MyPillow CEO and 2020 dead-ender-who-will-simply-never-quit Mike Lindell attempted to put pressure on Fox News to cover his non-existent election fraud case—which he’s long-promised to file with the Supreme Court—by holding a poorly attended rally outside the cable channel’s offices.
On Wednesday morning, a smattering of protesters gathered in Lindell’s name in front of Fox News headquarters on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, where, the MAGA mogul told The Daily Beast, the names of the mystery plaintiffs bringing his mythical filing to the high court would, at last, be revealed.
Alas, the names were not revealed.
Instead, videos from the slapdash protest, which Lindell shared with The Daily Beast, showed a moderately engaged crew numbering little more than a dozen. They wagged signs branded with “Frank Speech”—the name of Lindell’s homespun social-media platform—and expressed their displeasure with the conservative cable news network for its insufficient fealty to their pillow-hawking leader.
“Shame on Fox! Shame on Fox!” went one chant, mirroring Lindell’s now-signature tagline. “Fox failed! We want the truth!” went another. A billboard truck parked on the street appeared to take aim at “Faux News,” asking “WTH?!?!"—i.e., “What the hell?!?!”—and imploring the network to "Talk about THE BIGGEST CRIM IN HISTORY! 2020 ELECTION FRAUD."
“I didn’t coach them,” Lindell wanted The Daily Beast to know. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. Notably, despite the demonstration, Lindell’s company continues to advertise across Fox platforms, pushing products like bedsheets and his signature pillow.
Last Friday, Lindell alluded to an upcoming protest at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. “We are going to do something out in front of Fox News, I think we should have—you know, if people want to go down there, maybe we should give out Frank Speech signs,” he said at the time.
No media turned out to cover the poorly publicized last-minute confab, though Lindell at one point urged The Daily Beast to send these “evil” D.C.-based reporters to cover it in person. But Lindell didn’t even attend his own rally—despite past promises. Instead, he said, he was busy traversing the U.S. to allegedly persuade state attorneys general to co-sign his unhinged election-fraud complaint to the Supreme Court.
Takers, it appears, have been hard to come by.
While Lindell promised supporters for weeks that he would file the suit this Tuesday, the deadline quickly came and went, with the multimillionaire publicly releasing a draft complaint with a placeholder “[Insert state here]” listed as plaintiff.
In an early Wednesday morning text exchange, however, Lindell claimed the plaintiffs would be announced at the protest. He then gave The Daily Beast the names of four states, on the condition they not be named until the announcement: All of them, however, were Democratic states, two of which were already listed as defendants in his draft.
He laid the blame for his failure to gain an audience with the high court squarely on Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, suggesting a conspiracy to shut him out and calling her “worse than Fox now!”
While Lindell insisted that unnamed “state AGs” will take on the litigation, the pillow exec has yet to publicly identify any prosecutors, states, or even interested parties. In multiple texts on Wednesday, Lindell actually suggested the project is now out of his hands and entirely with the unidentified state attorneys.
“I am not the ones [sic] doing the complaint,” he wrote. “They are.”