Mike Lindell has been all over your TV for years. Well, maybe not your TV. But he’s the MyPillow guy! His company makes what are alleged to be some of the softest pillows imaginable, all for the low, low price of about 40 bucks. But he’s been on television a lot more often recently, and not because he wants to make your life easier. Quite the contrary. He’s a longtime ally of Donald Trump, and when the outgoing president lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, he leaned hard into the many increasingly nonsensical conspiracy theories about said election being rigged, stolen — anything that claims his friend didn’t lose re-election by several million votes.
On Saturday, Washington D.C. was once again overrun by Trump supporters who still refuse to accept his loss. It was a who’s who of people who’ve become famous for spouting nonsense about Trump. There was Melissa Carone, aka Rudy Giuliani’s “wine lady witness.” There was also Lindell. He’s been saying that God will sort this out, that God will help Trump serve another four years. Truly, at this point, after losing dozens and dozens of court cases and repeatedly getting shown the door by even the Republican-leaning Supreme Court, it will take a miracle.
But on Saturday Lindell — whose own state of Minnesota went to Biden by over 7 percentage points — laid out his case for how the election was stolen by… Fox News, apparently?
"Why do you think Fox declared Arizona with only 14 percent of the vote in? They already knew what they did! They were in on it!" — Mike Lindell accuses Fox News of conspiring to defeat its own meal ticket pic.twitter.com/JiAJc3ICvi
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 12, 2020
It’s a dense text, Lindell’s speech, alleging some half-remembered data about how Biden got “1.2 votes for every vote,” while Trump got “.66.” How specific! And therefore how almost certainly true! He said Trump, who received around 74 million votes to Biden’s 81 million, really got “probably 80 million.” There was something about how there were so many Trump votes they “broke the algorithms in the machines.” (“I look at algorithms all day,” he boasted, as proof that he knows what he’s talking about.) There was something about voting officials stopping the counting and then “backfilling” the votes for Biden. “It’s craziness,” Lindell said.
What Lindell is positing would require a vast conspiracy with many players — pretty much everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter, really. He then came for an outlet that’s received a shockingly large amount of scorn by Trumpists: Fox News. The infamously right-leaning news network has been bleeding Trump supporters since Election Night, when its election desk called Arizona for Biden long before other networks called what was eventually certified as a Biden win in the state. But Lindell went farther than most.
“Why do you think Fox declared Arizona with only 14% of the vote in?” Lindell said. “They were in on it. I’m serious. They had to be in on it. You don’t know this stuff.” He said “they” should go to prison “when they are found out.”
Lindell also called out the “Republicans out there that didn’t back this great president and us as a people.” He cited Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia, saying, “We voted them in. They’ve got to be hiding something.”
Meanwhile, the majority of the GOP has remained silent about the tall and unproven claims made by Lindell and those like him — theories that have turned Parler into such a hive of red hot madness that their users are alleging 2020 election interference by the late Fidel Castro. But if they continue to do nothing, we’ll bet people that like Mike Lindell will eventually listen to reason.