The brilliance of My Pillow’s Mike Lindell

In the olden days, hucksters sold snake oil by the bottle. Televangelist Jim Bakker sold it by the bucket. Give people something they desperately want to believe and you can sell them anything. After all, rubes deserve to be fleeced. Consider W.C. Fields’ famous “Never give a sucker an even break.”

Mike Lindell is not your garden variety huckster. He is brilliant. Here’s why. Many charlatans are able to drag true believers along even after promised events do not occur. Consider, for example, the apocalypse preachers who predict the end of the world and then, um, recalculate. True believers still follow.

If that scenario sounds a lot like Lindell, it should. He has been predicting dates when Trump will be reinstated all year, including my birthday (which, coincidentally, is the date the Berlin wall went up). That people continue to believe isn’t surprising. Snake oil sells.

Lindell’s brilliance is that he has taken his show to a higher level. A recent posting on his website urges visitors to “Sign the Petition!” Specifically, “Sign this petition to encourage the Supreme Court to accept the bill of complaint brought by patriotic states to save our country.” The required fields are your first name, last name and email address.

There are couple of wee problems with what is encouraged here and this is the legal stuff. First, there is no mechanism for the Supreme Court to accept a petition as he describes it. That is not how the court operates. Second, there is no “bill of complaint” filed anywhere, much less by “patriotic states,” whatever they may be. So, if a petition means nothing and there is no bill of complaint, why is he asking you to sign the petition?

Unless you’ve already signed the petition, you know why. He is assembling a sucker list who will later be urged to contribute to his cause (as he has done before). Brilliant.

One more thing. Lindell’s latest prediction is “We will have this before the Supreme Court before Thanksgiving. That's my promise to the people of this country. We're all in this together. We worked very hard on this!"

Don’t let your turkey get cold.