Mike Lindell officially loses all his lawyers in $5M 'Prove Mike Wrong' cyber challenge

There are two kinds of Republicans—billionaires and suckers
He proves he's a sucker, because a real fascist would know never to ask to be proven wrong
- FINO
  Fascist In Name Only.

man i just spent like an hour in the bathtub reading further into this and belly laughing
i will say though that i think the guy who sold mike lindell the 'data' that he's referring to in the challenge might actually be a genius lol. this is apparently the third or fourth time he's identified someone who needs some kind of technological hail mary and then he just shows up and is like "i have.. the data". he sold proof that obama faked his birth certificate and also sold a bunch of completely bogus software to the pentagon during the post-9/11 defense industry boom such as software that "decodes" al jazeera broadcasts into secret al qaeda messages. an employee of his testified that he doesn't even have an IDE installed on his computer. he's literally made tens of millions of dollars off of this grift and despite being basically constantly legally embattled for the past 20 years has apparently not suffered any consequences. i wish him a long and successful career being the smartest dumb guy in the room
mike lindell actually comes away from this looking almost sympathetic because he is so, so clearly a moron whose conception of data is like, a PS1-era spinning icon of a CD-ROM. it's very hard for me to guess whether or not he was acting in good faith: on the one hand, the logical thing to do with proof of election tampering is not 'announce a five million dollar challenge for someone to prove that i don't have it', but on the other hand, it doesn't make any fucking sense to do that if you don't think you have proof either. either way i would love to know how much money he paid for it (by the way, the data is: a text file with a list of IP addresses in mainland china, a PDF with a 'graphic depiction of voting machines', and many terabytes of gibberish binary files timestamped to several days before the challenge was set up). look at this quote the guy is literally zoolander stupid
“I said, ‘Wow!’ This would absolutely explain what I couldn’t explain!” Lindell recalled in an interview. “It was done with computers! I knew that was the only explanation."
- The votes were IN the computers all along?
  Smartmaticsonite... I was WAYYY off!
- My favorite part is that the lawsuit is being brought by a Trump voter.
  
  "Let them fight!"
- What's hilarious is that they all seem to have proof of all these things, but they never release any of it.
- Wait...there is money in manufacturing false data to sell to these fascists?
  
  Oh, if only my moral compass was just a bit weaker. The TSA spent about a decade after its conception trying to find a magic box that identifies terrorists in airports. The millimeter wave scanners are the most successful thing to come out of the entire effort. Those at least sorta work, and most of the rest on the list are far worse than that. Made a bunch of people a lot of money, though.
- Want good reads to recommend concerning this?
  
  sorry im not sure if you're asking or offering. if you're offering then absolutely, hit me. if you're asking then these two are pretty good:
  https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada-companys-troubles-entangle-gibbons-federal-government/
  https://www.npr.org/2009/12/19/121667905/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon
- Dude is a clown.
- The fact that he did a “prove me wrong” instead of a “here’s the proof” tells me, at minimum, had a suspicion that the proof had no merit.
  
  No, he admitted at some point the "5 mil to prove me wrong" was a publicity stunt to drum up media coverage of his conference.
  He thought it was impossible to prove a negative, but in this case the data was so clearly unrelated to any election, much less election fraud, the judge found that the confrence go-er had proved him wrong.
- an employee of his testified that he doesn’t even have an IDE installed on his computer.
  that doesn't make him not a programmer, plenty of linux pilled programmers don't use IDEs.
  Hell some of the really prominent ones use shit like text mate, DHH for example.

What I find fascinating is the total number of numbskulls and cartoon villains, all collected under the Trump banner, and that lunatic mob may very well take government.
What's the hell wrong with American voters?
- They are in a conservative news bubble or they don't pay much attention to things that don't directly affect them and attribute those that do to the wrong party. Or they're just greedy or racist. Or stupid.
  Take your pick, mix and match.
  
  I'll go with answer E: all of the above
  
  You forgot wrapped up in culture wars.
- Southern Strategy and decades of Fox News.
  
  True. I'm gonna go out on a limb and add another reason: Money in politics.
  When I was a kid, if a politician was accused of taking bribes, they would fall over themselves to deny the accusation. Later, the politician would simply reply, "It was pay for access, not a bribe."
  Now, they don't even respond to such accusations. Bribes are so normalized that we don't even notice them anymore.
  (For the pendants, yes there are pols that are occasionally punished for literally accepting bribes, some recently. My point is that there is little difference between literally accepting money and storing it in a freezer and having several billionaires fund your re-election campaign with dozens of legal loopholes.)
  This allows The Rich to have a very heavy hand on the tiller for which way elections go. If rich folks weren't pouring big money into elections (corporations are people too!) I'm willing to bet at least one political party in the US would be dead now.
- My coworker is going to vote for Trump because gas prices went up in the last 4 years.
  
  I think you need to be intentionally naive, or just an absolute shitbag, to want to vote for lower gas prices at the cost of increased human suffering. Let alone whether it's something Trump could even deliver.
  
  thats not why he's voting for trump
- What’s the hell wrong with American voters?
  Rage at a system that doesn't work and dreaming of being a person who doesn't have to apologize for anything. There is a reason why crime movies, games, and TV shows are so popular. It isn't that most people want to be going around murdering all day, it is they want to be able to.
- On average, insufficient education and critical thinking skills because of a quasi-oligarchy that favors lots of desperate people to keep unskilled labor costs down. These oligarchs are also in league with sociopath religious leaders who know that religious recruitment is higher when life is miserable. Because 80% of our leadership are effectively solipsists, little is done to improve anything long term because it doesn’t benefit them immediately or personally.
  Based on the probabilities we can derive from examining history, the situation will have to deteriorate for a few more generations before a widespread radical event changes key aspects of civilization. We should all try to change things now in less destructive and less risky ways, but I fear it won’t work.
  
  lots of desperate people to keep unskilled labor costs down
  America needs more unions sooo badly

Having heard him make a deposition, Lindell's the kind of guy I could see insisting on representing himself against better judgement.
- There's no better judgement than Mike Lindell's judgement. That's a lumpy MyPillow guarantee!
- It was unclear if Lindell would retain new counsel in the case. As Foster pointed out, business entities cannot represent themselves in court.
  lol not even if he wanted to (which would be very entertaining to watch, sadly)
  
  I thought that to be interesting, never heard that before. Wonder what the reasoning is?
- You… you’ve seen his commercials right? He seems like not only the kind of guy who would represent himself, but he would also be on a ton of cocaine when he does it.
  
  I think his cocaine use is determined by if he's writing a book at the time or not?
- I don't think he can. I seem to recall businesses aren't allowed to represent themselves in court.
  
  He's going to end up with an overworked public defender.
- Can you practically represent yourself (as a non-lawyer) in a court as high as what he needs to appeal? They will throw it out on procedure grounds alone right?

Ya'll should watch some of his 'broadcasts'.
Not, like, the whole things.
Tommy Campbell's YT channel does basically recaps of the stupidest shit the stupid MAGA clowns do and... well Mr. Lindell features quite often.
Lindell is basically the most perfect stereotype for a loser idiot boomer that lucked his way into being a business owner, and he is of course astoundingly technically incompetent.
There are at this point running gags with a number of words that he seemingly is incapable of pronouncing correctly, the guy produces moron clips at such a rate Im surprised he isnt a number of widely used meme formats.
- incapable of pronouncing correctly
  Lonely bookish kids, grown men who do not listen to anyone else, ESL adults who had to pick up the language without help. Take a guess which one of the three he is.
  
  Alex, I'll be forgoing your 3 options and asking instead "What is an obviously still using cocaine addict?"
  He might have graduated from the rock to the powder, but at this rate he'll either be incarcerated or back to the rock soon.
- sounds amazing. can you put up a link?
  
  Sure!
  https://m.youtube.com/@tommycampbell
  I am on mobile but the url should fix itself.
  Another running bit he does is...
  Ok, so he calls it a 'special version' of Lauren Boebert's autobiography.
  I think what this means its that the only editorializing is that he adds 'It was like a fairy tale.' at the end of all of the maybe couple of pages he reads, which presumably would not actually be in the actual book.
  But you see, I cannot actually tell how much of the rest of what he is reading is direct from the book and hammed up for effect.
  She comes across as having the writing ability of maybe an 8th grader... and the stories are so absolutely absurd... but the problem is that Lauren Boebert is so fucking absurd, I cannot reliably draw a line between what Boebert has written, and what Campbell is hamming up.
  Its ... its like reading a diary of the villain from mean girls, except she's a hick, regularly does crimes, has the trashiest life imaginable, she has infinite self confidence and is somehow self aware but also not self aware at the same time.

We need more of these feel good stories. That put a smile on my face.

"But the pillow executive moved forward with an appeal anyway."
God damnit... I truly hope that history looks back on this period of time as the outrageously ridiculous and overwhelmingly disappointing failure that it is. Fuck, man... God damnit, this is so FUCKING stupid.
- History will probably unveil one of the largest psychological operations ever perpetrated by foreign actors in order to dismantle a hegemony and it'll be clear as day. In a couple decades everyone will act at though it was totally obvious that in less than 10 years the 'common sense' rural folk decided to worship someone with used car salesman ethics and elect his entourage of unqualified nincompoops, none of which have enough intuition to start a lawnmower
  
  "Less than 10 years" isn't giving Rupert Murdoch the blame he deserves. Repubs have been working on this for decades.
  
  Meanwhile the rest of us have already known it, and tell them, but they won’t listen.
- I hope he's forgotten. He wants to be remembered.
  
  Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I hope he's remembered, just poorly.
- My concern is that within a couple of decades this country will be converted into a theocratic fascist nation that won't allow history to be taught (at least, not the "unapproved" version). My closest data point in support of this is the current projected electoral vote count: Biden - 224, Trump - 301, tied - 13. How in the hell (gerrymandering, media horseracing, and everything else) is this fraud LEADING?

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I have no idea why this man is in the American news cycle so much. I guess "talks a lot of bollocks" is enough these days.
He always looks like he should be dictator of a small South American country. Not a real one, obviously, they'd decorate the nearest tree with him, but the sort of dictator who ends up there through a series of zany mishaps in the kind of shit sitcom that Paramount+ might greenlight. With a really uninspired title as well, like El Presidente.
- I don't think MAGA really view him in high regard, they more or less allow him because Trump loves him. For all non MAGA people, it's medium entertaining how much of a top to bottom train wreck this guy is. I haven't seen a single instance of him in a public space where he doesn't make himself look like a complete fool only to realize he has exposed himself to then try to get out of whatever hole he just dug unsuccessfully, making him look even more foolish. So, you know, an honest and reasonable representative of the average MAGA.
- Because he spent millions on ads for his shitty pillow so everyone who was exposed to ads knew his face. And then he came out as a raging fascist so then he became a controversial commercial celebrity.
- In a field full of clowns He is the king crusty.
- If it were a production directed by Armando Iannucci, I'd watch it.

“I think he’s the single greatest purchaser of advertising I’ve ever seen.
I said, Mike, I don’t care how many pillows you sell, and now you’re selling slippers, and sheets, you’re selling everything. I said, I don’t care, you can’t afford that much advertising.”
45th President Donald J Trump
- Give him his due, the man can sniff out a chump to be exploited.

🍿🍿🍿

How common is it that lawyers walk away from a case?
- I don't think its that rare, but its not common. Usually it means that the client is breaching their agreement. Often that breach is in the form of they lied to the lawyer. Lawyers have confidentiality, so the only reasons to lie are external to the case itself.
  Could also mean Lindell stopped paying them, probably for money troubles.
  
  The only reason to lie is external to the case, but that's a bold move assuming reason was involved.
  I bet he lied for no good reason, making it harder for them to do their job.
  
  Thnx!

He cries into his own lumpy pillows at night
- you've clearly never used one of his pillows
  
  And now they never will.

Seems drugs were treating him better then Jesus is.

How does one prove that someone does not have something?
- I'm not sure but the mandatory arbitration lindell himself put in said to pay the guy, so it was as rigged as lindell could get it without it being illegal, and they still felt it was well-proven, and lindell should pay.
- I claim that I have a five dollar bill in my pocket. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
  We turn my pocket inside out. No five dollar bill is there. I lose the challenge.
  
  In Mike Lindels case, what was the pocket that he was forced to open, revealing no data was there?
  It seems like such a ridiculous exercise.

Stop giving stupid people air time.

Sorry, but a shithead losing support doesn't qualify as news.

this is unfair exploitation of mental illness.
Mike Lindell is an American hero with a story of success, making a great pillow everyone loved and making himself wealthy in the process
his religious delusions are a form of either mental illness or partial handicap and he shouldn't be stripped of everything because of that
his belief that the election was rigged AND he had the secret proof (that would hold up to court scrutiny) was clearly a religious delusion and if you think otherwise you don't understand how cults and mental illnesses intertwine
in a just world, this deal should be something he doesn't have to honor because he offered this "prove me wrong" thing to the public when he was clearly out of it
what about all the people he employed? the people he made happy with a decent pillow? we as a society have failed by allowing the religiously delusional to enter into any sort of unusual contracts at all. yes, the amish should be allowed to sell grain and the menonites should be allowed to sell delicious jams, but should we really allow right wing religious maniacs to enter into complex contracts?
no, of course not
this man should be given ALL his money back, and an apology from society for exploiting him. this man worked hard in life and doesn't deserve this
- I mean, the options seem to be "this man is mentally ill, he needs to enter adult conservatorship" or "this man is an adult, who made a contract, and is being held to a contract"
  He doesnt seem to be so far gone he needs a conservator, so his contracts are valid.
  
  there needs to be some sort of space between "this person needs a conservator and can't have any rights" and "this is a logical rational person who can contractually give away 5 million dollars because he's filled with religious delusions"
- I genuinely can't tell if the downvotes are because people think you're serious, or because people think you're joking, or because people can't tell if you're serious or joking.
  
  Its hard to tell sometimes because I have seen diatribes almost exactly like that, but completely serious.
  
  Given his follow-up responses he seems to generally believe what he said (or at least upholding the joke?). I mean I kinda get the notion that we shouldn't take advantage of people, but Mike made the competition himself. The guy asking to be paid isn't taking advantage, he's asking for what Mike promised him.