Speaking in an absolutely wild interview on “CNN News Central” on Friday, August 9, CNN senior correspondent Donie O’Sullivan asserted that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and his famous pillows are “subverting” democracy in America by advertising with right-leaning broadcasters in the United States.
As background, Frank Speech, the streaming platform that Mike Lindell runs, hosts right-leaning broadcasters like Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who featured heavily alongside Trump in the wake of 2020, and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, known for his populist views on immigration and economics.
O’Sullivan, wildly, used that to claim that the pillows are subverting democracy. Beginning, he said, “We’re not talking as much about allegations or false allegations of the last election being stolen. But for the world that Mike is living in and the world that he has helped create … he’s helping fund it as well through his pillow codes.”
Prodding him along and requesting more details on the matter, the host, CNN’s Kate Bolduan, asked O’Sullivan whether the pillows are part of that rightist “conspiracy theory” worldview. Doing so, Bolduan went ahead and asked if “the actual pillows are actually part of the conspiracy theory universe.”
Responding to Bolduan’s wild question, O’Sullivan told her that the pillows are involved in destroying democracy. He said, “The pillows are now helping to subvert American democracy. So you’ll remember after Jan. 6, Trump and a lot of his supporters got kicked off the major social media platforms.”
He continued, “What happened then was this rise of all these alternative social media platforms. Of course, like Truth Social. Lindell himself actually set up his own social media platform with this video streaming service. Rudy Giuliani has a show on there, Steve Bannon is on there, basically … the kind of election denialism band getting back together.”
He then said, “They are being subsidized in a way because they are promoting Mike’s pillows, and they all have a pillow code.” He further added, “And so if you were an election-denying conspiracy theorist, you might have a code ‘Kate Bolduan.’ And so every time that somebody watches your show, buys the pillow … with your code, you get a cut of it, Mike gets a cut and you can continue to push these lies.”
Watch him here:
O’Sullivan is the one who characterized the claim that America is a republic rather than a democracy as an “attack on democracy,” saying, “There is, of course, a legitimate debate discussion to be had on what form of democracy we have here in the United States, direct democracy, representative democracy, in fact, constitutional republic, which you heard people mentioned in that piece, that is a form of democracy. But look, this is not actually a debate about government, about democracy, it’s an attack on democracy.”
Continuing on that point, he added, speaking to CNN host Omar Jimenez, “People have heard the warnings that Trump is a danger to democracy, and therefore you have people trying to convince others that, well, the United States isn’t a democracy in the first place, and therefore Trump can’t be a threat.”
Watch that here:
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