Pillow Man Mike Lindell’s sad denouement and imminent demise are one part Greek tragedy and four parts gloppy Greek yogurt. His much-ballyhooed cyber symposium—the Archimedean lever that was to move heaven and Earth and return Donald Trump to his rightful throne sometime before this fall’s triumphant return of the McRib—has turned out to be the wettest of wet farts.

You knew this. I knew this. And yet for some reason, I subjected myself to hours of symposium-simpering anyway. That was Tuesday and early Wednesday morning. I think I’m done. I can’t remember exactly when I got hooked on Mike Lindell—the ex-crack addict who late in life traded an attachment to his drug of choice for a slavish devotion to the far-more-dangerous Donald Trump. But it’s about time I move onto saner pastures. Hey, I kicked my Candy Crush habit and never looked back. I can do this, too, right?

Forgive my unhealthy obsession, but there’s something fascinating about a figure who’s 100% convinced of something that’s almost certainly untrue. I can’t quite squeeze down his favorite rabbit holes with him, but peering inside is what I imagine tripping on DMT would be like. Can’t make sense of anything, really, but BLAMMO, what a ride!

Unfortunately, his cyber symposium (you can peep it here, if you’re really interested) has committed the gravest sin of all: it’s boring. Lindell repeats himself so damn often I wonder if he should try his hand at one of Donald Trump’s suuuuuper genius dementia tests.

Luckily, some intrepid observers have been capturing highlights throughout the proceedings, so you can get a nice taste without freebasing the entire kilo:

Sadly, that’s a pretty representative sample.

This morning was little better. As Lindell kicked off Day 2 of his historic what-have-you, his audience, gathered in tidy rows of tables in front of him, mostly spoke amongst themselves and looked down at their phones. Our nation’s most celebrated shouting mustache was hoarse from Day 1 of the symposium, which revealed … yeah, pretty much nothing.

The election’s packet captures—which Lindell claims to have and which were touted as a kind of Rosetta Stone that could finally unlock all that sweet, sweet election fraud—were ostensibly not available for cyber experts or the media to inspect. Meanwhile, an earth-shattering announcement that was sure to be “historic” was moved from 7 p.m. CT Tuesday to, erm, Thursday.

Hey, I’m no world-class pillow marketer, but if you’re intent on drawing eyeballs to your grotesque charade and you don’t want people to, well, talk amongst themselves and look down at their phones, wouldn’t you lead with your irrefutable evidence of election fraud? Just a thought.

I briefly turned away from Pillow Man to do my morning crossword, and when I returned there was a professorial fellow standing in front of an impossible-to-read chart with “Election Process Review” written underneath it. Not exactly P.T. Barnum.

Later, Dr. Douglas Frank—whose theories have already been pulverized into stray quarks and neutrinos—noted that Ohio’s Amish population voted in massive numbers for Trump (maybe true, but proof of very little). Then he started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” which quickly morphed into an off-key rendition of “God Bless America.” And, no, I’m not shitting you.

Not long after that, notorious QAnon figure Ron Watkins (who may be Q himself) showed up on the big screen, and that’s when I called it. 

In a sane world, Pillow Man would still be laser-focused on selling unremarkable pillows, as he did for more than a decade before falling in bed with Donald Trump. But that sane world slipped through our fingers when the loser of the 2020 presidential election, struggling mightily against the imperatives of his delicate eggshell of an ego, refused to concede. In fact, last I checked, Trump was one of the few high-profile figures giving Pillow Man any credence—almost certainly because Lindell is one of the few warm bodies willing to forcefully declare that Trump actually won.

Meanwhile, I sense that Lindell is becoming even more unhinged and desperate as the symposium inexplicably trundles on without presenting a whiff of anything resembling proof. One reporter whom Lindell had spoken with extensively in the past, Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo, has now apparently fallen out of favor with the big guy:

Lindell promised over and over and over again that his evidence, which he claims he’s had since January but which he was somehow unable to put to productive use before now, will prompt the Supreme Court to vote unanimously to “take down” the 2020 presidential election and reinstall Donald Trump. 

That was virtually impossible before Lindell launched his three-day whatever-it-is, and it’s fucking unfathomable now.

On Tuesday morning, I eagerly tuned in to Frankspeech.com to see what Lindell claimed to have—even though I pretty much knew he had bupkis. I assumed he’d at least get into a dialogue with a few cyber experts, not hide from reporters who wanted to challenge him with pointed questions.

Sadly, what Lindell touted as living history has more closely resembled crippling dysentery, and both I and my delicate digestive system are done.

Time, at last, to get some sleep. Thank God for memory foam. 

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