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Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.
This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.
Before that Mike Lindell has been deplatformed and one of the target of the ire of the left wing establishment which includes plenty more rich people collectively working together than what Mike Lindel represents. Where their behavior is not held accountable.
There is no reason to consider this as an example of a bet taxing bullshit. That perspective would only merit entertaining if we see courts forcing liberal establishment figures, including in powerful corporations and NGOs having to pay large fines, or getting them to pay relating to technicality, including prove me wrong bets, to the extend there is some parity there.
Even this hitpiece article against him shows how Lindell has been targeted for his political opinions although they have a celebration paralalax line. https://www.newsweek.com/rise-fall-mike-lindell-1830372 and he has been banned from social media platforms and had other interference with his affairs https://www.axios.com/2023/09/22/mike-lindell-cellphone-seizure-court-constitutional
The message being given is that if you oppose us or support Trump, we are going to get you. And then throw a line of weak deniability. But it would be about your political opinions.
Moreover, the collective media hitpieces on this guy is just utterly horrible behavior. It seems that a culture of liberal voyeristic sadistic glee has developed where certain figures especially, and their general opponents become the afixed target. But especially there is a focus on particular individuals as a tactic to isolate the opposition. This culture definitely leads to increasing injustice and indifference to injustice, because the priority is "getting them" whether Trump, Lindell becomes a value that replaces actual moral principles.
This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.
Another issue to ponder, is what would happen if everyone who made claims about russiagate, election interference, supported riots, made destructive false partisan claims, not just politically incorect but including all political correct false narratives, etc, were targeted. Not to mention controversial issues that aren't cared about like supporting warcrimes, aggressive wars, and more. Who would be left of the political establishment?
“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.
Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.
Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.
The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.
Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.
How was Hillary treated? There is an extremely high likelihood that she directly ordered her staff to break serious laws in serious ways, with serious consequences, then ordered them to cover it up, and both she and her staff were given a pass.
By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?
If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.
If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.
(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)
Do we really need to go over all of this again?
Per Comey's report "Exonerating" Clinton, on at least three occasions Clinton or someone on her staff made unauthorized copies of classified documents for whom the Secretary of State was not the classifying authority. All 3 of said documents were tagged "Top Secret" and "SCI" meaning that strict compartmentalization procedures are to be followed. Right there, that's three felonies worth 2 - 5 years in prison a piece for a normal person.
In addition to the above, said copies were then removed from the Secretary of State's SCIF (a violation of the afore mentioned compartmentalization procedures) digital copies were then uploaded to a staffer's personal computer and then sent to Clinton's personal email account in the clear (ie unencrypted) over an unsecured internet connection. (Something most security types would agree constitutes gross negligence). At some point the digital copies are altered to remove their tags and tracking data implying that somebody knew that they were being naughty and adding another 3 three felonies to the pile. The documents were recovered in the possession of an unnamed staffer's spouse (who did not have a security clearance) during an unrelated criminal investigation revealing at minimum of 3 known instances of Unauthorized Disclosure (more felonies).
Investigators subpoenaed the staffer's* email history at which point the Clinton server
suffered an unfortunate loss of, oh who are we kidding, they wiped the server to destroy the evidence rather than answer the subpoena wich is about as clear-cut a case of Federal Obstruction of Justice as a prosecutor could ask for.In contrast the FBI raided Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago for an alleged breach far less egregious than any of these.
*let's be blunt, given that the material was recovered from Anthony Weiner's personal computer while he was being investigated for child-porn and cyberstalking we can surmise that the staffer in question was Huma Abedin.
Thank you for rehashing this. Some of us were into politics eight years ago and recall most of this, but half a generation has entered the Culture War unaware of the old guard and their malfeasance.
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