Are you worried, against all evidence and logic, about vaccine-pushing Antifa Satanists stealing U.S. elections? Then “Let My People Go,” a new conservative conspiracy film which purports to be “rooted in biblical themes and archetypes” may be the movie for you.
The film was created and narrated by former New Mexico State professor David Clements, who has become a fixture in an industry of speakers, writers, and pundits who tour the country promoting misinformation about U.S. elections. Conservative Daily, the podcast network run by Colorado election conspiracist Joe Oltmann, contributed to the documentary, and it is being hosted on MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s FrankSpeech network. Lindell has been a major funder of election denial in the U.S. from the 2020 election onwards.
“Everything in this film is true, and no matter what the liars say and no matter what they do, this will be the place we start from in restoring order, fighting for the soul of our nation, and taking back our nation for the people,” Mike Lindell says in the film’s introduction.
For Oltmann and Lindell, election denial has carried heavy financial consequences. Both face ongoing defamation lawsuits by Dominion Voting Systems and former Dominion employee Eric Coomer, among multiple others, for making false statements about Dominion machines and Coomer himself. As for Lindell, he says the price tag of those lawsuits and his overt advocacy has amounted to millions of dollars.
In short, the people involved in the production of “Let My People Go” need money. Fittingly, the film costs $20 for a streaming activation code. For $25, you can order a physical blu-ray copy. The sidebar for the viewing page pleads that you donate a further amount to the Lindell Offense Fund “to help save our country and secure our election platforms.”
A trailer touts “Let My People Go” as “A Film The Captured Media Has To Ignore.” In truth, I wish I had ignored it, and I advise anyone reading this to do just that. “Let My People Go” was not worth nearly two and a half hours of my time, nor was it worth the $20 I paid to stream it. That’s not because it was dangerous or revolutionary – simply put, it was boring.
The film is a barely-coherent potpourri of conspiracies. While it advertises itself as being about the 2020 election and the people imprisoned for their role in the Jan. 6 Insurrection, it can’t resist interspersing it all with footage of drag queens and demonic statues. It also devotes disparate chunks to COVID vaccine conspiracies – notably, Clements’ commitment to these theories was part of what lost him his job as a professor.
You don’t get the full story about that from this movie, by the way. Clements devotes part of the runtime to a version of his life story, where he claims that he was fired from New Mexico State University in August 2021 for his refusal to wear masks. His comments in a lecture comparing COVID vaccines to Nazi Germany were not included in the film, nor were his Telegram posts where he called on his followers to harass his fellow university employees.
On its face, the film is built around the connection between Donald Trump’s loss (or, as Clements would call it, the stolen election) in November 2020 and the events of the Jan. 6 Insurrection.
“There’s still a disconnect with most Americans that don’t associate what happened on Nov. 3, 2020, with Jan. 6,” Clements says. “But the reality is everyone [J6ers] that’s rotting in [prison] right now is in there because of what happened on Nov. 3.”
This sums up the thesis of the film: most Americans are kept “asleep” by mainstream media propaganda, unaware of what Clements and others see as blatant and egregious fraud perpetrated to overturn what should have been the victorious reelection of Trump. If they could just “wake up” and see what Clements sees, then they would understand that Jan. 6 insurrectionists were actually patriots fighting for the soul of the country. (Except for the ones who were actually Antifa plants.)
Clements says all this as though it’s self-evident, and not a denial of reality. The reality is that Biden beat Trump fairly in 2020; in the aftermath, numerous investigations have found no evidence of the sort of widespread, systemic voter fraud that conspiracists allege. In some cases, conspiracists can bring up potential vulnerabilities in the election process, but never evidence that those flaws were actually exploited. But because that’s not what they want to hear, conspiracists instead cherry-pick the information that serves their narrative.
A large portion of the runtime shows this selective editing at play. At many points, it just recycles other videos wholesale – a 2023 Conservative Daily clip in which US Election Integrity Plan’s Mark Cook demonstrates alleged vulnerabilities in Mesa County, CO election software, footage from one of Mike Lindell’s election fraud symposiums, and more are reused without edit or commentary. At times, it feels more like a glorified clip show than an actual film.
The framing device for much of this is a low-budget animated segment in which a cartoon version of Clements tries to convince audience surrogate “Chad” that elections are being rigged, using the aforementioned clips to systematically debunk the talking points of strawman election officials – again, cherrypicking clips and soundbites to build a narrative of dark deception.
Speaking of strawmen, this segment prominently features a cartoon version of Eric Coomer who insists his name is “Heinrich Coomer,” no doubt in reference to infamous Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler who created and controlled Germany’s concentration camps. Just to make sure you know who this is actually meant to be about, the film cuts away to footage of Eric Coomer at multiple points, referencing him by name.
He’s later joined by a cartoon version of Dominion CEO John Poulos, here named “John Faustos,” who comes complete with a Nazi-esque armband. If this film has any strong suit, it definitely isn’t subtlety.
The film goes on to directly reference Oltmann’s claims that he caught Coomer plotting to rig the 2020 election on an “Antifa conference call.” It plays a clip of Oltmann addressing a live audience previously, repeating the claim for which he is currently being sued.
“That’s how we got to the call and him [Eric Coomer] saying that, ‘hey, don’t worry about it, Trump’s not going to win, I made sure of it.’ … Like, how could someone be that evil?” Oltmann says in the clip.
Denver District Court Judge Marie Moses said that Oltmann’s claims were “probably false.”
“The entire story appears, on its face, to be manufactured around Coomer’s Facebook posts, and deliberately crafted in a way to make it impossible to be verified by anyone attempting to investigate the veracity of Oltmann’s outlandish claims of Coomer’s involvement in the Antifa conference call,” Moses wrote in 2022.
Nonsensical at times, hamfisted at others, it’s unclear who “Let My People Go” is supposed to be a wake-up call for. The $20 activation fee all but guarantees that only the die-hard election fraud truthers, who already believe almost everything Clements has to say, will watch it. Sure, they could pay an extra $5 to send their friends or relatives a DVD. But my impression is that most uninitiated people will tune it out after hearing Clements ramble about how demons have taken control of the U.S. within the first 15 minutes. Here are his actual words:
“When the nation evicts the Holy Spirit, something else will come to inhabit our institutions. The spirit of Ba’al or Mammon replaced our love of God with a love of money. The spirit of Ishtar dulled our sense of duty and virtue by replacing it with an addiction to pleasure and comfort. And once our morality was compromised, and we became lazy to our plight, the spirit Moloch lurked in the shadows to slaughter the unborn and traffic the innocent. But one spirit in particular opened the door for the others: the spirit of fear.”
And even for those who already believe the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats are pawns of Satan, and all the other things… what does this movie have that they haven’t already heard? There’s Clements’ autobiographical portion. There’s the sections about Jan. 6 prisoners, which includes original footage of the outside of the prison where J6ers are being kept, but that makes up less than half the runtime. There’s also Clements’ message of hope at the end, where he talks at length about “the historical actions of Abraham Lincoln, Moses, and the warrior Gideon,” but anyone who wants to hear Clements’ religious ramblings can tune into Conservative Daily, where he’s a regular co-host.
Even for the conspiracy theorists, I don’t think “Let My People Go” is worth $20.
