Excerpt From Judd Legum blog post about AT&Ts funding of the extreme right.
"Popular Information first reported on AT&T's relationship with OAN in February, when OAN repeatedly ran a two-hour movie created by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, "Absolute Proof," that uses discredited conspiracy theories to claim that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election. “Absolute Proof" aired thirteen times from February 5 to 8 — encompassing 26 hours of OAN's programming over four days.
Lindell's film promoted lies about Dominion, a voting machine company. For example, lawyer Matt DePerno claims that files "were deleted from the Dominion system in Antrim County. We know that for a fact." Lindell responds, "wow." Although a clerical error briefly showed a landslide for Biden in the county, it was corrected. There is absolutely no evidence of any vote manipulation in the county and the results were confirmed by a hand recount of the votes.
While "Absolute Proof" was technically a paid advertisement, OAN promoted it as a news program. In a tweet, OAN billed it as an "exclusive report" about "[g]rowing evidence of election fraud reveal[ing] that the presidency of the United States has been stolen from the American people."
Lindell's movie was not out of place on OAN. In July 2020, OAN describedQAnon, the conspiracy theory that Democrats are part of a Satanic cult operating a child sex ring, as "the new mainstream." OAN host Kristian Rouz said that QAnon "is becoming a widely accepted system of beliefs" and is "immensely popular." She described efforts to ban QAnon adherents from social media sites as the "deep state… fighting back." Rion said that Q, the fictional character sending coded messages about the child sex ring, was "anonymous for a reason" and "people need to respect that." "
David Bonn 