The MAGA misinformation-industrial complex has gathered steam since 2020. Here’s how

Editor’s Note: Watch CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan’s full report in MisinfoNation Part 2: Patriots, Pillows and Paper Ballots on The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper Sunday, August 11, 8pm ET/PT

If I was trying to blend in, it wasn’t working.

It was October 2020 – the height of Covid – and I was one of the only people wearing a facemask at a meeting in a drab windowless hotel conference room in Scottsdale, Arizona.

One attendee, dressed in some kind of elaborate costume, directed a disapproving grunt my way.

We listened as speaker after speaker explained that Trump was certain to win the 2020 presidential election – then just weeks away – in a landslide. Anything less would be a sign the Democrats had cheated.

If that happened, warned a man from the podium, we may need to take matters into our own hands. Political violence, he argued, wasn’t all that bad – American history had been shaped by it after all.

A little more than two months later that man would take part in an attack on the US Capitol. He is now serving an 11-year prison sentence.

The other man – the one in costume who had grunted – would soon achieve global infamy. His painted face, and his headpiece made of animal horns, would land him on the cover of newspapers all around the world. We’d all come to know him as the “QAnon Shaman.”

‘Stop the Steal’ hasn’t stopped

The Scottsdale event I had wiggled my way into in 2020 was “QCon,” a meeting of QAnon enthusiasts who were still fringe. Trump feigned ignorance about the movement and refused to denounce it. “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said at the time.

Some of the people in that conference room talked tough, but, I thought, maybe that’s about all they would do.

It wasn’t. And we now know what happened next.

That’s what concerns me most about the moment we are in now in the United States.

The conspiracy theories didn’t go away. They’ve proliferated thanks to a sophisticated, relentless campaign. A surge of alternative social media sites, so-called “free speech” platforms like Trump’s Truth Social and the video streaming platform Rumble have cropped up. There’s also been an explosion of online MAGA influencers and video streamers, some with millions of followers.

All of them are pushing the same conspiracy theory: The 2020 election was stolen, and the only way Trump can lose in 2024 is if it is stolen again.

This is false, of course. Not least since polls show Trump and Harris neck-and-neck.

In the middle of this growing MAGA misinformation-industrial complex: an affable pillow salesman.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell speaks to CNN’s Donie?O’Sullivan?outside a MAGA event in Las Vegas earlier this year.

Mike Lindell, better known as the MyPillow guy, says he had never voted before 2016. Now, he is a Trump ally who is on a misguided crusade to, as he sees it, save American democracy.

Lindell has bought into the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election – specifically that voting machines were hacked to steal the election (they were not). So he set up his own social media and video streaming services, Frank Social and Frank Speech respectively. They include programming from the likes of Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. Shows decrying the demise of American democracy and warning of stolen elections are punctuated with pillow promotions.

The Patriot economy

When I met Lindell recently at the Republican National Convention, he was on his way to a live taping of the Steve Bannon show “War Room” to promote his “political prisoner” special – a discounted deal on a mattress topper. Political prisoners are what the MAGA world calls people convicted for their actions on January 6. It’s also how they sometimes refer to Bannon, who is currently serving four months in federal prison for defying a congressional subpoena. Bannon’s daughter filled in for him as host at the RNC.

A vast array of Trump-supporting, election-denying influencers who are thriving on the new “free speech” platforms have their own pillow promotion codes. They help sell Lindell’s pillows, and in turn they get a cut.

The promotion of election conspiracy theories is being subsidized by the sale of more and more “patriot products.” There are freedom steaks made from “unvaccinated” cows. A patriot cellular service that bills itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider.” There is even patriot water named Freedom2O. Its website sells Yeti products inscribed with quips like “This drink ain’t woke.”

It’s very possible that if you are reading this you’ve never heard of any of these so-called “free speech” social media platforms. We are living in a far more fractured media environment today than we were at the time of the last presidential election.

Millions of Americans are now getting their news, information, and misinformation on these platforms – and they are being primed for another “stolen” election if things don’t go Trump’s way.

Many of us want to tune it all out, pretend it’s not happening. We want to ignore the conspiracy theories, the absurdity of QAnon Shamans and “political prisoner”pillow promotions.

But just because it’s all a bit absurd doesn’t make it any less dangerous.