Mike Lindell: Still Sleeping With a Trump Pic Under His MyPillow

[Cartmann99]

Mikey just claimed that Trump actually won Minnesota.

[Cartmann99]

 Bannon introduced him earlier as the "third son of the Trump of the tropics." Bolsonaro presented Mikey with a MAGA hat signed by Trump from his meeting with him the previous night.

[fraurosena]

21 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Bolsonaro presented Mikey with a MAGA hat signed by Trump from his meeting with him the previous night.

Can you imagine Trump’s face when he finds out the hat he had signed and magnanimously given to the son of the Brazilian dictator was given away the very next day?

[Cartmann99]

Symposium attendee:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

"The con is winding down"

Quote

Allow me to present to you the evidence that China stole the 2020 election. Please sit down; I don’t want you to be injured when you faint.

So: voilà.

Yes, you’re reading that right. Looks like you owe MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell an apology.

Hm? You say you can’t figure out what you’re supposed to be looking at? Well, that’s just because you [mumbles] and you know what, I really have to get going to this dentist’s appointment.

Let’s change gears for a second.

Imagine that someone handed you an envelope containing a lengthy document written in Portuguese. You have it translated and you learn that it’s a written confession from a criminal who is currently siphoning billions of dollars a day from millions of individual checking accounts. What do you do next?

Presumably, you call the local police or the FBI. You present them with the original document and the translation and let them take it from there. What you presumably do not do is promise for weeks on end that you have definitive proof that someone is stealing millions of dollars from bank accounts and that people need to fly to some remote location so that you can unveil that proof over the course of three days.

The gibberish above is one result of the latter process. Lindell, who has claimed for months and months that he had definitive proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by China, pledged to release that information at a “cyber symposium” that is underway in South Dakota. According to Lindell, someone captured Internet traffic in the days after the election that shows how votes were shifted away from Donald Trump and to President Biden. Instead of simply presenting this evidence to the public, he withheld it, offering $5 million to anyone who can prove that the information isn’t legitimate.

Rob Graham, a technologist and author, went to the summit to evaluate what Lindell claims to have. During a “breakout session,” he and others were provided with access to what Lindell’s team claims to have obtained. Graham shared what they were given — a collection of files that consists of 1) a list of computer Internet protocol addresses and 2) gibberish like that above. Well, technically they were given rich-text format files, some of which were inexplicably converted to hexadecimal encoding. Graham, an expert on Internet data, described the provided material as “a bunch of confusing stuff they can’t explain,” and said that those running the symposium pledged to hand over the “real” information Tuesday night or Wednesday. Meanwhile, Lindell’s live stream of the symposium — being watched by hundreds of thousands of people on one streaming feed — presses on, with the CEO mostly riffing on how toxic the media is. Promotions offer viewers codes for discounts at MyPillow, a useful bit of advertising given that Lindell’s conspiracy theories have cost his company placement in a number of retailers’ inventories.

Again, it’s been the case for months that Lindell has said his “cyber experts” saw proof of vote hacking in the captured packets of data. It would, presumably, be very easy for those experts to then stand up and quickly walk through what they found and what it means. But this has never happened. It’s never even been explained what such evidence would look like. Instead, Lindell’s relied on lengthy statistical presentations from a guy named Douglas Frank, presentations that are the functional equivalent of a kid reviewing a Jackson Pollock painting: They’re looking at something, to be sure, and picking out patterns and meaning where they can.

Of course, it would also be easy for Lindell’s team to present the raw data in a format that people at the symposium could examine. Graham says they were told it was in a “proprietary BLX/PLX format,” maybe. So the gibberish above might be some kind of encoding, like some sort of compression. But then, you don’t convert that to rich-text format or identify it as an .RTF file. You share the compressed file and say it’s a compressed file. (Converting the text above to a compressed file did not make it accessible, by the way. Nor did converting it to a PDF, a JPEG or a PNG.) If you are trying to prove something, you prove it.

But what if you’re not trying to prove it? What if you’re trying to make some cash and you stumbled onto a big, juicy mark? What if there were a millionaire desperate to prove something, a millionaire who’s not exactly an Internet savant but one willing to hand over loads of cash for data you made up — as some of the data previously released by Lindell pretty obviously was? For a while, you’re skating, cashing checks and sending along reports on occasion. Eventually, though, you get closer and closer to the point at which you need to actually turn over your work.

This is how all cons end. Things stretch and stretch and stretch until: snap. So instead of presenting your data, you encode it and obfuscate it and promise that there’s actually something there, but wait, hmm, that is weird, let me see what’s happening. Instead you say things like that there was a medical emergency that slowed things down and just ask everyone to stick with you for a moment. It’s just buying time — like Trump calling senators on Jan. 6 — hoping that if another hour or so passes, you can somehow regain control.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why Lindell was stretching things out the way he is. I believe that he’s being taken for a ride, though perhaps unintentionally. (I think Douglas Frank believes he’s stumbled onto a secret conspiracy, for example, though he obviously hasn’t.) But why is he letting the fraud keep going? Why’s he participating in stretching it out?

Watching the symposium live stream Tuesday morning, I think I figured it out. The start of the event was delayed by technological problems, problems Lindell claimed were a function of his bespoke social media site being “hacked.” This was the refrain: He’d done everything right but hackers kept picking apart his site’s defenses. He said the same thing when his site first launched and quickly got flooded. He also said Tuesday morning that his plane had trouble landing Monday night, hinting at a conspiracy aimed at silencing him.

In other words, this seems very much like a guy who’s primed to believe fairly far-flung excuses for why bad things happen. The kind of guy who, when told that the data will be ready in a month, waits patiently for the month to pass. Maybe he’s something more sinister, engaged in an effort to willfully delude America, but observing him over time makes it seem more like he’s the mark than the hustler.

On Monday, Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez offered an insightful chain of thoughts about the overlap between those who believe false claims about the election being stolen and those who reject the coronavirus vaccine as dangerous.

In both cases, Sanchez wrote, the conspiracy theories “have the superficial trappings of real science. Links to journal articles on the one hand, or on the other, impressively hackery looking hex dumps & spreadsheets full of IP addresses” — a reference to Lindell’s information.

“[I]n both cases, this evidence is absolutely useless to the target audience,” he continued. “They have neither the training nor the context to evaluate the quality or relevance of technical articles in medical journals — or even to understand what the article is claiming in many cases. … They are, however, being flattered by the INVITATION to assess the evidence for themselves — do your own research, make up your own mind!”

Instead of offering their trust on experts in their fields to explain complicated subjects, the audience is convinced that it needs only to trust itself — though, of course, they’re actually simply trusting the hustlers presenting incomplete or misleading information. What the hustlers offer the audience, Sanchez says, “is the illusion of not trusting an authority — unlike all those sheep who trust the mainstream authorities.”

Data from YouGov shows that the overlap of those who don’t want to get the vaccine and those who think that Biden is an illegitimate president is nearly complete. About three-quarters of Republicans hold the latter position and 3 in 10 the former, but a quarter both reject the vaccine and Biden’s election.

Many in this group clearly fit the profile Sanchez describes.

It seems pretty clear that Lindell does, too. It seems clear that he was told something about packets and China and data and hex codes and, dang, if that isn’t exactly what he assumed had happened. He did his own research and found a guy who’s offering him something he doesn’t entirely understand, something the mainstream media is desperate to undercut. Lindell found something in which he has complete, unfailing confidence.

And that’s all it takes.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

 

[Ozlsn]

Is anyone else wondering if this is a distraction, and if so from what?

[Sarcastically spinster]

18 hours ago, Alisamer said:

Dude needs an intervention, a reality check, probably a shower, and a good night's sleep.

And a psychiatrist.  

[CTRLZero]

3 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Is anyone else wondering if this is a distraction, and if so from what?

I don’t get what he’s up to, but he’s making Dominion Voting’s job easier as far as its defamation case.  Is he trying to squander his finances so there is nothing left to pay out?  Is there a guilty by reason of insanity in civil suits?  What is going on here?!?!   I need more coffee.  

[Cartmann99]

Satan is obviously behind this.

LindellTV.com is down, so I'm also watching this on RSBN. Prayers requested to help me resist buying several million pillows with their 66% off coupon.

[Cartmann99]

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

I'm officially retiring the phrase "shit show". For now on, all major debacles will be likened to "pillow symposium"

I prefer to call it a "Pillow case".

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

I'll keep an eye out for her article.

[fraurosena]

 

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

So full-time pillow pushing until they get past this drama segment?

[Cartmann99]

[Cartmann99]

This article is from November, but it gives you the background story on Dennis Montgomery:

Man behind vote fraud conspiracy theory previously pushed debunked info with CIA, Joe Arpaio

Quote

A man who once claimed he could prove a federal conspiracy against Sheriff Joe Arpaio — and who collected more than $100,000 from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office before it determined his claims were baseless — is now a key figure in a right-wing vote fraud conspiracy theory being pushed by key supporters of President Donald Trump. 

Media reports and conservative activists on social media say Dennis Montgomery has been spreading the claim that widespread voter fraud is the product of a deep-state supercomputer called “The Hammer” and software called “Scorecard.” According to the claims circulated online, those systems were allegedly used to alter ballot counts across the country.

The right-wing website American Report apparently helped launch the idea in a story it published Oct. 31. American Report features, among other things, extensive stories reiterating right-wing conspiracy theories from the Obama administration era. 

The site said Montgomery claimed to have developed the HAMR, or Hammer, computer and the Scorecard software in the late 2000s, and that it was commandeered by the Obama administration and used to steal the 2012 election and is now being used to steal the election on Biden's behalf.

The claim has been pushed by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and other high-profile allies in Trump’s orbit — though researchers have thoroughly debunked the idea.   

Earlier this week, right-wing media personality Pamela Geller posted a video that she claimed showed Hammer and Scorecard at work, which the nonpartisan fact-checking website Politifact labeled “Pants on fire,” a designation reserved for only the most misleading or factually inaccurate claims.

“The head of the government agency created by Trump to protect against cyber attacks called the Hammer and Scorecard theory, ‘nonsense,’ the Politifact analysis said, adding that elections security experts said that “(I)f someone truly wanted to steal an election, the example Geller cited makes no practical sense.”

Montgomery, who could not immediately be reached for comment, has long dabbled in conspiracy theories and has a track record of persuading people in high places to invest in them. 

According to a 2011 New York Times story, he was able to convince CIA officials and other members of the George W. Bush administration that he had developed a technology for decoding secret messages to al-Qaida sleeper cells that were supposedly being broadcast on the al Jazeera television network.

Montgomery was able to parlay his claim into millions of dollars in government security contracts, and his warnings once led to an apparently baseless grounding of airline flights in 2003.

Montgomery appeared again in the middle of Arizona's long-running saga of racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under the former sheriff, Joe Arpaio. 

In a 2015 contempt of court hearing in Arpaio’s racial-profiling case, Arpaio testified that Montgomery had come to him two years earlier with claims that the U.S. Justice Department had been tapping Sheriff’s Office phones and emails. Arpaio ultimately admitted that despite the tax money his office had spent pursuing Montgomery’s theory, the claims were not credible.

In a highly unusual move, U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow, who presided over Arpaio’s trial, addressed the revelations from the bench,saying they caused “great concerns."

According to the allegations Snow outlined in court, Montgomery said Snow and others including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon were conspiring against Arpaio. Snow called it an attempt to divert the court from the underlying racial-profiling case.

Snow wondered aloud why, when the Sheriff's Office should have been dedicating time and money to complying with the court's orders stemming from the racial-profiling case, the agency was funneling funds and overtime man-hours in an attempt to construct a "bogus conspiracy theory."

Montgomery had been able to sell Arpaio on the idea despite the fact that his plan to track al-Qaida messages in al Jazeera broadcasts had been exposed just two years earlier in the New York Times.

Months after Snow described the claims from the bench, the Sheriff's Office released more records describing its deal with Montgomery.

One internal email stated: "After reviewing all the hard drivers our experts concluded that Dennis Montgomery deliberately compiled massive amounts of data on to these drives for the purpose of obfuscating the fact the data itself contained no evidence to support Dennis Montgomery's claims."

A detective described reviewing the 50 hard drives of information Montgomery had provided to support his claims about a conspiracy against Arpaio. Instead, the detective wrote, "the drives contained 'data dumps' of video feeds from the Al Jazeera network."

 

[Cartmann99]

Brannon Howse just announced that they are done for tonight, but will be back at 9am CDT.

Mikey's pissed:

Spoiler

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Xan]

3 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

This article is from November, but it gives you the background story on Dennis Montgomery:

Man behind vote fraud conspiracy theory previously pushed debunked info with CIA, Joe Arpaio

 

I read in another article that Montgomery's family claims he very recently had a stroke.  Isn't that convenient?  I think he was scamming Lindell the whole time and didn't think it would get this far.  

[fraurosena]

Will he be speaking to an empty room today?

 

[Cartmann99]

10 hours ago, Xan said:

read in another article that Montgomery's family claims he very recently had a stroke.  Isn't that convenient?  I think he was scamming Lindell the whole time and didn't think it would get this far.  

Montgomery claimed that he had two strokes back when he was scamming Sheriff Arapio.

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Will he be speaking to an empty room today?

People are there and clapping, but I'm not sure exactly how many are there as they have a buffet out of camera range. The prayer they had was the Christian version of "beat the shit out of the evil who comes against us" so they are doubling down. Mikey claims that someone got raided last night and that proves that they are on the side of righteousness.

He claims that he has hired a bodyguard for protection.

Here's the update from the South Dakota reporter:

Spoiler

Click the link below if you want to watch the television version of this report. Be sure to scroll down to the very bottom of that page to see a second video in which Alderson provides a longer explanation about packet captures and what he expected to see after examining Mikey's data.

Cyber expert claims Mike Lindell does not have election data, eligible for $5 Million award

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - If you drive past the Military Heritage Alliance building on Russell Avenue, you may see people waving signs, singing, or cars honking.

It’s all to draw attention to the closed event inside. The Cyber Symposium is hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

The Cyber Symposium started as a formal event on Tuesday morning. As the event progresses, there is more crowd interaction including statements being yelled from the crowd.

While speakers from the stage claim that the Chinese government hacked the 2020 Presidential election, a quiet group of cybersecurity experts are finding another story in an adjacent room.

The main call to attend was what Lindell called proof of election fraud by having a digital version of every vote cast in the last Presidential election. Lindell described the data in a conversation on August 4th.

“We have every packet capture and all the data from the whole election for the 2020 November 3rd election,” said Lindell.

Tuesday we introduced you to Bill Alderson. He paid his own way to attend from Texas. Alderson is the Chief Technology Officer at Security Institute. He’s an instructor, talks of helping the Pentagon after 9/11, and just developed ways to limit the transmission packet captures, or p-caps through a system called Hop Zero.

When Alderson received Lindell’s data on Wednesday morning, he said it didn’t add up.

“We were unable to get the data from the actual 2020 election. Very disappointing,” said Alderson.

Some of his colleagues were discovering the same thing.

“But every person who came specifically looking for those p-caps was very disappointed. Some were somewhat angry,” said Alderson.

Lindell says the p-caps were provided to him in early January at no charge but paid millions of dollars to have them analyzed.

“If you have the packet captured you have it all,” said Lindell.

“And that’s the problem,” said Alderson. “They thought they had those p-caps, and they were in such a format: encrypted, decrypted, et cetera and they came out as gobbly goo, no conclusive evidence that I could analyze.”

Some of the cyber experts attending are wondering if Lindell paid for the analysis of worthless data.

During a zoom call on August 4th, we asked him, “What if they conned you?”

“12 different ones across his country and two of them work for the government, I don’t think so,” said Lindell. “What if you were conned? Well, then you come and get the $5 million dollars, huh? You know I offered $5 million dollars. There’s a $5 million prize.”

The prize was offered to anyone who could prove the data did not have 2020 election information. Alders signed the waiver to be eligible to receive the 5 million.

“I want Mike to keep his money, and to be happy and live a good life,” said Alderson. “But if he pays anybody else I want to be paid with them because it said he could split it. So I will take a split, if he’s gonna send it out, I’d like my share.”

Mikey's alone on the stage and lurching from topic to topic as thoughts pop into his head.

Spoiler

 

 

Update: They just did a shot of the audience and the tables look pretty full at the moment.

Edited August 12, 2021 by Cartmann99

[CTRLZero]

He was attacked outside his hotel?!?!  Was this after being onstage for the entire 72 hour symposium?  🙄