MyPillow's Fall is Leaving Us a Tell

It would seem, in an ironic sort of way, that what has happened to Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame and the reason behind it might be a bit of an odd turn of events if not also a very telling tale of how democrats and liberals think.

What do they (liberals) always say about businesspeople? They put profits before all else and leave the regular folks behind in the process.

Was it not so long ago that republicans and conservatives were bashed by the left for bringing pain to Anheuser-Busch for its stance on the Dylan Mulvaney issue and support of LGBTQ+ issues? After all, according to the left, the makers of Bud Light simply had an opinion, and they were entitled to it. 

Enter Mike Lindell who also has an opinion. But of course his opinion, albeit a controversial one (but so was the Dylan Mulvaney opinion from the right) did not and does not align with what the left thinks. His kind of opinion is not allowed and therefore he must be destroyed.

As a result, enduring ongoing legal battles that have wiped his bank accounts clean and destroyed his company as voting machine companies sue him for defamation and many retailers have opted to remove his products from their shelves, the left is rejoicing.

This is what you get, they say.

In a way I agree with the sentiment. I have said often that businesses can have an opinion, and surely their leaders can as well, but that mixing their opinions with their business presence is generally a bad idea. Granted, Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A proved to be exceptions to that rule.

In business the only goal is to make a profit and sell your products, and because certain opinions alienate some customers and potentially threaten one's ability to do that, you probably should just keep quiet.

At the same time, one thing Mike Lindell has been very vocal about is his convictions regarding the matter he is fighting so hard for. He's held his position and held firm in his pursuit of it without regard to profits and even his own riches.

He has put what he believes in ahead of profits.

Shouldn't the left, so hateful of the rich, rejoice in that over the potential devastation of his business and wealth? You don't have to agree with what he says or what he is fighting for. But if you are going to make the statement that a business is entitled to say what it wants and shouldn't be punished when they say things the left agrees with, on the basis of "free speech" as it applies to them, and "doing the right thing" as it aligns with their position, shouldn't the same concept apply even if what is being said is opposite of their side's position?

This is where the double standard always comes in to rear its ugly head. This is where the tell comes from.

Beyond that, doesn't the business who decides to pull a product from shelves also engage themselves in politics when they decide to do that? And why are their "statements" not challenged as well at some level?

Let's think about what may have happened had retailers decided to pull Bud Light from the shelves after the controversy over Dylan Mulvaney took hold? How would the left have reacted to that decision? Would they have said of the businesses who refused to sell the AB product, "Their business, their decision, get over it," like they did when AB decided to double down on their position over the infamous beer can?

Not hardly. Because again, this way of thinking only applies if the reason behind the decision is in lockstep with what they think is right.

The question in a case like the MyPillow one is, why would anyone perhaps not question, just a little bit, what the real motivation is if you are willing to destroy your business and keep on with what you are fighting for?

Beyond that, how does what Mike Lindell is doing align with the left's unrelenting stance that rich people only care about the money and will exploit everything and everyone in order to simply make a profit?

Clearly, he's not doing that.

Regardless of whether or not I agree with Lindell, or even admire his stance, I still stand by my thought that mixing business and politics is a recipe for disaster and should be avoided. But I also think that when it comes to "the response," it should not always be a sort of one-sided one. Because particularly when it comes to product yanks, it tends to happen to conservative leaning opinions as opposed to liberal ones.

If it is good for the goose, it is good for the gander.

Some businesses have a different kind of reach, such as Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A, where they have standalone buildings in which to sell their products. MyPillow relied mostly on mail order or the retail stores that carried his wares. It's harder to get your products out if the stores won't carry them or TV stations won't even air your commercials.

The problem I have with all of this is that so often the left gets its way, and they are happy about that, but get fit to be tied if the tide turns against them for the very same reasons they win on their side.

Take the Washington Redskins or Aunt Jemimah pancake syrup. The indian figure on Land O' Lakes products or Uncle Ben's rice. Clearly all evidence of a cancel culture the right does not embrace that the left does. And yet, while the left will cry foul if anyone is against their cancellations, they are perfectly fine if something aligning with the right is cancelled.

I think as a people and as a society, we need to decide what we want. And more importantly, to decide why we want it? Is it to get our way and simply have our say? Or is it because we truly believe in the underlying fundamental basis for shutting down anything.

Because the same woes facing Elon Musk's X could also be an example. Does X experience issues because of the business itself and what it offers? Or is it affected only because the views of the guy who owns it leans conservative in his views?

Ultimately, we're not going to stop businesses or business leaders from having opinions. It's still a free country and these people and businesses are entitled to exercise their constitutional rights just as much as anyone. But when it comes to the products they sell? I think it should be left up to the buying public to also support or not support something. If the decision had been made to pull MyPillow from the shelves because the consumer decided to let the products collect dust on the shelves, that's one thing. But taking away the choice of the consumer to send their own message is wrong. Just like in the case of the Bud Light controversy, the opinion of the consumer was clear. Bud Light beer stayed on the shelves while competing brands flew off them.

Yet no one pulled Bud Light entirely to avoid any potential backlash for carrying the product despite the clear opinion of the buying public. And that's the very reason MyPillow was pulled. The retailers did not want to be associated with the opinion of the brand. But again, this decision sides with the left and once again leaves conservative opinion behind.

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What is Truth and the Silencing of Conservatives

It often becomes, to me, a confusing area of contention. Why does it seem that the only people being sought after to silence is targeted to silence only those who speak from the right? Granted, there may be no actual data to support the claim, so let's just call it an observation, shall we?

But you have to admit, it does seem a bit obvious. The right IS the target.

I will even grant you that most of the time there's "something" behind the silencing. Or at least, that is the impressive that wants to get left after the silencing occurs. 

Why is that, and again it seems, that the left can say anything it wants, call anything it wants to truth, and have their say and no one gets to question that? But when the right says something, everything is questioned. And in the minds of those asking the questions, and ultimately doing the silencing, there is no room for questioning the questioner. 

You will remember around 2017 Bill O'Reilly, then the top-rated cable news show host on television, was boost off the air amid sexual harassment allegations. Okay, sounds justified, right? Sure, according to all of the allegations and reports he was a bit of a fox in the den of Fox News. 

But was he? Or was he simply pushing back too hard and getting too big of an audience for his clearly conservative viewpoints? Maybe. Maybe not. It does seem odd that Fox News would want to remove a host who was clearly a large part of their bread and butter without at least good cause.

Or was the left just pushing too hard? Were the other things Fox News was concerned about that they used Bill O'Reilly as an opportunity to quiet the potential bigger onslaught?

Tucker Carlson, the latest target, was removed from their airwaves with his last show airing Friday, April 21st—which at the end of the show he told audience he would see them on Monday. So, it was a quick development over the weekend following the settlement of the Dominion voting machines defamation lawsuit.

Lou Dobbs was also recently cancelled, and he happens to be another one among those named in the filing against Fox News.

Before I go any further, might I remind people that there were many hosts on other networks who were offering up false information and lies galore during the entire Russia Collusion farce. Who fact-checked? Who offered redactions? Who corrected the record?

Why was no one sued for defamation in those cases? Okay, no one brought the suits. But should someone have? Maybe. Should calls to action have been encouraged? Probably. Should it have been important to set the record straight and tell the news straight? Would it even have been a good idea to maybe offer up apologies?

I mean, say what you want about the claims regarding Dominion sort of accusing Dominion of being the source for stealing an entire election from the American people. But one could easily argue that the entire left wing media news organization which is comprised of NBC, CNN and even media giants like Google and Facebook might have had more to do with rigging an election than Dominion ever was if the claims made against them by Tucker Carlson and others were true.

Whether it was about issues surrounding the election or the supposed insurrection of January 6th when it was supposed that angry conservative Trump supporters sought to storm the capital and overturn an election, the mere fact is that conservatives were literally silenced and shut down from having anything to say to potentially open a dialogue, even if was just to ask questions and see where those questions might lead.

Donald Trump was at the forefront of course. A former sitting president was literally kicked off of Twitter. And others followed him—all conservatives. All of them cited for supposedly spreading misinformation and lies.

Based on who's truth? I mean, that should be the question of the day, right? Who's truth is the Imperial truth and who gets to decide what that is? Why is always so immediately assumed the right is at the helm of harmful misinformation?

We have people out there who can openly debate that a woman exists for Heaven's sake. Isn't that patently false? Is it even an argument? Apparently it is. They can freely say that a woman cannot be defined by old outdated standards. But can we, the right, openly deny their truth?

No. We can't. Even if we are not silenced for that speech, surely we are made into pariahs for it. We're called liars and racists and homophobes, we're called out of touch and out of sync with the times. We are called imaginiationists (a word I just made up) instead of realists. We're labeled as bigots.

To be completely honest what I take issue with more than anything is the very use of the word misinformation. Frankly, I think it gets tossed around too readily and too easily—and of course it's the right being accused of it time and time again.

As I asked before, "Based on who's truth?"

Who are the fact checkers? The media of course. And what makes up the largest portion of the media? Liberals. The left. They are the ones cracking the code of truth and anyone who questions the person supposedly setting the record straight is simply spreading more misinformation and denying the truth. The truth they decide.

Now TikTok is up in arms and running a bit scared by the truth seekers of the world—particularly the United States government.

They say they have a team of individuals of more than ten thousand people scanning through the media being offered by members to root out the evils of hate speech and information. And who gets targeted? Not the woman sitting in her bath robe sipping on a cup of coffee in a live stream getting to voice her opinions about men and women not existing in the world and defending her use of the word cis to redefine non-transgender people, who before the word existed in the imaginations of the left, simply described men and women. No. She gets to keep talking even if she is offensive to tens of millions of people who disagree with her.

The ones getting silenced and banned and shut down are the ones who voice their opinions other than what the left has already predetermined to be the truth. A guy can be banned for a week for simply suggesting that president Biden may not actually be running the country. Not because he stole the election. But because maybe he does not have all his faculties and can't be in charge.

Granted, it's an opinion. Just like suggesting a man or a woman is somehow now a cis is an opinion. But of course the left are the ones who decided that there is a difference between fact and opinion. Saying a man cannot be a woman, even if biologically that's a true statement, is not allowed. It's misinformation that could potentially be harmful of disrespectful to others.

Never mind the harm or disrespect imposed on someone who thinks otherwise.

Will it ever change? Who knows? I can say that more people seem to be pushing back more than ever. Even coming from both sides—although of course most of the push back is coming from the right and those middle ground people who call themselves independents.

No one sought to silence that crazy democrat congresswoman Maxine Waters from California for shouting, "Impeach 45," with no basis for impeachment other than she disliked the president, or called her out for potentially inciting violence during the Derek Chauvin trial telling protesters to "get more confrontational." No one held Chuck Schumer to the fire for saying there would be "hell to pay" if Roe v. Wade would be overturned which sent a madman nearly to the door of Supreme Court Justice Cavanaugh wishing to murder him.

But people Mike Lindell and Tucker Carlson will be targeted and silenced. Donald Trump himself will be hounded by baseless accusations and investigations, impeachments and indictments. And rather than stack the courts the media and whoever can find any dirt to dig up will go after a Justice like Clarence Thomas and try to physically remove him from the courts.

It is literally a case of the fox minding the chicken coop here and people need to start paying better attention to what's really going on. The misinformation is happening not just on the right—in fact, I would strongly contend that the lion's bulk share of it is actually coming from the left. 

The left, by the way, who have become literal masters of fictional tales selling their books as gospels of truth and verifiable and undeniable correctness to the masses for wide consumption, also bearing the arms against anyone who might question their truths so that they may pounce swiftly and unleash their terrorism of their own defamation and destruction of character—hopeful that eventually all real truth might finally see its own abolishment so that the only thing ever labeled as truth is what they badly want you to believe.