With Trump twiddling his thumbs down in Florida (he can’t use them to Tweet anymore after all), the right-wing media needs a new conspiracy-theory-shouting horse to hitch its outrage wagon to, and there’s an obvious frontrunner in this race: the MyPillow guy.
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, emerged as Trump’s biggest voter-fraud mouthpiece during the final weeks of his presidency, famously delivering documents suggesting the president invoke martial law in order to overturn the 2020 election. When that didn’t work, Lindell started using his platform, visiting right-wing networks like OAN and Newsmax to tout unproven allegations that Dominion, the tech company that owned machines in Georgia and other states, had somehow tampered with millions of votes. He spread those claims further on Twitter, eventually leading to his suspension (and the deactivation of his company’s account) when the social media site determined his increasingly bizarre statements were a threat to the public.
Which brings us to the current MyPillow Guy controversy: the feud he’s fueling between Fox News knockoffs OANN and Newsmax.
Both right-wing media companies are battling to secure viewership from Trump supporters disenfranchised by Fox News’ lukewarm commitment to sticking to the facts and Lindell seems to be the lynchpin in OAN’s plan for fake news-spewing domination. The network crafted a segment filled with faux outrage over a recent Lindell appearance on Newsmax that ended with one anchor walking off set after “censoring” the CEO’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
the one thing we absolutely deserve in 2021 is a media feud between two right-wing networks over the proper level of devotion to a conspiratorial pillow company https://t.co/qzuVh6Y1Ql
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) February 4, 2021
OANN tried to loop its rival network in with big tech “oligarchs halting the flow of information to benefit their own agendas,” claiming Newsmax was no better than Twitter because they demanded facts to backup Lindell’s wilder election allegations. Normally we wouldn’t complain about two right-wing news programs tearing each other apart over the MyPillow guy of all people, but watching these OANN anchors salivate over this chance to sabotage their competitors is kind of like watching the family dog beg for scraps at the dinner table. It’s just sad.