A University of Washington emergency preparedness professor named Michael K. Lindell has had to deal with a deluge of harassment from confused Trump supporters who have mixed him up with a certain infamous pillow salesman.
According to The Guardian, "The voicemails and emails last year came from his supporters, praising his work and asking if he could connect them with Donald Trump. Not a weird ask for Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman who now makes a name for himself by questioning election results.
"But the callers and writers had the wrong Mike Lindell: they were reaching out to a semi-retired 77-year-old professor living in Seattle who most definitely didn’t know how to reach the former president."
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Speaking to the paper, Prof. Lindell said it makes him feel like his name is contaminated: “It’s sort of like the idea of picking up a slug, that kind of sense of revulsion was my immediate reaction,” he said.
Regarding the MyPillow tycoon, he added, “His political and personal views are so different from mine, I guess is the kindest way I could say it,” the elder Lindell said. “It’s sort of like an optical illusion that we even live on the same planet.”
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The other Mike Lindell, a Minnesota native who rose to fame with late-night pillow infomercials and an inspirational story about getting clean from his youthful drug abuse, has become one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists asserting the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. He has held "cyber symposiums" to try to gather evidence of fraud, and even submitted an "petition" to the Supreme Court demanding they reinstate Trump as president, which went ignored by the justices.
In the process, Lindell has spent millions of dollars of his own money, saw his bedding products dropped by major retailers, founded his own media platforms after even right-wing cable networks stopped booking him, was sued for defamation by election equipment providers, and was even ordered to pay $5 million to a man who took up his stated challenge of debunking his fraud claims.
