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Mar-a-Lago on the Prairie
PuckI have listened to innumerable speeches from Donald Trump, read every tweet that the man has issued, consumed years’ worth of right-wing conspiracies online and in person, and I can say this with absolute certainty: MyPillow C.E.O. Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium, held last week in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was the most illogical, confusing, mind-melting event that I have ever been to in my life, even by the high standards set by our former president.
...snip...
The stage of the South Dakota Military Heritage Center was what one expects from a large MAGA gathering these days: a 20-foot tall American flag draped overhead, cameras and correspondents from OAN, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network; smaller bloggers waving handheld tripods in the face of mask-wearing journalists, fishing for “gotcha” moments; pro-Trump wannabe local and statewide politicians shilling their campaigns. Even Steve Bannon was there to lend his nationalist imprimatur to the event, broadcasting his show War Room livefrom a box seat, and at one point doing a panel with “Brother Lindell”; elsewhere, QAnon personality InTheMatrixx was taking innumerable selfies between recording his podcast.
There were numerous “experts” who came onstage to gesture at alleged conspiratorial lines between the Chinese Comunist Party, George Soros, Hunter Biden, and the omnipresent technology that helped tabulate elections, and the son of Brazilian President and Trumpian autocrat Jair Bolsonaro, who made his own video alleging voter fraud in South America. There was even Ron Watkins, the conspiracy theorist of 8chan renown, who came in over Skype to try to find holes in a random snippet of “forensic images” of software from Mesa County, the Colorado district whose election office was investigated, in an apparent attempt to prove that someone had deleted something at some point. “There’s a lot of smoke, there must be a fire,” his co-host kept repeating, as Watkins struggled to stay connected to the audio.
But the star of the show was Lindell himself—mustachioed, belligerent, and wildly angry at everyone he thought was out for him, from tech billionaires like “Mark Zuckerbuck,” to Fox News hosts, to a 22-year-old reporter from Salon named Zach Petrizzo, whom he summoned to the stage to debate him (and then quickly rescinded the invite once Petrizzo agreed). Billion-dollar lawsuits would not deter him, nor would the “antifa attacks” that he saw lurking around every corner, because, as he proudly declared numerous times: “I’ve got the biggest mouth!”
Perhaps that is why the vast majority left the symposium before the symposium’s end, disappointed and deflated. It wasn’t because of the hilariously bad tech issues, which Lindell waved away with claims of hacking (whether it was Soros, antifa, or the CCP was unclear). I heard the story of a state senator who’d showed up, listened to Lindell ramble for several hours, then abruptly got up and took his staff home. A cybersecurity expert specializing in the “packet captures” of Lindell’s obsession—forensic data that captures IP addresses, which could, in short, determine whether data from a malicious actor had made its way into a voting machine—told me that nearly all of his colleagues had left early, and that they had never been given any data at all to scrutinize.
...snip...
The stage of the South Dakota Military Heritage Center was what one expects from a large MAGA gathering these days: a 20-foot tall American flag draped overhead, cameras and correspondents from OAN, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network; smaller bloggers waving handheld tripods in the face of mask-wearing journalists, fishing for “gotcha” moments; pro-Trump wannabe local and statewide politicians shilling their campaigns. Even Steve Bannon was there to lend his nationalist imprimatur to the event, broadcasting his show War Room livefrom a box seat, and at one point doing a panel with “Brother Lindell”; elsewhere, QAnon personality InTheMatrixx was taking innumerable selfies between recording his podcast.
There were numerous “experts” who came onstage to gesture at alleged conspiratorial lines between the Chinese Comunist Party, George Soros, Hunter Biden, and the omnipresent technology that helped tabulate elections, and the son of Brazilian President and Trumpian autocrat Jair Bolsonaro, who made his own video alleging voter fraud in South America. There was even Ron Watkins, the conspiracy theorist of 8chan renown, who came in over Skype to try to find holes in a random snippet of “forensic images” of software from Mesa County, the Colorado district whose election office was investigated, in an apparent attempt to prove that someone had deleted something at some point. “There’s a lot of smoke, there must be a fire,” his co-host kept repeating, as Watkins struggled to stay connected to the audio.
But the star of the show was Lindell himself—mustachioed, belligerent, and wildly angry at everyone he thought was out for him, from tech billionaires like “Mark Zuckerbuck,” to Fox News hosts, to a 22-year-old reporter from Salon named Zach Petrizzo, whom he summoned to the stage to debate him (and then quickly rescinded the invite once Petrizzo agreed). Billion-dollar lawsuits would not deter him, nor would the “antifa attacks” that he saw lurking around every corner, because, as he proudly declared numerous times: “I’ve got the biggest mouth!”
Perhaps that is why the vast majority left the symposium before the symposium’s end, disappointed and deflated. It wasn’t because of the hilariously bad tech issues, which Lindell waved away with claims of hacking (whether it was Soros, antifa, or the CCP was unclear). I heard the story of a state senator who’d showed up, listened to Lindell ramble for several hours, then abruptly got up and took his staff home. A cybersecurity expert specializing in the “packet captures” of Lindell’s obsession—forensic data that captures IP addresses, which could, in short, determine whether data from a malicious actor had made its way into a voting machine—told me that nearly all of his colleagues had left early, and that they had never been given any data at all to scrutinize.