Conspiratorial thinking has long been an alternative way of how a section of American society chooses to interpret events in our politics, culture, and even religion.
The current political climate and a pandemic that won’t quit haven’t helped things much. In fact, millions of Americans took it upon themselves to try to find answers. A significant percentage of them resorted to doing it in this oddly familiar fashion.
They found comfort in the baroque theories spun by MAGA, an umbrella movement that has synthesized anti-vaxxers, quarantine refuseniks, paranoid subcultures, QAnon, Stop the Steal, and many others into a bizarre phenomenon.
Grifters and true believers alike found room under this umbrella where Mike Lindell, the lead missionary for the movement has also pitched a tent.
This CEO of a Pillow company has since styled himself as an election-fraud investigation sophisticate for the movement, a platform that he not only uses to market his pillows but to also promise bizarre kinds of political justice that will avenge the grievances of the Stop the steal sect of the movement.
Despite the obvious absurdity and utter falsities of Lindell’s narratives being apparent to anybody who can count, they’ve somehow managed to help millions of people construct private realities of how these narratives could be actualized.
This man is besieged by lawsuits and is banned on a few mainstream social media platforms that hope to curb his wave of disinformation and misinformation, but Lindell still somehow manages to lock millions up in epistemic prisons that work to isolate them from the realities of 2021 America.
Republican politicians and MAGA personalities on the other hand surprisingly either fully embrace or play up to his endlessly permuting wave of misinformation.
“The morning of August 13, it’ll be the talk of the world…..”. Lindell.
