Mike Lindell

Mike Lindell speaking at a Toilet Paper USA event in 2020.

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“”In reality, Mr. Lindell is a conspiracy theorist who has been spreading inaccurate information about election fraud since November, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the presidential race. Even after the violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol last week, Mr. Lindell went on television to promote the lie that “Donald Trump will be our president for the next four years.”

—Annie Karni, The New York Times, 16 January 2021

Michael James "MyPillow Guy" "MyPillow Mike" Lindell (1961–) is an American businessman, pseudoscience-pusher, conspiracy theorist, wannabe right wing politician, Razzie winning schlockumentarist, and rabid Republican supporter of Donald Trump. Lindell claims that he was previously a cocaine addict and alcoholic before finding sobriety through Christianity, though as far as is known the only evidence of the cocaine addiction is Lindell himself.^{Do You Believe That?}

His day job is owner of MyPillow, a cushion manufacturer and airwave polluter that has had a longstanding pattern of complaints based on a never-ending 'Buy-One-Get-One' scheme. MyPillow has lost two separate false advertising lawsuits after claiming his pillows could cure insomnia, sleep apnea, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis, and was ordered to pay $1 million in each case.

Lindell made some dumb business decisions. At Trump's urging during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindell directed his company to make cloth masks instead of pillows, intending to give them away to first responders. Unfortunately he failed to do basic research, and found that his masks weren't approved for use in hospitals and nursing homes. He then decided to sell the masks through his company website at the same time the market became saturated with masks. He ended up with two million cloth masks that he can't even give away, and a $US7 million loss.

I support Trump, so buy my pillows

Lindell (center) hawking pillows with the argumentum ad populum fallacy ("4 Million People Can't Be Wrong!")

Lindell enjoys a symbiotic relationship with right wing conservative media. He attained a kind of cult status for standing by personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham after they were harshly criticized for hate speech and lost many advertisers. Lindell reiterated his support for these people, and in some cases increased advertising on their shows to lengthy infomercial segments. Lindell also heavily advertises on conservative talk radio stations in the Salem Radio Network, and appears on the talk shows hosted by many Salem personalities. Lindell was the largest advertiser on Fox News in 2020, but following Trump's election defeat, has harshly criticized the network's news coverage despite maintaining his commercial relationship with them.

And, if you're a QAnon nutjob and you buy his pillows, you can even get a discount!

COVID woo

See the main article on this topic: COVID-19 pandemic

In August 2020, Lindell and Ben Carson began pitching oleandrin, a toxic chemical found in the oleander plant, to Trump as a cure for COVID-19. Lindell has a financial stake in Phoenix Biotechnology, the company developing the experimental oleandrin product. There is no evidence that oleandrin works to treat COVID-19 in humans. When Lindell went on CNN to promote this unproven cure, calling it "the miracle of all time", host Anderson Cooper asked him, "How are you different than a snake oil salesman?"

On February 6^th 2021, Lindell went on a rant about COVID-19 on a Steve Bannon podcast, describing COVID's supposed connections to the "One World Order", asserting that the COVID-19 vaccine is "mark of the beast stuff", and then going off on a whacknoodle tangent about assorted non-sequiturs (666, Nazi analogies, communism, socialism, etc.).

2020 election conspiracy theories

After Trump lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November 2020, Lindell jumped on the crazy train and began spewing election conspiracy theories and making absurd, incendiary statements. He parroted Trump's false claims that Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Georgia governor Brian Kemp sold out Trump by refusing to overturn their state election results. Taking the lead from unhinged Trump lawyer Lin Wood, Lindell said that people who voted against Trump in the state of Georgia should be imprisoned and that Trump should declare martial law. In December 2020, Lindell appeared on the conservative cable network Newsmax and claimed that the voting machines were rigged to give Joe Biden the victory. Lindell has financially backed the post-election efforts of Trumpist lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood.

In January 2021, Dominion Voting Systems warned Lindell of imminent litigation regarding his "false and conspiratorial" claims that Dominion had somehow rigged the 2020 election against Trump. On February 22, 2021, Dominion initiated a US$1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Lindell and MyPillow. Another voting machine maker, Smartmatic, also sued Lindell on January 21 2022.

Bizarrely, Lindell has levied his bullshit "election fraud" claims even on states that solidly went for Trump. Lindell successfully pestered the state of Idaho to conduct an audit of the votes, alleging that there was widespread voting fraud flipping Trump votes to Biden, even though Trump carried Idaho with 63.8 percent of the vote. Among the allegations made was that electronic manipulation occurred in all 44 Idaho counties (in spite of 7 Idaho counties having no electronic steps in their vote counting process). While Idaho election officials did conduct the audit (and found no evidence of fraud), they nonetheless were rather miffed at Lindell, threatening to send him the bill for the cost of the audit. Later, in January 2022, they also sent a cease and desist order to Lindell demanding that he remove his bullshit election fraud claims about Idaho off his website.

2021 coup attempt

See the main article on this topic: 2021 U.S. Capitol riot

Lindell's rhetoric and support helped lay the groundwork for the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6^th, 2021. He sponsored a two week "March for Trump" bus tour in December 2020, in which he continued to propagate assorted conspiracy theories regarding the election. Lindell sponsored and participated in the pre-riot warm-up show (Trump rally), and had even spoken the day before at rallies in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. Lindell is a supporter of the Right Side Broadcasting Network, an obscure pro-Trump television propaganda outlet. Following the violence and failed coup, Lindell refused to back down on his election conspiracy bullshit, instead spouting more false claims, this time the "Antifa did 1/6" conspiracy theory.

Following up the failed coup attempt of January 6, Lindell was invited to the White House, where he apparently intended to present a memo outlining plans for martial law. Lindell subsequently claimed ignorance of the memo (the contents of which were partially-photographed in his hand by the Washington Post), claiming that an unnamed lawyer had asked him to give it to Trump.

His bullshit claims about the 2020 election just won't stop

“”As a preliminary matter, a reasonable juror could conclude that the existence of a vast international conspiracy that is ignored by the government but proven by a spreadsheet on an Internet blog is so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would believe it.

—Federal Judge Carl J. Nichols, in ruling against Lindell's request to have the case by Dominion Voting Systems against him and others dismissed

Lindell was permanently banned from Twitter on January 26, 2021 for breaking Twitter's rules which prohibited making false claims about the 2020 election. On Tucker Carlson's show that evening, Lindell claimed that his Twitter account was taken over by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and that posts from his account in the days prior to the account's suspension were fabricated by Twitter staff. In reality, Lindell is delusional. Twitter doesn't need a reason to suspend accounts; it's a private company offering a free service. Demonstrating what bullshit that excuse was, Lindell then decided to use the official corporate MyPillow Twitter account to continue tweeting his crazy whines about election fraud and Dorsey. This got the corporate MyPillow Twitter account suspended as well (for ban evasion) on February 1, 2021.

Much of Lindell's election fraud arguments (similarly to those by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, and others) revolved around baseless fraud allegations involving voting machines, especially those made by Dominion Voting Systems. In January 2021, Dominion got sick and tired of all the inane bullshit Lindell was spouting off, infringing on his untouchable freeze-peach by sending him a cease-and-desist letter, threatening to sue for defamation if he didn't recant his accusations. Lindell's response was defiant, welcoming a potential lawsuit and confident that he somehow had "100% evidence that China and other countries used their machines to steal the election." On February 2^nd, Lindell appeared on Newsmax to talk about his Twitter suspensions, and whether they fit into the "cancel culture" narrative often pushed by conservative media. Newsmax previously was also promoting baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, however on December 21, 2020, another voting machine company, Smartmatic, sent them a cease and desist letter, which tempered the conspiracy talk considerably. Not knowing the difference between mere garden variety bullshit and potentially slanderous bullshit, Lindell went off-topic and ranted baseless conspiracies about Dominion voting machines. This forced Newsmax anchor Bob Sellers to read a prepared disclaimer that "we at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations" and try to steer Lindell back on the "cancel culture" narrative. Eventually this led to Sellers walking off the set, having failed to stop Lindell from committing potential slander.

On February 5, 2021, teaming up with Brannon Howse and his "WorldViewWeekend" fake news outlet (to the point where Lindell offered a "WVW" coupon code, and assurance that a portion of every MyPillow purchase would support Howse's batshit insanity), Lindell released a "documentary" called Absolute Proof. The "documentary" consists of two hours of Lindell and a few other talking heads babbling the same tired, debunked claims of election fraud that had gotten Donald Trump's "legal team" laughed out of court over 60 times in the previous 3 months. Lindell then purchased airtime on One America News Network so he could air this bullshit documentary for 12 hours straight. (Although, in a half-hearted attempt to shirk responsibility from any potential libel lawsuits, even OAN felt the need to air a disclaimer distancing themselves from Lindell before the beginning of every showing.) Absolute Proof would later earn Lindell the Golden Raspberry Awards for "Worst Actor" and "Worst Picture," an honor he now shares with fellow right-wing charlatan Dinesh D'Souza.

In March 2021, Lindell continued his descent into madness, claiming on Steve Bannon's podcast that he is filing a voter fraud lawsuit, and as a result, the United States Supreme Court will invalidate the results of the 2020 election and install Trump as President in August 2021. He also announced a new "documentary" entitled Absolute Interference that he claims will contain evidence notably lacking in the previously released and widely mocked Absolute Proof. Lindell also announced that he is developing a new social media platform for right wing extremists and conspiracy theorists.

In April 2021, Lindell upped the insanity (and tried to catch a few more viral headlines) by attempting to promote an alternative Internet for his "vision", as more vendors stopped carrying his MyPillow products due to his bullshit fraud claims. Speaking to Steve Bannon, Lindell announced a "rival to Amazon" called MyStore (though this was already a section of MyPillow's website since October 2019, and in contrast to Amazon, sold mostly kitschy novelty trinkets). Also, in a separate video post, Lindell announced the creation of a new social media site called "Frank". Promising "a platform like no other" (or a muddled combination of Twitter and YouTube features, take your pick), Lindell declared that the new site will be "the most secure platform ever", and would also strive to fight against "cancel culture" and "political correctness". The site also vowed to be the "voice of free speech". (Except, fuck, no fucking cursing was allowed on Frank, and even taking the Lord's name in vain was fuckin' banned, goddammit. What bullshit.)

On 19 April 2021, Lindell initiated a complaint against Dominion Voting systems in Minnesota federal court. In this laughable suit, Lindell claims that Dominion is a state actor that violated MyPillow's free speech rights, and that the company initiated a "media blitzkrieg to inflict a crippling fear of becoming the next target for destruction if one dares to raise any question about the use and integrity of voting machines during elections." The suit claims that Dominion violated MyPillow's free speech rights while simultaneously asserting that it had nothing to say and no speech to suppress. This happened at the same time as Lindell launched the Frank Speech "social media" platform with a streaming video of him interviewing various "personalities." The launch quickly turned into a spectacular fail, as prospective users were unable to create accounts, or post, or do anything at all, except for view the website's main page consisting of news reports from other internet sites.

Lindell continued firing up the QAnon crowd in 2021 by giving traction to a ridiculous conspiracy theory that Trump will be reinstated as President by the United States Supreme Court in August 2021, based on purported "evidence" of election fraud he has collected since the 2020 election. The conspiracy theory, supported by fellow raving lunatics such as Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, has no chance of happening. At a QAnon kook rally in Tampa, Florida, in June 2021, Lindell said that Trump "will be in office by this fall, for sure" and that he's going to have a "cyber symposium" where "cyber guys" will prove that the election was stolen via "packet capture."

By July 2021, some of Lindell's ad buys on Fox News were being rejected for containing too many bullshit winks and nudges to Lindell's bizarre election fraud claims. At the end of July, Lindell responded by pausing advertisements on Fox News. Lindell returned to running advertisements on Fox News in late September 2021, but only after switching to the relatively safe GOP boogeyman of "cancel culture".

The Cyber Symposium Farce

(l-to-r) David K. Clements, Mike Lindell and Steve Bannon at the Cybersymposium

In mid August 2021, Lindell held his "cyber symposium", which ended up being as spectacular of a disaster as you might expect. The conference took place around the same time that Lindell lost a bid in court to dismiss the lawsuit against him from Dominion Voting Systems.

Lindell's hired cyber expert to prove fraud via "packet captures", Josh Merritt, admitted that Lindell's supposed 37 terabytes of “irrefutable” evidence couldn't prove anything at all, and also confirmed that the source of Lindell's data was Dennis L. Montgomery, a software designer and noted con artist best known for scamming the Pentagon in 2010. Even Steve Bannon wasn't impressed by Lindell's inability to show any sort of proof.

Another longtime cybersecurity expert named Bill Alderson, who actually was very familiar with packet capture analysis, attended the conference out of a legitimate desire to "discover the truth". However, Alderson discovered that not only did the data fail to prove anything about the 2020 election, but the files weren't even in the defacto standard file format (eg .pcap / Libpcap) that one would expect, given that Libpcap files are almost universally recognized by most standard packet capture / packet analysis software out there. As Lindell had offered up a $5 million reward to anyone who could disprove the accuracy of the data, Alderson demanded that Lindell pay him the money for peddling such obvious bullshit. (Lindell, naturally, responded by complaining about Alderson on the usual right-wing podcasts.)

Software forensics expert Robert Zeidman also attended the conference and came to similar conclusions as Alderson. According to Zeidman, some of the "proof of fraud" documents were actually Microsoft Word files filled with random gibberish; in addition, the "last modified" date for the files was dated only a couple weeks before the farce began, meaning that it could not solidly be used as proof for anything related to the 2020 election. When Lindell refused to pay, Zeidman sued Lindell. On April 20, 2023, an arbitration panel ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman the $5 million.

A portion of Lindell's conference was spent attacking other right wing media sources that disregarded the event, such as the aforementioned Fox News. Bizarrely even for Lindell, he even inferred that a writer for the Gateway Pundit who was critical of Lindell was a CIA plant.

To top this shitshow off, the conference gave prominent stage time to a Mesa County Colorado county clerk named Tina Peters, who was beginning to get into additional hot legal water due to some voting machine security breaches that she aided. Peters had previously been subject to a failed recall vote due to horrible incompetent management of the 2019 general election, and had tweeted election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election. At some point in May 2021, Peters turned off surveillance cameras monitoring stored Mesa County voting equipment (a security breach that was not discovered until some time in August). During this time period, some voting machines were illegally accessed and had images of their hard drives downloaded. In addition, on May 25 2021, during a "trusted build" software update that Dominion employees performed on the Mesa County voting machines (a highly regulated process in which, during the update, only staff members from Mesa County, the Secretary of State, and Dominion could be present), Peters introduced an unauthorized person as a "staff member", who was able to observe the process. This rogue "staff member" ended up filming the "trusted build" update. Later, this video was uploaded onto a Telegram channel run by former 8chan administrator Ron Watkins, where the uploader claimed (falsely) that this was evidence that the machines could be remotely administered. In addition, footage of passwords related to the county's voting systems were leaked to a far-right wing blog. Combined, this forced Colorado to junk Mesa County's voting equipment as unusable for the next election in November 2021.

Naturally, at the conference, Peters made a speech complaining that the investigation of her office was politically motivated. Watkins also was a speaker. During his presentation time, he started showing files and directories from the compromised voting machine hard drive as bullshit "evidence" of the fraud. Watkins' lawyer quickly called and stopped him from doing so, due to the highly questionable legality of showing the internal files of a hacked hard drive to the public.

As one might expect, the allegations of Peters' election conduct were serious enough for the FBI (as well as the state of Colorado and the Mesa County District Attorney) to open an investigation on her conduct. Lindell responded to this news by moving her to a "safe house", adding obstruction of justice to his list of potential misdeeds. Peters, who came out of hiding in mid-September 2021, was eventually stripped of her right to run the November 2021 election by a Mesa County District Court Judge on October 14, 2021. In March 2022, Peters was indicted for seven felonies and three misdemeanors for her election tampering activity. Peters was found guilty of seven of the ten charges (including four of the felonies) on August 13 2024, and sentenced to nine years in prison shortly afterwards on October 3.

Still promoting the Big Lie

See the main article on this topic: Big lie

“”So your source is ‘trust me bro?’

—12 year old content creator Knowa De Brasco, accurately skewering Lindell's baseless election fraud claims at the 2024 Democratic National Convention

Unfortunately, the complete failure of the symposium taught Lindell nothing, and he continued doggedly pursuing his evidence-free, jaw-jaw-heavy promotion of the Big Lie of Donald Trump afterwards. Increasingly, however, both the press and the public stopped paying much attention. The few exceptions tended to be whenever Lindell's statements went into much greater batshit insane territory than usual. An example of such occurred on January 2022, when Lindell proclaimed that he had enough evidence to put "everyone in prison for life, 300 and some million people". (For comparison, the estimated population of voting age Americans in 2020 was 256,662,010.)

In August 2022, Lindell held another "election fraud" summit in Springfield, Missouri. Most major news media sources stayed well away. Few other people noticed — attendance was estimated by a local paper at around 400 people, and the streaming viewership wasn't that much better.

In September 2022 Lindell was named in an FBI investigation over his cell phone records going to Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters in relation to the aforementioned election tampering investigation. Lindell subsequently sued the FBI and DOJ claiming that the confiscation of his phone as a result of the investigation violated his constitutional rights against unlawful search and seizure and was an attempt to chill his freedom of speech. This lawsuit was rejected by district court judge Eric C. Tostrud in November 2022.

In the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections, Lindell claimed to possess evidence showing voter fraud and election rigging in multiple election contests. Of course, none of his claims have any basis in fact. Subsequent evidence showed that the youth vote between 18-29 in the 2022 elections have a 27% turnout rate. This also disproves Lindell's argument of the election being stolen one way or another because the majority of Trump endorsed candidates have lost the 2022 elections. Note there are allegations under investigation as of 2022 to overturn the 2022 elections.

In December 2022 Lindell announced his candidacy for the Republican National Committee chair campaign. Lindell's candidacy was immediately endorsed by Stephen Colbert:

Dear Santa, I have been a very good boy this year. I just want one thing for Christmas: Please put the screamy mustache man in charge of the Republican Party.

His magnificent candidacy for the party chair ended in complete humiliation, as he only managed to get four votes out of 168 voting members.

Lindell's Twitter account was reinstated in December 2022, and he immediately resumed spouting election conspiracy theories.

As if 2020 election conspiracy theories weren't enough, in late December 2022, Lindell made some headlines by making baseless election conspiracy theories about the 2022 Florida governor election, which was won by the Republican, Ron DeSantis. At the time, DeSantis was widely seen as Trump's top rival in the 2024 election due to a poor performance by Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates in the 2022 midterms, which compared unfavorably with DeSantis' solid victory. Thus, a possible explanation for this unusual attack, aside from desperate attention seeking, is perhaps Lindell's unswerving, devoted loyalty to Trump. Multiple conservative commentators made fun of the Lindell "clown show" afterwards, showing that even in the conservative universe, Lindell was quickly fading into irrelevance.

In January 2023 Lindell ranted about the House Speaker dispute and accused Marjorie Taylor Greene of breaking her promise for voting for Kevin McCarthy for House Speaker. At the same time, Lindell was in a pissing match with Ronna McDaniels over the Republican Party chairman seat and resorted to making allegations without direct evidence.

In April 2023 Lindell was ordered to pay a settlement of US$5 million to a data scientist who proved that his evidence for vote tampering in the 2020 election was complete bullshit. The ruling was upheld on appeal in February 2024, and a reportedly broke Lindell was ordered to pay up "in thirty days".

In October 2023, Lindell's legal team in defamation lawsuits brought by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic asked to be removed from the case, as Lindell hasn't paid them in several months and says he's broke:

I — can’t pay the lawyers. We can’t pay. There’s no money left to pay them ... I don’t know where that leaves us.

In February 2024, Lindell was named as one of the supporters to recall Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, because he accused the state legislator of not rigging the election for Trump.

"$14.88 for a new pillow"

See the main article on this topic: Fascism

Given how closely aligned Lindell has become with Trump, it is safe to say he is also a fascist, with supporting evidence based on his other fascistic rhetoric (big lie, election conspiracy denialism, coup support). Lindell's claim of ignorance as to the Nazi meaning of what the $14.88 sales price for his pillows, therefore rings hollow.

External links

• frankspeech.com Lindell's complete and total colossal failure trying to imitate a social media powerhouse, and a prime example of how to spend millions of dollars on utter bullshit
• If Trump Doesn’t Keep You Up All Night, MyPillow Will (New York Magazine, 19 January 2021)
• MyPillow's History Is Not Very Comfy goes into detail about some of the shady things MyPillow (and by extension Lindell) have done, including the false advertising lawsuits, the BOGO fiasco, and the fake COVID cure (iilluminaughtii, YouTube, 11 November 2020) (archive snapshot)
• Why Mike Lindell Can’t Stop A detailed analysis of the rise of Mike Lindell and his descent into madness (Politico, 15 June 2021)

See also

• Pious fraud