The day after being kicked out of Twitter for repeatedly sharing electoral misinformation, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on the program for Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night for an extremely nice interview – and started shooting bizarre conspiracies left and right.
Lindell has been one of former President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, financially supporting many of the pro-Trump lawsuits that attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. After the insurrectionist riot incited by Trump, Lindell said the attack was “very peaceful” and blamed the “disguised antifa dressed as Trump”.
The pillow seller continued to promote the unbalanced theory that millions of Trump votes were transferred to Biden due to a nefarious international conspiracy involving Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and corrupt voting software, opening up to legal threats from Dominion Voting Systems. Lindell, who says he “welcomes” a suit, also personally visited the White House during Trump’s last days in office to convince him of his latest theory of electoral fraud. (White House lawyers rejected his claims.)
Carlson, whose program is largely supported by MyPillow ads after an exodus of sponsors, welcomed Lindell on Tuesday night, praising his program’s main benefactor.
“He is one of our biggest sponsors and we are grateful for that,” said Carlson. “He is sponsoring freedom of expression. But it is clear that the defenders of orthodoxy are not impressed, they are furious. For the crime of having different opinions, Mike Lindell was banned from Twitter. “
Following Lindell’s ban, Twitter said that Lindell was “permanently suspended due to repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy”. The new policy was approved after the insurrection and indicates that anyone who continually shares incorrect information about the elections can be banned.
After noting that several retailers also stopped selling Lindell’s products after his conspiracy, Carlson – newcomer to QAnon conspirators – painted the founder of MyPillow as a free speech warrior and a victim of censorship.
“It seems very clear that they are sending a message,” said the Fox presenter. “People that the public recognizes cannot get out of line because you can convince others to do the same. Do you understand another message or do you think that’s why they are doing this to you? “
From there, Lindell quickly turned the interview into an opportunity to make bizarre and baseless claims, while Carlson sat and let his biggest sponsor go to town.
Noting that he was initially suspended by Twitter earlier this month for tweeting about electoral fraud, Lindell then insisted that Twitter “did not remove it entirely” and that someone at the social media company was actually managing his account for two weeks.
“I just couldn’t do anything and they were running my Twitter like they were me,” he continued. “My friends go, you guys aren’t tweeting a lot and when you do – I said I’m not going to do this, so I try to cancel and I got something from Germany saying that these are the Twitter rules and you can’t do that, so they ran my Twitter for 14 or 15 days. “
Lindell then claimed – without any evidence of evidence – that after Dominion threatened him with prosecution for his allegations of fake voting software, “they hired attack groups and bots and trolls and went after all my suppliers and stores cash to cancel me. “
While not promoting or endorsing Lindell’s comments, Carlson framed Chief MyPillow’s conspiracies as part of normal speech, suggesting that it should be entirely acceptable to “convince the public that you are right.”
Meanwhile, Lindell went straight down the rabbit hole.
“You are exactly right. With this particular thing that is happening now, I was all trying to find the machine fraud and we found it, we have the evidence, ”exclaimed Lindell. “So, all these establishments calling me The Washington Post, New York Times, in all the media in the country, they say ‘Mike Lindell, there is no evidence and he is making fraudulent statements.’ No, I have the evidence and I challenge people to put it on! “
“I challenge Dominion to sue me because it would come out faster,” he added. “They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want that! “
“No, they don’t want to,” Carlson murmured in response.
“They are not making conspiracy theories disappear with this,” he continued, before adding, “You don’t make people calm down and stay reasonable and moderate by censoring them, you make them more crazy. Sure!”
In recent weeks, Dominion and Smartmatic – another electronic voting machine involved in electoral fraud plots – have made legal threats to several right-wing media outlets and Trumpworld figures, including Fox News. Dominion, meanwhile, has already filed billions of defamation lawsuits against Trumpist lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for promoting unfounded fraud allegations about the company.