Well, that was fast.
A day after storming out of his interview with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell after the Trump-boosting pillow salesman wouldn’t stop pushing baseless voting machine conspiracies, Newsmax anchor Bob Sellers issued a groveling apology to Lindell and Newsmax viewers on Wednesday afternoon.
During an off-the-rails segment on Tuesday afternoon, Lindell—who is facing a potential lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over his false fraud allegations—kept ranting about Dominion, insisting that he has “100 percent proof” that there was “election fraud with these Dominion machines.”
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Considering that Newsmax is also looking down the barrel of pending litigation from Dominion and has already forced its hosts to read an on-air fact-check debunking the network’s bogus voting machine claims, Sellers was put in a perilous situation.
Repeatedly cutting off Lindell and even having the MyPillow guy’s microphone turned down, Sellers read a prepared statement that Newsmax accepted the presidential election results before begging producers to stop Lindell.
“Can I ask our producers—can we get out of here, please?” Sellers begged as Lindell kept shouting, eventually getting up out of his seat and literally ditching the interview.
The moment, which instantly went viral on social media, drew loud condemnation from the virulently pro-Trump Newsmax audience. Many of the network’s viewers took to Twitter to say they wouldn’t watch Newsmax anymore while calling for Sellers to be fired. Fringe-right websites and commentators, meanwhile, claimed that Newsmax was engaging in “cancel culture” by censoring Lindell.
It would appear that Sellers and Newsmax agreed.
“If you watched American Agenda yesterday, you may have seen something out of the ordinary happen during an interview with Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow,” the Newsmax host said on Wednesday afternoon. “Mike is a friend of this network, and we were supposed to discuss Twitter’s decision to ban him and the impacts of cancel culture on his business.”
After establishing the network’s admiration for one of its biggest sponsors, Sellers went on to place the blame fully on himself for any “confusion” that occurred during the interview.
“Mike thought that we were to talk about vote fraud in the recent election. It’s a topic we have covered extensively on Newsmax,” Sellers declared. “I was frustrated that we couldn’t focus on the current, very pressing issue of free speech and cancel culture and, in hindsight, there is no question that I could have handled the end of the interview differently.”
“At Newsmax, we seek out all points of view. Mike was back on Newsmax last night with Rob Schmitt on his show to continue the conversation about cancel culture and the censorship by social media,” the Newsmax anchor continued. “Mike also made clear he thinks Newsmax is ‘great’—his words—and I can tell you he will continue to be an important guest on Newsmax.”
Sellers ended his apology by telling his viewers that they’ll “enjoy what Mike had to say last night” before airing Schmitt’s entire interview with the MyPillow CEO, which focused on Lindell’s recent Twitter ban.
