Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than being the Newsmax guy interviewing the MyPillow CEO on election fraud is being the Newsmax guy forced to apologize to the MyPillow CEO about election fraud.
Per the Independent, MyPillow exec Mike Lindell—who managed to get bizarrely close to ex-President Donald Trump’s administration and is likely the first pillow tycoon to try to plan a coup d’etat—regaled viewers of the far-right news network on Tuesday with yet more hoax claims that Democrats somehow stole the 2020 elections with the assistance of election tech firm Dominion Voting Systems. The interview, which was supposed to be about how Lindell’s Twitter ban was an example of “cancel culture,” turned into a trainwreck when Lindell began asserting he had “100% proof” of “election fraud with these Dominion voting machines.”
Lindell does not have proof of fraud by Dominion, a firm smeared by Trump supporters and his re-election campaign with conspiracy theories, and neither does anyone else. That is because no such fraud occurred. But Lindell is currently facing threats of a defamation suit from the company, which is already suing Trump campaign lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $1.3 billion. Those same lies got Lindell banned from Twitter (and even resulted in MyPillow’s ban after Lindell simply started tweeting from its corporate account).
Smartmatic, another voting company, is suing Fox News for $2.7 billion for airing similar smears and has threatened Newsmax and chud competitor One America News Network with the same. All three networks are bracing for the potential of additional lawsuits from Dominion. So it’s perhaps understandable that Sellers desperately tried to vamoose, per the Daily Beast:
“Mike, Mike... you’re talking about machines... that we at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations,” Sellers said over an animated and talking Lindell. “We just want to let people know that there’s nothing substantive that we’ve seen.”
At this point, during a segment on “cancel culture,” the control room apparently turned the MyPillow guy’s microphone down as Sellers then began to read a prepared statement that Newsmax had accepted the results of the election as “legal and certified,” all as Lindell kept shouting.
Sellers then begged his producers, “can we get out of here, please?” adding “I don’t want to have to keep going over this. Newsmax has not been able to verify any of those allegations.” He then left his seat and walked off set.
The Beast separately reported that Sellers has issued a definitely-not-forced apology blaming “confusion” over what topic the segment was supposed to cover.
“Mike thought that we were to talk about vote fraud in the recent election. It’s a topic we have covered extensively on Newsmax,” Sellers told viewers on Wednesday afternoon. “I was frustrated that we couldn’t focus on the current, very pressing issue of free speech and cancel culture and, in hindsight, there is no question that I could have handled the end of the interview differently.”
“At Newsmax, we seek out all points of view. Mike was back on Newsmax last night with Rob Schmitt on his show to continue the conversation about cancel culture and the censorship by social media,” Sellers added. “Mike also made clear he thinks Newsmax is ‘great’—his words—and I can tell you he will continue to be an important guest on Newsmax.”
Many right-wingers have become obsessed with the idea that giant tech firms are secretly plotting to purge the web of all conservative content, which appears to be why Lindell was invited on in the first place.
The MyPillow incident has apparently pushed some conservatives into thinking that Newsmax is now part of the liberal censorship cabal. One America News, the rabidly pro-Trump network that has managed to overtake Newsmax on the dystopia scale, aired a segment this week accusing the rival network of having “muzzled” Lindell and being “swept up by leftist censorship.”
Keep on spiraling, folks.