A nagging mystery involving MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appears to have been solved.
The voter fraud conspiracy theorist and Trump ride-or-die held his goofy “Cyber Symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, last week, spending a coma-inducing 72 hours availing Americans of his unsubstantiated theory that Chinese hackers and deep state goons colluded to rig the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden.
The event was mostly an interminable wash, but one of the highlights was Lindell’s weird claim that he had been physically assaulted by an unknown assailant. He made the pronouncement onstage during the symposium’s last day: “Last night when I got to the hotel, I was attacked,” he said. “I’m OK. It hurts a little bit,” he added. “I just want everyone to know all the evil that’s out there.”
Everybody was left wondering what befell the pillow salesman: Did he get jumped? Did some Hinckley-esque assassin fire a bullet at him as he exited his car? Was he actually injured?
Lindell left the ultimate nature of the attack ambiguous, declining to really explain what happened. He seemed to imply that “Antifa” may have been responsible, or that the leftwing gang had somehow infiltrated his conference.
At the time, Gizmodo reached out to the Sioux Falls Police Department to try to get some clarity on the situation and they basically told us that they were legally barred from identifying the victims of crimes or alleged crimes, but that they had received a report about an alleged assault near the site of the symposium.
A few days later, however, Lindell finally revealed the dreadful nature of his assault: He had been poked too hard. Yeah, some guy poked him with his finger. More specifically, a guy walked up to him and asked for a selfie and poked him with his finger while they were taking the picture together.
“He put his arm around and stuck his finger, it was so much pressure, I just knew if I did anything something more was coming,” Lindell said, while discussing the incident on conservative talk show FlashPoint. “He jammed it in where it was just piercing pain.”
Truly amazing. Later, Lindell claimed that maybe the guy had shoved some sort of device into his ribs when he poked him—the Associated Press reports that Lindell referenced a picture that showed the man holding some sort of yellow object. He further stated that he had “doubled over” in pain after the incident.
However, Jeff Buongiorno, a conference attendee, told the AP that he actually witnessed the whole thing and that, unsurprisingly, there “was no attack.” Buongiorno claims that he was “shooting the breeze” with other attendees in the hotel bar when they saw Lindell come in. They all subsequently asked for pictures and Lindell obliged, according to the witness. Then another guy walked up and also asked for a picture—and Buongiorno offered to snap it with the man’s phone, he said. This last guy is the apparent finger assassin.
Appropriately, Lindell now seems to have a conspiracy theory about his fan’s own finger: The pillow salesman told the AP that he wants to investigate the incident for himself to understand how the guy “could have shoved an object between his ribs.”
Ahh, yes. The finger was just a smokescreen for the real weapon: a hypodermic needle filled with Chinese nano-bots, the likes of which are surely now racing through Lindell’s bloodstream to convert his freedom juice into communism fuel. Can we get a three-day symposium together to look into these claims and live-stream it to tens of thousands of people? Yes? We can? Great.