Years back, I was up late working on something, and I saw this crazy guy hawking pillows in the wee hours of the morning, saying how great his pillows were. It was Mike Lindell, and his commercials were damn monotonous. But when his commercials started appearing in prime time, I was shocked. This guy made it into the big leagues selling his crazy pillows. It hurts me to say this, but I was impressed, yet something kept nagging me about Lindell. What was his story? Buying prime commercial time wasn’t cheap.
Well, I did a little digging, and things started popping up. Lindell was a recovering addict, and he had the kind of story that makes a bestseller, can get you on Hallmark, and draws people to you like the Pied Piper in the famous fictional tales we told our children when they were young and impressionable.
According to Lindell, he was down to his last few dollars fighting the temptation to give in to his addiction, but he prayed and prayed for help. And, you guessed it, he claims the Lord showed him the way out of his dilemma by inspiring him with an idea to help him with his inability to sleep at night and came up with the MyPillow idea. But it wasn’t easy; he had to sell them and convince people to see him. From what I gleaned from his story, he had the gift of gab and was able to see the right people and persuade them to give him a chance, and as they say, the rest is history.
Lindell’s pillows became a hit with the night owls. He was selling them as fast as he could make them. The money flowed, and he hired those who hit on hard times, such as he had. He was becoming a bit of a local hero in his hometown. He started manufacturing his pillows in Chaska, Minnesota, which he is proud of and has often mentioned. Not all of his products are made in the USA. Like many other manufacturers, he outsources the manufacturing to foreign countries where the labor is cheap, such as Pakistan, Cambodia, and India. Seemingly, Lindell was on his way toward prosperity.
Addiction is an insidious monster. View as the Leranenan Hydra, the monster Hercules had to destroy as part of his labors imposed on him by Eurystheus, the King of Tiryns and Mycenae. Every time he cut off one head, two more would grow back in its place. Somewhat symbolic of the struggle one undergoes in dealing with an addiction. When one believes they have it under control, its ugly head rises again, and the battle to overcome renews itself.
Lindell credits divine intervention from God as what saved him from the destruction his addiction was inflicting on him, “I look back now, and I go, ‘The only way that we were able to do that was divine intervention.’”
I will not question that. One’s belief in God is personal; from my perspective, it is not up for debate. So, if Mike believed it was by God’s hand, he turned his life around; who are we to judge? Who hasn’t faced seemingly enormous odds against us, found a pathway to overcome the obstacles before us, and not have said, ‘By the grace of God?’
We enjoy success stories of individuals who overcame what seem to be impossible odds, came out on the opposite side, and were successful. Drug addiction overcoming it and turning one’s life around and becoming successful is one of those stories, and Lindell’s story is indeed compelling.
From all accounts, Mike Lindell’s story is one of those stories. Confronting his demons, he subdued them, built a new life for himself and his family, and provided aid and assistance for the people in his hometown through employment and job creation. Some would say it doesn’t get any better than that, and it’s an example of Yankee toughness and ingenuity and one for the history book. I found myself asking what in the world would possess him to diminish all he accomplished in support of Trump’s lying about the 2020 election being rigged and stolen from him.
Conversely, Lindell has a more compelling story that people can relate to. One could say Lindell’s story and struggles are ones they can identify with as they also stared down the abyss of addiction and wrestled it to the ground. Unlike Trump, he had his daddy’s money to bail him out when he screwed things up, something Trump did regularly. Now, he finds himself wrestling with a self-imposed pathway of destroying all he built because of his passionate belief in Trump’s fraudulent claims of a rigged election. One must ask what causes individuals such as Lindell to buy into demonstrably unproven election fraud claims.
If Lindell had stuck to his knitting, he wouldn’t be in the situation he is dealing with now:
- The court ordered that Robert Zeidman, winner of the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” be paid a five-million-dollar prize if he could prove Lindell wrong. He proved Lindell’s data was meaningless and showed no fraud in the presidential election, as Lindell claimed.
- Facing two multimillion-dollar lawsuits by Dominion and Smartmatic for defamation, the same companies that sued Fox News Corp, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5 million and fire Tucker Carlson.
- His legal firm initially fired him for nonpayment of fees amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars because he couldn’t pay them.
- Eviction from his warehouse for nonpayment of back rent of $200,000.
- He can no longer run his ads on Fox because he can no longer afford their rates.
Lindell’s allegiance to Trump is very baffling. What Lindell is doing makes no sense. For a supposedly businessperson, throwing good money after bad is not a rational business decision. Lindell has no recognizable return on investment as he has no convincing hard and fast evidence of a stolen election, votes changed, or stuffing ballot boxes. Now, he plans to go to the Supreme Court to argue that electronic voting machines should be banned.
Hamilton wrote the following in Federalist 1:
“The perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.”—Federalist 1.
The perverted ambitions of a class of men indeed manifested themselves in the past election and are intensely raging as we move forward in this election year. When it comes to perverted ambitions, there is no one more perverted than Donald J. Trump. He is delusional to the point he has cast aside any doubts he will tear down our constitutional form of governance and rule as a dictator. Individuals like Mike Lindell are far too eager to help him in his quest to become the first American dictator. Begging the question, what is it about representative democracy they don’t like? There is no doubt our form of governance has flaws, but for well over two hundred years, we’ve conducted free and fair elections and effectively dealt with governmental problems that have come about. So again, I ask, what could Lindell possibly have anything to complain about?
For that matter, what in hell does Trump and all his a-hole followers have to complain about? They live in a country that allows them a level of freedom others envy in ways they seem not to understand. Trust me when I say should Trump get back and become the dictator he said he would be, and believe me, he will be a dictator for more than one day, and if they see their freedoms suddenly curtailed, they will be the first to holler foul. And Trump will look at them and laugh and call them suckers for believing all the bullshit he was feeding them. The following comes to mind from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here:“ Cure the evils of democracy by the evils of Fascism.”—pg 17
That is what Trump and his acolytes are attempting to do with all this election denial, clamoring for the elimination of the use of voting machines, intimidating election workers, and filing baseless challenges to voters’ signatures if there is an ever-so-slight difference in the signature. It’s this type of nonsense people like Mike Lindell unquestioningly support because, for reasons that make no sense, he has bought Trump’s lies on a level that will break him financially.
If there was ever a person so wholly unfit to be President of this country, it’s Donald J. Trump. He is a clear and present danger to this country and should be sitting in a jail cell and not ever again behind the Resolute Desk. And
Mike Lindell needs to stop spending what money he has left on trying to prove Biden stole the election from Trump. If he continues on this path, he will go from being the MyPillow Guy to the MyBankruptcy Guy.
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