A Well-Earned Victory Lap for Gretchen Carlson. The Trouble with Lindell’s Lunacy. | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

MEDIA WINNER: Gretchen Carlson

It’s easy now, more than four years after he died and more than five years after he resigned from Fox News, to forget how powerful Roger Ailes once was.

When Gretchen Carlson filed her lawsuit in 2016 alleging Ailes had declined to renew her contract when she rebuffed his advances, she was stepping forward alone against the most powerful man at the nation’s cable news ratings winner. Other female Fox News employees spoke out later, but only after Carlson had been the intrepid original accuser.

Thus, Carlson deserves the lion’s share of the credit for Ailes’ downfall, and she’s now turned her personal ordeal into a force for good that will benefit sexual harassment victims nationwide. She’s been a vocal and eloquent critic of the legal ensnarements that make it more challenging for victims to fight back against abusive employers, including NDAs and forced arbitration clauses.

This week, Carlson celebrated the passage of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which allows employees to take their sexual misconduct claims to court instead of being forced into confidential proceedings that often allowed employers to sweep bad behavior under the rug.

Enjoy your victory lap, Ms. Carlson. You’ve earned it.

MEDIA LOSER: Mike Lindell

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has imagined himself to be a media baron in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, not only amplifying Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, but promoting his own utterly bonkers conspiracy theories.

Getting smacked with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems wasn’t enough to dampen Lindell’s tinfoil hattery and he’s loudly criticized Fox News for not following him down his various rabbit holes (while once again throwing piles of cash at them to buy pillow ads, but we digress).

In Lindell’s latest wild rant on The Lindell Report, which runs on his web channel Lindell TV, he attacked Fox News for refusing to air his so-called “evidence” the 2020 election was stolen.

He went so far as to suggest hacking their broadcast to force them to run his show. “Maybe we should get our cyber guys, who looked at all the evidence, to hook up our stream to Fox’s.”

To be clear: what Lindell is suggesting is a crime. We highly doubt he has the technical ability to even attempt such a thing, but his repeated support for actual action is what makes his conspiracy mongering potentially dangerous. From reportedly encouraging Trump to impose martial law to calling election workers criminals, he has been a key part of the miasma of misinformation that has sparked real-world threats and violence.

Links We Like:

Team USA Is Leading a Secret Protest Movement Inside the Winter Olympics
– Matt Sullivan, Rolling Stone
Joe Rogan is too powerful to keep acting as if he’s just a regular guy chopping it up
– Monica Hesse, Washington Post
China Brings Out the Hypocrisy in Corporate Social Justice Warriors
– John Stossel, Reason
I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality
– Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

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