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Mike Lindell has been quite busy since Donald Trump's election defeat last fall. The founder and CEO of MyPillow somehow became a close confidant to the former president, mainly by touting utterly bonkers conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. These efforts not only endeared him to Trump, they also had the effect of turning Lindell into a cause celebre in some right-wing circles.
All has not gone well for the pillow guy, however.
This week, for example, Lindell received some discouraging legal news when a federal judge cleared the way for Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Lindell and some other pro-Trump conspiracy theorists. Dominion has accused Lindell of peddling ridiculous falsehoods about the company, and this week, a judge -- a Trump-appointed judge -- agreed that Lindell had "made his claims knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth."
It was against this backdrop that Lindell traveled to South Dakota for a "cyber symposium" event in which the pillow guy vowed to unveil "irrefutable" proof -- presented over the course of several days -- which would prove that President Biden did not actually win the election. In fact, Lindell was so confident in his claims that he said Biden would voluntarily exit the White House, as an honorable gesture, after seeing the evidence that China secretly hacked the election.
That didn't work out, either.
Josh Merritt, also known as "Spider" or "Spyder" and who was hired by Lindell for his "red team," told the Washington Times on Wednesday at the symposium that, effectively, Lindell has sold his adherents a bill of goods. Lindell claimed that intercepted network data obtained by other hackers, also known as "packet captures," could be unencrypted to reveal evidence of vote-switching by the Chinese-backed hackers. But Merritt has now said that's just not true.
In other words, Lindell said his team would bolster his conspiracy theories, only to hear his team discredit his conspiracy theories.
Reality an unwelcome guest at 'pillow guy' big reveal event to restore Trump presidency
by Rachel Maddow
AUG. 13, 202108:03
Where does this data come from that Lindell has used as the basis for all these months of agitation on this issue? Well, his cyber expert confirmed that the actual material that’s the basis for these claims has been provided by a man named Dennis Montgomery. And I’m guessing you do not recognize that name, but you might remember him from these headlines not long ago:’The Man Who Conned The Pentagon’
by NPR, All Things Considered
December 19, 2009
One man's claims about secret al-Qaida messages sent via television led American officials to raise terror-alert levels and cancel a number of flights. But those claims turned out to be bogus. Guy Raz talks with journalist Aram Roston about his article in Playboy magazine about Dennis Montgomery, "The Man Who Conned the Pentagon." [January-February, 2010]
GUY RAZ, host:
Back during the Bush administration, officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often accused Al Jazeera of serving as al-Qaida's favorite TV station. That may explain how a man named Dennis Montgomery convinced the CIA that Al Jazeera was sending coded messages through its broadcast signal to al-Qaida operatives. And Montgomery claimed he had the computer software to break the code.
For several months starting in the fall of 2003, Montgomery's analysis led directly to national code orange security alerts and cancelled flights. The only problem: he was making it all up. And you and me, the taxpayers, well, we paid for it.
The story is told in the new issue of Playboy magazine. And the author, Aram Roston, joins me from our New York bureau.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. ARAM ROSTON (Author, "The Man who Conned the Pentagon"): Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: Let's start at the beginning. What was Dennis Montgomery claiming he could find in Al Jazeera's broadcasts?
Mr. ROSTON: First of all, let me point out it's still all classified. That said, what he was claiming to find were barcodes in essence. Sequences of information that he said then revealed the targets of intended terrorist attacks.
RAZ: Barcodes from a television signal?
Mr. ROSTON: Yeah. He said they were sort of embedded within the digital feed from Al Jazeera, so - and which is potentially technically possible, of course. You could sort of scramble the pixels in various ways. But he said he could decode all this and find these barcodes or sort of things like barcodes. And he said these translate into coordinates - latitudes or longitude, times, flight times, flight numbers - and those were terrorist targets, he claimed.
RAZ: Let's back up for a moment. How did Dennis Montgomery convince the CIA to give him business, because they gave him business? I mean, they actually put some money into this.
Mr. ROSTON: He was in business with another man, as the article describes, in a company called eTreppid. They were the initial contractor, although later, he would sell the same, or try to sell the same software through another company with another partner.
The first partner was a man named Warren Trepp. Now, people who are familiar with Michael Milken and the big scandal of the '80s, the Drexel Burnham scandal...
RAZ: The junk bonds.
Mr. ROSTON: ...the junk bonds scandals, exactly, they'll be familiar with Warren Trepp because he was Michael Milken's right-hand man in the junk bond schemes.
RAZ: And he was running this company that hired Dennis Montgomery and that company managed to get the contract with the CIA.
Mr. ROSTON: Exactly.
RAZ: You write about some of the code orange security alerts that came directly from Montgomery's so-called analysis of those al-Jazeera signals. Describe some of them.
Mr. ROSTON: On the 21st of December in 2003, there was this huge announcement -it was a Sunday. Everything seemed to be going fine that Christmas season, and then suddenly on that Sunday, Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security, made this announcement: we're going to orange alert - and nobody knew what it was.
Reporters, you know, investigative reporters and then people who cover the intelligence community and so forth, were all trying to gauge what was going on. They talked about was there chatter intercepts and informants and so forth. What it was was this guy's analysis or supposed analysis of al-Jazeera.
And people in the CIA, people who knew what they were talking about, were furious. Every quote I got from them was basically full of expletives. They were so upset. They were just losing it.
RAZ: But who believed him? I mean, who believed him there?
Mr. ROSTON: What happened was there was a particular division called science and technology, and they were the CIA's, you know, sort of high tech group. The ones that you often like in the movies - they make disguises and intercepts and special little gadgets. They were the ones that believed it. They were the ones that gave him the contract.
RAZ: And some of this data reached Frances Townsend, who was President George W. Bush's senior counterterrorism advisor.
Mr. ROSTON: Yeah. Well, what happened was sources told me she was chairing the meetings during this time that resulted from this stream of supposed intelligence. She was the one who President Bush appointed to oversee the response meetings - and she would hold them every day. And so I talked to her and she did admit she held those meetings. She agreed she held those meetings. She remember all the intelligence, she sort of laughed about it. She said, well, they had to take it seriously.
RAZ: Is it possible that the decision to announce a code orange alert in December of 2003 was based on additional intelligence but not just this information from Dennis Montgomery?
Mr. ROSTON: That's what some of them have said. They say this was part of it but not all of it. There were other concerns. But ex-CIA guys I talked to say that's not the case. They say this was it.
RAZ: How long did it take before the CIA found out the truth about Montgomery?
Mr. ROSTON: Some of them knew the truth about it all from the beginning. But eventually, what they did is parts of the CIA tried to recreate this. It was hard because nobody was being told exactly what it was, which was one of the secrets to its success, if you want to call it that. If you can never figure out what intelligence is, how do you knock it down?
They did it with the cooperation of the French intelligence services, I was told. The French were affected tremendously because of this Air France flight that was cancelled over and over and over again. Nobody was telling them why anybody was cancelling their flights. Eventually, the agency did tell them, and that's when this all came, they did some real analysis and found, you know, this isn't there. This was just irrational.
RAZ: So, what happened? Did the CIA just sort of drop all contacts with Montgomery or did they launch an investigation?
Mr. ROSTON: Well, that's sort of complex. He was under a federal investigation in 2006. So many agencies have touched on: the FBI, the U.S. Air Force, special investigations and others that it's unclear where he stands legally in all that. But he's not in good shape right now legally.
Caesar's in Vegas, they filed criminal charges against him. The county attorney in Clark County, Nevada, filed criminal charges against him for bouncing checks to Caesar's Casino - almost a million dollars. He liked to gamble, in other words.
RAZ: He's living in Nevada?
Mr. ROSTON: No. He lives in Rancho Mirage. It's a very nice house. I tried to go there. It was a very beautiful estate...
RAZ: This is in California.
Mr. ROSTON: In California, yeah. Sort of a Spanish tile on top.
RAZ: And he wouldn't talk to you.
Mr. ROSTON: He wouldn't, no.
RAZ: Why do you think Dennis Montgomery was ultimately believed? I mean, was it the atmosphere of the times? The sort of deep fear and concern that terrorists would strike again or was it pure carelessness by folks at the CIA and Homeland Security and other government agencies?
Mr. ROSTON: It's always so hard. You know, I wrote a book about Ben Ahmad Chalabi and it's sort of hard to figure out why he was believed so much. I think it's mainly because he offered an easy solution. If you go to somebody in government and say, listen, I've got a secret technology that can solve your terror problems right now and tell you exactly what al-Qaida's thinking, you know, a lot of people will say, well, I can't ignore that. That sounds great. That sounds perfect. That's what I think it was.
RAZ: That's investigative reporter Aram Roston. His article, "The Man who Conned the Pentagon," can be found in the new issue of Playboy, which you might be surprised to know has great articles.
Aram Roston, thanks so much.
Mr. ROSTON: Thank you, Guy.
Copyright © 2009 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at http://www.npr.org for further information.
“The Man Who Conned the Pentagon.”
Also,How a Reno Casino Con Man Duped the CIA And Pulled One of the ‘Most Dangerous Hoaxes’ In American History
By Travis Daub
PBS News Hour
Oct 14, 2014 2:43 PM EDT
In the winter of 2003, the CIA received a disturbing bit of information. Al-Qaida, the intelligence said, was planning to strike the U.S. by hijacking a specific list of incoming international flights from France and other nations.
The agency shared the information with the White House. They had flight numbers, schedules and possible coordinates for the attacks. After speaking with the French government, President Bush issued an order to ground certain flights worldwide, severely disrupting holiday travel.
But it turns out the intelligence was flawed. In fact, no such plot existed to crash Air France 747s in the U.S., nor was there any credible intelligence that al-Qaida was planning a Christmas attack. Few knew exactly from where the bad information had originated, thanks to silos inside the intelligence sphere. The information had come from Dennis Montgomery, a little-known government contractor who claimed he had the ability to decode secret al-Qaida messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. After the groundings, French officials demanded access to Montgomery’s software, and handed it over to a team of French engineers to analyze.At one point, Risen says, Montgomery’s intelligence information was so revered, the White House considered issuing an order to shoot down a passenger plane over the Atlantic.
The French engineers concluded Montgomery’s claims were an elaborate hoax. There were too few pixels in an Al Jazeera broadcast image to contain hidden messages.
Just a few years before the phony holiday terror plot, Montgomery had been a frequent presence in a Reno, Nevada casino, where he gambled compulsively and claimed to have designed software that could analyze security video to recognize betting patterns and catch cheaters—or count cards into an eight-deck blackjack game.
How did a Reno casino con man manage to convince the President of the United States to ground international flights?
Montgomery’s tale is told in detail on James Risen’s new book, Pay any Price, Greed, Power, and Endless War. Risen’s reporting explores how a national security complex, flush with cash to fight terrorism, attracted individuals like Montgomery—people who seemed to have too-good-to-be true technology designed to fill needs in a frightened and overwhelmed Washington. Montgomery’s fantastic claims about his casino software attracted the interest of the Department of Defense, and he slowly made his way up the ladder to the CIA. At one point, Risen says, Montgomery’s intelligence information was so revered, the White House considered issuing an order to shoot down a passenger plane over the Atlantic. Fortunately, that never happened. Risen puts Montgomery’s career into perspective:Montgomery was the maestro behind what many current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the case now believe was one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history.
Montgomery never worked directly for the CIA, but amassed DOD contracts worth millions of dollars and continued working on government contracts well into the Obama administration. A culture of secrecy and a lack of accountability enabled him to bounce from agency to agency, collecting contracts for years, Risen says.
As for Montgomery, he still says that his company’s software was useful in the war on terror, Risen writes, but he is unable to share details due to the classified nature of his work.
Watch more of James Risen’s interview with Judy Woodruff on the PBS NewsHour.
Travis Daub is Digital Director at PBS NewsHour where he manages the incredible digital content team and oversees the integration of online and on-air content. With 20 years of experience in online publishing, Travis has been honored to work alongside talented colleagues at the PBS NewsHour, Foreign Policy magazine and the Des Moines Register.
“How a Reno Casino Con Man Duped the CIA And Pulled One of the ‘Most Dangerous Hoaxes’ In American History.”Dennis Montgomery, a little-known government contractor who claimed he had the ability to decode secret al-Qaida messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts.
National Security and intelligence reporters James Risen wrote a book in 2014 about this guy. It’s about other things, too, but a big part of it was about this guy conning people and conning the government out of HUUUUGE sums of cash including by him claiming that he could decode news stories broadcast by Al Jazeera and inside those news stories he could access magic, secret al-Qaeda messages, because he could find them in the pixels.
He could NOT find them in the pixels. That was all made up.Infamous ‘Hoax’ Artist Behind Trumpworld’s New Voter Fraud Claim: He tricked the Bush administration into thinking he could detect terrorist signals in al Jazeera broadcasts. Now Dennis Montgomery has a new set of believers.
by Will Sommer
Politics Reporter
Daily Beast
Updated Nov. 09, 2020 3:14AM ET / Published Nov. 08, 2020 9:04PM ET
As Donald Trump refuses to concede the election, some of his most loyal allies have become obsessed with a bizarre new conspiracy theory about the race, insisting that Trump only lost the election because a deep-state supercomputer named “Hammer” and a computer program named “Scorecard” were used to change the ballot count.
The head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has called the claim about supercomputer election fraud “nonsense,” and urged Americans not to promote it.
But the mythical supercomputer claim has been embraced by prominent Trump backers, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, former Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, right-wing pundit John Cardillo, and Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson.
The election fraud claims center on Dennis Montgomery, a former intelligence contractor and self-proclaimed whistleblower who claims to have created the “Hammer” supercomputer and the “Scorecard” software some Trump fans believe was used to change the votes.
“He’s a genius, and he loves America,” Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and one-time leader in the birther movement, said of Montgomery on Tuesday on Bannon’s podcast, as Bannon praised an article on Montgomery’s claims. “He’s the programmer that made all this happen, and he’s on our side.”
Montgomery’s lawyer, Larry Klayman—a favorite attorney for fringe right-wing figures—didn’t respond to a request for comment. Klayman himself was temporarily suspended from practicing law in June.
What Trump allies tend to leave out, however, is that Montgomery has a long history of making outlandish claims that fail to come true. As an intelligence contractor at the height of the War on Terror, Montgomery was behind what’s been called “one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history,” churning out allegedly fictitious data that once prompted the Bush administration to consider shooting down airplanes.
And now, Trump allies want voters to believe Montgomery’s claims about the election.
“I think there are any number of things they need to investigate, including the likelihood that 3 percent of the vote total was changed in the pre-election voting ballots that were collected digitally by using the Hammer program and the software program called Scorecard,” Sidney Powell, the attorney for former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, said Friday in an appearance on Fox Business. “That would have amounted to a massive change in the vote.”
“That’s called intervention in our elections,” host Lou Dobbs said.
“This is Coup 5.0, Lou,” Powell said.
Powell repeated her computer voter fraud claim Sunday on Fox News, with no pushback from host Maria Bartiromo.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies flush with money began pumping defense contractors with cash in the hopes of averting another terror attack.
One of the recipients of that windfall was Dennis Montgomery, a Reno, Nevada, software designer and frequent gambler who claimed to have come with software that would help the CIA penetrate deep inside al Qaeda’s systems.
At various times, Montgomery insisted his programs could identify terrorists’ faces and weapons through drone footage, or spot submarines deep underwater, receiving millions in contracts from the Air Force and the military’s Special Operations Command. But the jewel of Montgomery’s company was a program he claimed could detect messages to al Qaeda sleeper cells hidden in broadcasts from Qatar’s al Jazeera network.
CIA employees intrigued by the supposed Al Jazeera decoding technology moved into Montgomery’s Nevada office, and Montgomery’s companies received at least $20 million from the U.S. government for what was then considered “the most important, most sensitive” technology in the agency’s repertoire, the New York Times reported in 2011.
“They began to believe, in this kind of war fever, that you could find Al Qaeda messages hidden in al Jazeera broadcasts,” New York Times reporter James Risen, who wrote a book about Montgomery’s business, said in 2014.
Montgomery’s supposed insights on al Qaeda reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, with insight that Montgomery provided prompting the George W. Bush administration to raise the terror threat level to “orange,” its second-highest rating.
In Dec. 2003, according to a Playboy report, Montgomery claimed he had discovered information in a TV broadcast proving that al Qaeda hijackers were set to hijack planes flying to the United States from Europe and Mexico.
President Bush himself blocked the flights, ordering them to turn around or stay on the ground. The administration even considered shooting down the planes based on Montgomery’s information, according to the Times.
But according to reports and former employees, Montgomery’s supposed technology was all a hoax. One employee quoted in the Playboy report claimed Montgomery had ordered him to fake a test for U.S. military officials, tricking the officials into believing Montgomery’s software could detect weapons in drone footage.
French intelligence officials, furious that Montgomery’s data had been used to ground French planes, debunked the “technology” and reportedly convinced CIA officials to drop Montgomery, according to the Times.
“We got played,” an ex-intelligence official told the Times in 2011.
Even as he rose in intelligence circles, Montgomery reportedly developed a mammoth blackjack habit, losing $442,000 in one day at casinos, according to Playboy.
“He was, in the parlance of the gambling hall, a ‘whale,’” Playboy wrote of Montgomery.
As of 2011, Montgomery was fighting Nevada charges for writing bad checks worth $1.8 million at casinos. The Daily Beast was unable to determine the ultimate disposition of those charges.
As the government soured on his claims about al Qaeda, Montgomery was on increasingly on the outs with his business partner, a former top trader for convicted junk bond king Michael Milken. Montgomery allegedly split from the company he had founded with his partner, taking highly secret confidential government files, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit.
The FBI raided Montgomery’s home and storage units in an attempt to recover the missing data. But Montgomery was never charged over the government contracts, with a federal judge throwing out evidence gleaned in the FBI raids.
The federal government scrambled to block evidence related to the software from being revealed in court in a civil fight between Montgomery and his former business partner, in what the Times reported was an effort to avoid embarrassing the CIA and other agencies that had paid Montgomery millions of dollars.
Despite avoiding federal charges of the contracts, Montgomery wasn’t done making incredible claims about his software.
Montgomery resurfaced in 2013, as a “confidential informant” for controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Arpaio was embroiled in a federal case over his department’s treatment of Latino drivers, and furious at the federal judge who had ruled against him. According to reports and court testimony, Montgomery convinced Arpaio that he had a software called “Hammer” that could prove that the federal judge was colluding against Arpaio with the Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder.
Arpaio bought into Montgomery’s claims, even as Arpaio’s lawyers and detectives fumed that the “proof” Montgomery was providing about the judge was fake.
At one point, Arpaio reportedly exploded at his subordinates after they complained that he was wasting money on Montgomery and pointing out the controversy over Montgomery’s al Jazeera software. Still, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office paid Montgomery $120,000 for the data he provided Arpaio in his fight with the judge.
By 2017, with Trump supporters furious at the intelligence community and former FBI Director James Comey over the investigation into the Trump’s campaigns, Montgomery reinvented himself as an aggrieved intelligence whistleblower.
In June 2017, Klayman and Montgomery sued Comey and other top Obama-era officials—including Obama himself. In a lengthy complaint, the pair laid out a complicated story claiming that Montgomery had taken 47 hard drives full of evidence of an illegal surveillance program from an Army base, alleged that Comey somehow misused the hard drives, and that intelligence officials had hacked both Klayman and Montgomery.
Montgomery’s claims were trumpeted by reporter John Solomon, whose reporting on Ukraine would later be rebuked by officials and Fox News’s research department during the Trump impeachment hearings.
“This is way larger than Snowden,” Solomon declared of Montgomery’s allegations in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.
Montgomery’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed, with a federal judge calling them a “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists' complaints.”
Montgomery found new fame on the right in the final days of the election. On Oct. 31, an obscure conspiracy theory website called The American Report published a story claiming that "Biden Using SCORECARD and THE HAMMER to Steal Another U.S. Presidential Election," illustrated with a picture of Biden next to Josef Stalin.
The American Report has claimed that Montgomery invented “SCORECARD” and “HAMMER” for intelligence purposes, an apparent reference to his controversial programs that purported to track al Qaeda. In this telling, the Obama administration hijacked Montgomery’s software to steal elections.
The murky reporting was embraced a few days later by Bannon and McInerney, with Bannon calling news “very disturbing” and praising the site for “incredible reporting.” Montgomery himself appears to have publicly stayed silent, even as he’s quoted as proof that the government stole the presidential election for Biden.
Fueled by Bannon’s podcast and Powell’s Fox appearances, the “Hammer and Scorecard” conspiracy has found a home with Trump’s grassroots. In calls to baffled C-SPAN and talk radio hosts, Trump supporters have insisted that dire consequences are ahead for any involved in the nonexistent “Hammer and Scorecard” saga. Tweets referencing “Hammer and Scorecard” posted every few seconds on the site even as Twitter tries to hinder the spread of the disinformation.
“Twitter’s Trust & Safety team will take action on Tweets that are in violation of our Civic Integrity policy, including in instances these terms are used in a way to undermine the legitimacy of the election process,” Twitter said in a statement.
According to Twitter, posts about the Hammer and Scorecard conspiracy theory could be labeled as disinformation or deleted from the site entirely.
Still, Montgomery’s conspiracy theory about the supercomputer has exploded on the right. On Sunday, Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard tweeted a story from a fringe outlet that promised a “Hammer and Scorecard smoking gun.”
“Anyone using HAMMER SCORECARD to alter voting in our America election should be prosecuted,” former football player and Republican convention speaker Herschel Walker tweeted on Sunday.
@willsommer
William.Sommer@thedailybeast.com
And it had been suspected for a long while – do you see the date on this from Will Sommer at the Daily Beast? November 9, 2020? It had been suspected for a long while that this legendary con artist had sold a new version of his con to the “Trump Secretly Won the Election” people. But now the “Trump Secretly Won the Election” people have confirmed that that’s where they’ve gotten their so-called “data.” That’s where they got this data that they’ve been confidently proclaiming will incontrovertibly show and prove to everyone that Trump won, and we’ll all see that data, and it will be so clear, and we’ll all say, “I’m so sorry we disagreed about this. Let’s all get together and go to the new re-inauguration.”EXCLUSIVE: Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election
by Joseph Clark
The Washington Times
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
So maybe we’re not all going to wake up all 330 million of us tomorrow, you know, joining in a unanimous consensus revelation that the wrong guy’s in the oval office. Maybe that’s not going to happen, but the consequences for people who really believe that’s going to happen, may be significant, and may cause bizarre behavior. It may cause people to need help. I think it’s an unpredictable moment in terms of people who have sort of gone down the Q-Anon, Trump-election-fraud rabbit hole. These next few days are going to be hard, and the rest of the month is going to be hard. But these next few days are probably going to be hard for them.
Making matters just a bit worse, as Rachel noted on last night's show, we also learned this week that Lindell was basing his strange campaign on cyber-data he'd received from Dennis Montgomery. As a Washington Post report added, Montgomery's background is ... problematic.
The New York Times reported in 2011 that the U.S. government was trying to keep secret the details of an arrangement in which Montgomery promised to provide technology to catch terrorists. Montgomery claimed he could decode secret al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. He received more than $20 million in government contracts. But his own former lawyer indicated the government was clamming up because the technology was bogus and wanted to avoid embarrassment. He also called him a "con man."
Finally, let's also not forget that Lindell has been a prominent advocate of the idea that Trump will not only be "reinstated" to the presidency -- a literal impossibility in our system of government -- but that this transfer of power will begin the morning of Friday, Aug. 13.
Which is to say, right now.
Occasionally, assorted figures will generate headlines by making End Times predictions. The basic idea is straightforward: these figures will tell their followers they know the precise day in which the world will come to an end, and then ask believers to plan accordingly.
This never turns out well, since these End Times prophecies have always failed, leaving the prophesiers scrambling to explain why they were so terribly wrong. The more specific the prediction, the more embarrassing the failure.
These cranks came to mind this morning as Lindell's unfortunately specific prediction proved false. (I have it on good authority that there are no moving trucks outside the White House.)
And while it's certainly tempting to have a good laugh about all of this, let's not overlook the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has warned local police departments nationwide about the prospect of political violence this summer -- because many on the far-right fringe have come to believe that Trump really might be "reinstated," and some extremists "have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized."
Mike Lindell has obviously had a difficult week, but the significance of the absurd ideas he's eagerly peddled continue to linger.