Mike Lindell Breaks Up With Fox, Marries His Company To Defamation Lawsuits

TFW your publicity campaign runs into the buzzsaw of the law.

All is not well in Wingnutistan! Mike Lindell and his beloved Fox are SPLITSVILLE after the network refused to air ads for the Pillow Man's "cyber symposium" next month which will "prove" the election was stolen with his beloved PCAPS .

 The Wall Street Journal was first to break the news that MyPillow would cease advertising on Fox immediately after the plug for his loonytunes confab was rejected.

"I am pulling everything!" Lindell shouted to Salon's Zachary Petrizzo, with whom he is basically obsessed . "Fox [News] denied the [cyber symposium] ad, and they based it on 'pending litigation.'"

Well, yes, they would do that. Like Lindell, Fox is already getting sued by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic , and Fox execs are probably not so interested in giving airtime to a guy who publicly accuses the companies of breaking the law on the daily.

"Dominion Voting Systems is destroying a lot of the evidence," Lindell told The Dispatch's Khaya Himmelman.

Let us speculate that it is highly unlikely that a major company that has hired serious, expensive lawyers to file billions of dollars of lawsuits is "destroying a lot of the evidence." That would be really fucking stupid. Not as fucking stupid as explicitly tying your pillow company to a doomed political smear campaign, depriving it of any ability to claim that it operates as a separate entity from its maniac founder and is thus immune to seizure by his creditors in a defamation suit. But still ... stupid.

And speaking of stupid, here's the man himself screaming "Shame on Fox News!" in an interview with Brannon Howse, the director of his insane election movies over a chyron advertising a deal on his pillows. You know, in case it wasn't already clear that the company and the man are one and the same. On behalf of Dominion and Smartmatic, Thomas Clare and Erik Connolly salute you, sir! (Probably.)

Mike Lindell just announced that he’s pulling all MyPillow ads indefinitely and immediately from Fox News because t… https: //t.co/l9cJqJuSH1

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@PatriotTakes 🇺🇸) 1627607500.0 

Lindell told the Journal that he spent $50 million to air MyPillow ads on Fox in 2020, and another $19 million this year already, making up a significant portion of ad sales for Tucker Carlson's show. And even though the network would be just fine without another penny in ad revenue, since it makes the majority of its money from streaming fees, the loss of $50 million is not nothing. Still, Fox is sure that Lindell is only hurting himself by yanking the spots.

"It's unfortunate Mr. Lindell has chosen to pause his commercial time on FOX News given the level of success he's experienced in building his brand through advertising on the number one cable news network," a spokesman said.

As for the ad, it's just Lindell pumping his symposium and his pillows against your basic Jesus-lion-eagle-flag background. Good luck telling the court that your company has nothing to do with the defamation claims against you when your own ad copy says, "To help support this cyber symposium event, I am offering some of the best prices ever on MyPillow products."

No one but Lindell actually believes that anything will come of his "cyber symposium." His crackpot theories have already been so widely debunked that it's hardly worth the pixels to demonstrate one more time that it's all nonsense. Doug Ducey and Brian Kemp, the governors of Arizona and Georgia whom Lindell has accused of various acts of perfidy, will not traipse to Sioux Falls so that the Pillow fluffer can park them in the front row to explain "why they stopped the truth from coming out," as Lindell fantasized to Himmelman. The Supreme Court will not leap into action to overturn the election "Absolutely 9-0."

But neither will yet another demonstration that Lindell is flogging absolute bullshit change any minds, least of all his own.

As Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic :

What will happen when Lindell's ideological, all-American, predicted-in-a-dream absolute certainty runs into a wall of skepticism, disbelief, or — even worse — disinterest? If history is anything to go by … nothing. Nothing will happen. He will not admit he is wrong; he will not stop believing. He will not understand that he was conned out of the millions he has spent "validating" fake data. (One has to admire the salesmanship of the tech grifters who talked him into all of this, assuming they exist.) He will not understand that his company is having trouble with retailers because so many people are repulsed by his ideas. He will not understand that people attack him because they think what he says is dangerous and could lead to violence. He will instead rail against the perfidy of the media, the left, the Communists, and China.

Certainly he will not stop believing that Trump won the 2020 election.

But along the way, he'll have convinced millions of people that American democracy doesn't work. Not because the Electoral College routinely awards the presidency to the person who gets fewer votes. Not because both houses of our legislature are gerrymandered to shit — one because of a historical anomaly, one deliberately. Not because one party is in a battle to the death to maintain minority rule by suppressing the vote. But because insane fairy dust lies are more fun than acknowledging that your guy lost.

And it's funny, because Mike Lindell is a hilarious clown, of course. But also, it's not fucking funny at all.

[ WSJ / Salon / The Dispatch / The Atlantic ]

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