Inside the Mind of Mike Lindell

The public face of the Stop the Steal remnant is a happy warrior for discredited conspiracies.

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Before November 2020, most Americans who’d seen Mike Lindell on television had encountered either an infomercial for MyPillow or a newsmagazine profile of the company he founded in 2004. Since then he’s been hard to avoid, popping up on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, late night talk shows, and even his own social media platform as the face of former President Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

Lindell has used many of his appearances to tout four documentaries he’s released that purport to reveal evidence of voter fraud and foreign interference via hacking and flipped votes. He’s being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for $1.3 billion, most of his claims have been debunked repeatedly, and none of his efforts have yielded any real evidence that would overturn the election. And yet he persists. 

In fact, he announced earlier this month that in August he will be hosting a “cyber forensic symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where a panel of experts will review his latest batch of evidence and, he believes, go on to persuade the Supreme Court to vote to overturn the election.

“I feel right now, we’re in the biggest revival in history to bring our country back to God,” Lindell tells me. “I know when we get through this, it’s going to be a great uniting of our country to get back to one nation under God. And I really truly believe that.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    Very thorough and bravo for engaging him that long without doing damage to your brain

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  2. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    *shakes head*

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    Ben Connelly

    Thanks Khaya. For debunking Lindell’s theories and then actually confronting and interviewing him about them. This seems like a thankless job but you’re doing yeoman’s work here. I think Lindell is a true believer and like many other commenters I wonder about his mental state.

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  4. Pretzel_Logic

    Tyrone Biggums thinks this guy hit the crack pipe way too hard. I didn't realize the crackhead crack about Lindell was actually real, just a reflection of how his insanity sounds exactly like, well, a crackhead.

    Whether it was the crack or an organic mental illness--likely both--this man is absolutely certifiable, and it's even more disgusting that Trump is willing to take advantage of those traits to push his BS.

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    Bel

    I recently re-watched a documentary on David Koresh - Lindell reminds me of him and his followers in the way he describes things

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  6. Stephen Nielson

    I think today's reporting that Mike Lindell has pulled his ads from fox news because they won't support his advertisement over this August Cyber conference is indicative that he's not trying to run a con to earn money for his pillow company. He's very much a true believer at this point and I think someone in the cyber space is pulling the wool over his eyes due to his lack of knowledge of how technology works. I could easily imagine this being the efforts of a foreign adversary supporting this due to the amount of divisions this creates in our country.

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    MarqueG68

    Thanks for this reporting!

    Viewed from a bit of distance at the start of the article, the guy seems like something of an encouraging story of individual reform and self-improvement. ... And then he speaks for himself and sounds, let us say, like someone with an addled mind, to put it as charitably as possible. What a wreck.

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    Rajeev

    I didn't know much about Ben Carson till his idiotic speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013 in front of President Obama. It was crazy to me how someone could be a genius in basic medical science but be an absolute nutjob in everything else. He's a lot like Mike Lindell in that he clearly should know how ridiculous he sounds but then he seems like he almost believes the stuff he says.

    One important thing from this that I think that so many sane Republicans like the ones that started this website couldn't see is that these crazies always seem to flock together. Since 2008 and President Obama's election, the worst always gathered together. Whether it was CPAC, Fox News, the Tea Party, or the Trump administration, the worst always rose to the highest power in the Republican power structure.

    And no group was more responsible than the evangelical sector of the Republican Party. They were always frauds and it was easy to see from outside the party. It just took too long for the honorable Republicans to understand that they didn't change. The Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson types were always theocratic nutjobs that would do anything to obtain power even try and overturn an election.

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    Pat Riot

    "MyPillow Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mike Lindell boosted pillow sales by echoing Donald Trump’s false claim that a voting machine company rigged the election, according to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit."

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-22/mypillow-ceo-sought-to-boost-sales-with-election-lies-suit-says

    Oh yes, he's a deluded idiot that is so stupid that he even believes *Trump's* lies. No, it couldn't possibly be that he knows he will grow his market share from a few points to the 40% of Americans who vote Republican. And while doing it he will make a national political name for himself and position himself as the successor to Donald Trump.

    Nope, it must be because he's the most stupid dupe anybody can possible imagine...

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      Narwhal

      The article says Dominion claims that his use of promo codes such as “FightForTrump” and “45” boosted his sales in 2020. The article does not say that Dominion claims it boosted his profits. There is a difference.

      Now, maybe it did. But, it is possible it didn’t or did but not by much. Discounting merch increases volume if successful, but it doesn’t always increase profit.

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    2. Shaybult

      I get your point and I'm not ruling anything out, but... he does seem pretty damn stupid. And it's not unheard of for stupid people to benefit from their stupidity.

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        Pat Riot

        *Stupid* is what gets you sales and votes and donations from Republicans these days...

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  10. Shaybult

    "[Lindell has] been hard to avoid, popping up on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, late night talk shows, and even his own social media platform."

    Nope, not hard to avoid at all. Those are all sites/networks that I have managed to easily avoid my entire life.

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      MarqueG68

      Truth. Ever since Trump arrived on the scene in 2015, I've mastered the art of averting my eyes whenever I see him or any of his flunkies, minions, and toadies depicted at the head of any news item...

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