In a sketch that opened this weekend’s edition of the long-running show, Saturday Night Live put Fox News — and Mike Lindell of MyPillow — on the rhetorical spot over lies both have told or helped spread about Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion is a company whose technology was widely used in elections around the U.S. in 2020 (and other years). For some reason, the company’s equipment became a consistent fixture in delusional conspiracy theories from the Right about imaginary fraud that Trump claimed cost him the 2020 election, and subsequently, Dominion has brought defamation litigation against interests including Fox (targeting both Fox News and the Fox Corporation) and Lindell. The Fox trial might be coming up soon, assuming there’s no sudden settlement in the case — in which Dominion is seeking over one and a half billion dollars in damages.
The SNL skit was a parody of a broadcast of the morning show put on by Fox called Fox & Friends in which the hosts — played by members of the NBC show’s cast — tried to distance themselves from the lies. Brian Kilmeade, as played by Bowen Yang, quipped that he wasn’t actually in the fabled loop about the falsity of the claims of election fraud. “Every Dominion machine has a Venezuelan Oompa-Loompa inside that eats the votes with its little mouth!” Lindell, played by cast member James Austin Johnson, who also does the show’s Trump impersonations these days, proclaimed to the hosts in the skit. The tone here is not that off-base from stuff the real Lindell has actually said in real life.
For instance, he’s talked about melting down some of the disputed voting machines to make prison bars for individuals accused of fraud. “MELT DOWN THE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES AND TURN THEM INTO PRISON BARS!” Lindell posted on Twitter in December of last year after he was allowed back on the platform. Elsewhere, an associate of Lindell’s — former Colorado county elections official Tina Peters — was recently found guilty of an obstruction charge in connection to surreptitiously recording court proceedings and could face jail at her sentencing next month. Check out SNL’s Fox parody below:
