The Pillow pumper was running on all pistons when he sat down for an interview with CNN's Drew Griffin last week. Confronted with evidence that his crackpot theories of China hacking the election for Joe Biden were utter nonsense, he cycled through feigned pity for the softheaded mortals unable to see what he sees, then sarcastic eye rolling that anyone would think he was getting duped, and finally screaming, incoherent rage.
In short, it was some Beautiful Mind shit. Only Mike Lindell is never coming back; he will never accept that his delusions are not real. That crazy train has left the station, never to return.
MyPillow's CEO keeps pushing false claims about the 2020 election. "No matter who says there was no widespread fra… https: //t.co/pjXKmIJur0
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@Anderson Cooper 360°) 1628211182.0
"You sent us this on Friday," Griffin said, holding up printouts of screenshots Lindell had given CNN as proof of his theories. "What is this?"
"That's just one piece of 1.2 billion lines of data from the election, okay? Within that there'll be timestamps of when it happened, there'll be flips in there," the cyber-understander responded.
"So we sent this to our own experts. He said that it doesn't show any specific actions of any kind, election-related or not. And it's proof of nothing," the reporter queried.
"Okay, so he said that's nothing, huh? Well, he's wrong, and you didn't hire a cyber expert," Lindell insisted.
Then CNN did its own slideshow of nine named experts, all of whom had IRL qualifications and none of whom was a pixelated image of a super secret anonymous source. They all described the supposed evidence as "completely ridiculous." Then CNN said they spoke to election officials from all 15 counties Lindell points to in his countersuit against Dominion Voting Systems, who unanimously agreed that Lindell's allegations are physically and/or mathematically impossible. Surprising no one, of course, because everyone who wants to understand how elections work already does. The issue is how we function in a country where millions of people don't want to know and are impervious to evidence because it's more fun to live in a world where an evil cabal of socialist gremlin hackers stole the election than to acknowledge that their guy just lost.
There's nothing that you're going to say — no piece of evidence, no matter how unambiguous — that will convince these people that they've been conned. Point out that the lines of code scrolling across the screen are just publicly available voter data , Mike Lindell will say that he's not showing the "real" stuff for "security." Tell him that the voting machines couldn't be hacked because they're not connected to the internet, he'll accuse local election officials of lying. Even the Republicans, they're all in on it! Explain that paper ballots match the machine tallies, as has been proven multiple times in hand-recounted audits, he'll tell you that the hacking occurred after the numbers were submitted.
You will never reason your way out of this problem.
"Donald Trump was going to win anyway," Lindell insisted, getting angrier when Griffin pointed out that the paper ballots were audited by hand and matched to the machine tallies, so it would be entirely impossible to add votes after the fact.
"No, they weren't. No they weren't!" he shouted, sneering at the multiple county officials who had diligently done their jobs only to find themselves the target of his baseless attacks. "Oh, did they tell you that? Well, they're going to have some answering to do."
When asked if he could "possibly be the victim of a scam," Lindell snarked through a disturbing, saccharine smile, "Well, then why don't you come to the symposium and make $5 million. Are you worried about me? We should give a hug. You're worried about old Mike? Oh, God bless you!"
This was a reference to Lindell's South Dakota "symposium" next week, where he has promised to let cyber experts examine his evidence and give $5 million to anyone who can prove ... something. Honestly, he seems to have left himselfquite a bit of wiggle room on the bounty. But he's sure that once the "real" cyber guys see his stuff, the Supreme Court will boot Joe and Kamala from the White House and return God's Own Donald Trump to the throne.
"We're worried that what you are doing is mistakenly or deliberately destroying the confidence in the legitimate elected president of the United States and fostering ..." Griffin said, before Lindell interrupted to completely lose his shit.
"I never said anything bad about Biden or the Democrats, ever!" he shouted, thrusting his finger in the reporter's face.
"You're lying!" he bellowed, although of course no one suggested that he attacked Biden personally, rather than his legitimate right to hold the office.
"I said the Democrats warned us. No, you're lying! I said the Democrat Party warned us," he said, unraveling before the camera.
"I'm not wrong! I've checked it out, I've spent millions. You need to trust me and come there," he said, partially regaining his composure to flog his insane symposium.
And it's funny. But also, very much not . Because lots and lots of people do trust him, and nothing we say or do will change their minds.
Happy Friday, everyone. Drink!
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Plenty of legit work for those of us with legit skillz. I would say that bilking Lindell might not come with the 2 am phone calls but that dude is acting like he's been on an extended bender so ...
I am definitely hearing some scuttlebutt about trying to collect the "bounty" among my infosec circles, but consensus is that this dude would find a way to not pay.
Crack and Religion make one hell of a cocktail.