A voting machine firm sues a pillow CEO for $1.3 billion? Sounds absurd, but it surely’s lethal severe

Dominion’s lawsuit towards MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, which additionally names MyPillow, pertains to a much less establishment-friendly type of the massive lie, but it surely’s all a part of the identical effort, and Lindell wasn’t pushing his Dominion claims alone. This lawsuit follows comparable ones by Dominion towards Trump legal professionals Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and voting firm Smartmatic equally sued Giuliani, Powell, Fox Information, and a few Fox hosts for $2.7 billion.

Within the lawsuit, Dominion alleges that “Performing in live performance with allies and media retailers that have been decided to curry favor with one in every of their greatest sponsors and to advertise a false preconceived narrative concerning the 2020 election, Lindell launched a defamatory advertising marketing campaign about Dominion that reached thousands and thousands of individuals and brought about huge hurt to Dominion.”

As for these media retailers, Lindell paid to air his lies concerning the election and Dominion in a two-hour documentary that ran on One America Information. OAN supplied an in depth disclaimer about how the documentary was simply Lindell’s opinion, “not the product of OAN’s reporting.” But it surely additionally promoted the present as “a never-before-seen report breaking down election fraud proof & displaying how the unprecedented degree of voter fraud was dedicated within the 2020 Presidential Election.” The video was subsequently pulled from YouTube for violating the platform’s presidential election integrity coverage.

OAN, one in every of Trump’s present favourite media retailers since he turned towards Fox Information, has been the goal of a defamation go well with by a Dominion govt and, following stop and desist letters from Dominion itself, quietly eliminated a bunch of election-related conspiracy concept protection from its web site in January.

So that is very a lot not only a voting machine maker suing a pillow maker. Lindell, as absurd as it might appear, is a part of a a lot greater effort to overturn or no less than throw doubt on the outcomes of a presidential election, an effort that began with somebody who, as absurd as it might appear, was then the sitting president of the USA. It was pushed in its excessive types by the latter’s legal professionals, together with a once-respected former mayor of New York Metropolis, and broadly aired on a couple of right-wing tv information community. The massive lie led on to a lethal assault on the U.S. Capitol aimed toward stopping Congress from certifying the election outcomes. The lie continues, in a barely watered-down kind, to be unfold by one of many high Republicans within the Home of Representatives on a serious community’s flagship Sunday information speak present. The veneer of absurdity doesn’t make this any much less severe.