night Live echoed one of these hypotheses, one that pointed directly to alleged interference by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.
The controversy that currently surrounds the communication company, the most popular among the country’s conservative audience, dates back to the disinformation campaign in which it allegedly took part after the November 2020 general elections, in which the Republican Donald Trump would lose the White House.
After the elections, different voices close to the campaign of the then president, including Trump himself, questioned the legitimacy of the election results. For weeks, the Republican’s advisers gave voice to numerous conspiracy theories. All of them would end up being denied by the authorities or dismissed in court due to lack of evidence.
One of those theories, already branded at the time as “insane” by numerous voices in Washington, maintained that the Dominion company, responsible for the voting machines in more than 20 states of the country, would have colluded with the socialist government of Venezuela to shift votes destined for Trump in favor of the Democratic candidate, ultimately, President Joe Biden.
As argued at that time in a controversial press conference by the lawyer Sidney Powell, adviser to the Trump campaign, to carry out his purpose, Dominion would have used the software Smartmatic, developed years ago by two Venezuelans residing in Florida with the aim, he said, of facilitating an electoral punch by then-President Chávez.
However, not only is there no evidence that Chávez, whose death has just passed 10 years ago, actually used such tricks to reassert his power, but also, Dominion does not use this software.
Despite the fact that the voting company denied the accusations from the beginning, the network foxnews it continued to accommodate such accusations in its programming. Finally, Dominion chose to sue the chain for defamation and claims compensation of 1,600 million dollars.
Rupert Murdoch himself, owner of the Fox conglomerate, in the context of the judicial process, has already admitted that the commentators of the news channel endorsed former President Trump’s false fraud claims and his allies, and that he did nothing to prevent it.
One of those allies is Mike Lindell, better known in the US as ‘My Pillow Guy’, due to his pillow company. After the elections, Lindell became one of the most consistent voices when it came to questioning electoral legitimacy.
Among other arguments, the businessman has insisted on Powell’s “insane” theory about Dominion’s Venezuelan ties, which has led him to defendant’s bench in the defamation trial, but also to be immortalized once again on Saturday Night Live.
He sketch in question, aired as part of last Saturday’s show, featured three comedians portraying the network’s regular commentators -Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmead- addressing the legal dispute between Fox and Dominion in one of the regular talk shows of the chain.
Despite the fact that Lindell hasn’t appeared on Fox News for some time now, to be more exact, since the multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit was filed, SNL decided to get him back for its Saturday show, as a supposed analyst. guest of talk show.
In fact, the false Lindell begins his speech by assuring that he is not going to talk about Dominion. “I know the rules,” he says. However, that is to say that and go back to his conspiracy theories.
“The Dominion machines all have an Oompa-Loompa inside”, the message is then dispatched. alter ego by Lindell, in reference to the orange characters who, while humming, work tirelessly in ‘Charly and the Chocolate Factory’.
And it is that, although it is true that neither Mike Lindell nor Sidney Powell ever mentioned anything about Oompa-Loompas in voting machines, the rest of their arguments sound as fantastic to many as Roald Dahl’s own novel.
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