Just a year ago, MAGA pillow maven Mike Lindell had angrily pulled his MyPillow commercials from Fox News after the conservative cable giant refused to air promos for his then-upcoming election-denying “cyber symposium.”
Fast forward to the present, and not only are MyPillow ads back on Fox News—but they are running at their highest clip yet.
According to liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, following the weeks-long pause last autumn, MyPillow commercials have spiked on the network over the past year. Per Media Matters’ data, some recent months have seen over 700 individual ads run on the channel, and last month saw more than 600 commercials on Fox News.
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Considering Lindell is heavily featured throughout his company’s ads, he has, in essence, become the most visible person on Fox News, all despite the fact that he hasn’t sat down for an on-air interview with the network in years.
In the wake of Tuesday night’s breaking news that the FBI seized his cellphone at a Hardee’s restaurant, Lindell’s ubiquitousness on Fox News airwaves was fully on display. Tucker Carlson, whose primetime show runs the most MyPillow ads of any Fox News program, groused about the seizure on Tuesday night—naturally likening it to authoritarianism.
“We told you last night that the Biden administration has politicized law enforcement to the point where it feels Soviet—and we were not overstating it,” Carlson exclaimed. “The FBI has just raided the guy who sells pillows on this channel, not because the pillows were bad, but because they didn’t like who he voted for.” (Fellow Fox News primetime host Laura Ingraham would also bemoan the seizure that evening, claiming it was the action of President Joe Biden’s “vindictive Justice Department.”)
Immediately following Carlson’s segment on the Lindell raid, a MyPillow commercial aired.
Furthermore, Media Matters reported that since January 2017, Tucker Carlson Tonight has run nearly 3,500 MyPillow commercials. The network’s two other primetime shows—Hannity and The Ingraham Angle—have both aired more than 2,000 ads during that same period.
While the MyPillow CEO has claimed that FBI agents were looking for information about another election conspiracy theorist, the search warrant he shared on social media is actually tied to a federal probe of a voting-machine breach in Colorado.
Requesting “all records and information on the LINDELL CELLPHONE that constitute fruits, evidence, or instrumentalities of violations” relating to purposeful damage to a protected computer, identity theft, and conspiracy, the warrant also claims the violating parties involve “Tina Peters, Conan James Hayes, Belinda Knisley, Sandra Brown, Sherronna Bishop, Michael Lindell, and/or Douglas Frank, among other co-conspirators known and unknown to the government.”
As The Daily Beast reported, the case appears to be related to an alleged 2021 voting-machine breach by Mesa County County Clerk Tina Peters, who attended Lindell’s “cyber symposium” last year to promote voter fraud claims regarding the stolen data. After Peters was arrested this spring over the breach, Lindell doubled down on his support for the pro-Trump clerk while claiming Dominion Voting Systems and an array of Democrats were “all going to end up in jail when this is all over.”
While Lindell’s business relationship with Fox News is in full bloom, he remains less than thrilled with the network’s unwillingness to fully embrace his bizarre and unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by Dominion’s voting machines.
After yelling “shame on Fox News” over the network’s refusal to promote his farcical election-fraud event, and then using that conference to call Fox “disgusting,” he eventually slunk back to Fox last September (after claiming he was losing $1 million a week in sales).
Yet even with his ads running nonstop on the network he continues to slam Fox News. Last October, for instance, he accused the right-wing channel of asking Dominion to sue them for defamation just so they could fire Trump-boosting host Lou Dobbs, who was one of Fox’s loudest election deniers. (Lindell, like Fox News, faces billion-dollar lawsuits from voting-machine firms Smartmatic and Dominion.)
Additionally, Lindell also planned a protest outside of Fox News headquarters in November, saying the network was “controlled opposition” and a “big part of our country being taken from us.” And during a Trump rally this winter, he grumbled that the “biggest problem” Trump supporters face is conservative media that won’t devote itself to election conspiracies.
“One of them rhymes with Fox. OK? Disgusting. They’re disgusting,” he yelled. “They won’t talk about anything. When was the last time you’ve seen anybody on Fox talk about the 2020 election? You’re not going to see it.”
Fox News and Lindell did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Hours after publication, however, Lindell finally responded to The Daily Beast by texting a link to a jokey article from right-wing website The Babylon Bee, titled: “Mike Lindell Still Holding Out Against FBI Inside MyPillow Fort.”
