By Hal Brown, MSW
I always figured that the pillow advertised by the MyPillow Guy on TV fell into the category of the other ads for products that didn’t do a damn thing like Prevagen (it’s a hoax) and other potents like Goli apple cider vinegar gummies (also worthless) which supposedly make you smarter than Einstein and immortal. Will the heavily advertised CopperFit garments give you superpowers? Don’t get your hopes up?
The placebo effect is very powerful so I am sure that many people believe the hype and end up benefiting from these products unless they have an underlying disease that goes untreated and they die.
It doesn't take a difficult web search to get the facts on products. Just add debunked into the search-bar.
With My Pillow you can just look it up on Wikipedia:
My Pillow, Inc. has been fined and has settled multiple lawsuits related to misleading advertising. The company has made scientifically unsupported claims that its pillows could treat and cure disease, including multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.[7][8][9]
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Lawsuits and settlement
In April 2016, a class action lawsuit was proposed for the pillows being falsely advertised, among the complaints being that Lindell is marketed as a "Sleep Expert," despite having no board certification or special training in sleep medicine.[8] The Better Business Bureau received 220 complaints regarding the company from 2013 to 2016.[31]
In August 2016, the New York State Attorney General's office charged that My Pillow failed to collect and remit over $500,000 in sales tax. The company denied any wrongdoing and agreed to pay $1.1 million in settlement.[32]
On November 1, 2016, My Pillow agreed to pay $1 million ($995,000 in civil penalties and $100,000 to California charities benefiting the homeless and victims of domestic violence) to settle a false advertising lawsuit brought in Alameda County Superior Court by Alameda County and eight other California counties.[33] The lawsuit challenged the company's marketing claims, which asserted without proof that its pillows could treat symptoms of fibromyalgia, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, cerebral palsy, acid reflux, and other conditions.[33] As part of the settlement, the company was banned "from making claims in California that its pillows can cure or treat diseases and their symptoms without a human trial to back up the statements."[33] "In addition, My Pillow must stop promoting itself as the 'official pillow' of the National Sleep Foundation because it failed to disclose its financial connection with the foundation to consumers."[32]
In November 2017, the lawsuit, which challenged the appropriateness of the marketing, packaging, and sale of My Pillow products, including health claims about the product, buy one get one promotions, and the use of third party endorsements and logos, was settled.[7]
Ratings and reviews
In January 2017, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) announced it had revoked the accreditation for My Pillow and had lowered its rating from an A+ to an F[34] based on numerous consumer complaints. The main issue addressed by the BBB was the constant use of their buy one, get one free offer. The BBB's Code of Advertising requires that offers or discounts must be made for a limited time, or the deal becomes the normal price of the product.[35] It remained an active promotion, as of August 2020.[36]
A 2016 Consumer Reports review of the company's pillows found a mixed reception after at-home testing, finding that "only one-third of the group said they would buy MyPillow again."[37]
Science tells us that most of the various vitamin and other supplements sold on TV don’t do anything. See also: Is A Placebo A Sham If You Know It's A Fake And It Still Works?
There has been lots of research about the power of the placebo, also called the placebo effect, for example from Harvard Health: The power of the placebo effect.
There have been many articles about why Trump has been able to exert the power over his cult, see for example: Is Donald Trump a cult leader? Expert says he "fits the stereotypical profile" — Mind control expert Steven Hassan says a cult leader "wants everyone to merge into their definition of reality".
As often happens when I think I’ve come up with something new it turns out that I’m not the first person to call Trump a placebo president.
Here's a brief video of an economist using the term:
Here are two articles about Trump as a placebo president that address the points I want to make (saving me the trouble of writing a long article):
America’s Placebo President, in The American Interest
Excerpt: Many Trump supporters want a country where it is possible to speak in public as most people speak in private (more or less). The complaints about too much “political correctness” are the most visible manifestation of this attitude. The new culture wars, for Trumpists, are a battle about who has the social right to act as a higher-status person, as higher-status people can speak more openly and directly in many social and business settings. Trump takes this to an extreme by using his remarks and tweets as a primate-like show of attempted dominance, yet some of his most offensive remarks please many of his supporters all the more. The considerable number of Americans who sometimes speak crudely miss the earlier time when such rhetoric was socially acceptable, whereas the more educated and genteel professionals—who tend to oppose Trump—usually do just fine living under the rhetorical standards of political correctness.
In other words, Trump’s main policy is his rhetoric, and his very act of promising to restore control to the “deplorables” is a significant signal of control itself. In essence, Trump supporters are diagnosing America’s problems in terms of deficient discourse in the public sphere, as if they had read George Orwell and the Frankfurt School philosophers on the general topic but are drawing more on alt-right inspirations for the specifics of their critique.
The Case for Placebo Politics, in The American Interest
Excerpt: Educated people often imagine that politics is, or should be, a coolly rational exercise in distributing resources and regulating institutions to create the best possible outcomes for the greatest number of people. But it is not, and has never been. Contests over status and claims to representation are always lurking below the surface. As Walter Russell Mead observed during the primary, Trump’s appeal flows from his pattern of behavior as much as his policy priorities. “By flouting PC norms, reducing opponents and journalists to sputtering outrage as he trashes the conventions of political discourse, and dismissing his critics with airy put-downs, he is living the life that—at least some of the time—a lot of people wish they had either the courage or the resources to live.” This is at the core of Cowen’s idea of a placebo presidency: telegraphing cultural solidarity with a constituency that feels belittled and disrespected, in part merely by infuriating their ostensible social adversaries.
The lessons for Democrats twofold. To retain power that they must understand how the Republicans will use human nature to their benefit to influence the millions of people who do not respond to rational and truthful messages. They have to craft their own messaging to reach enough of them to assure they can win elections in the purple states like Georgia.
Much has been written about Joseph Goebbels and the concept of the Big Lie. For example How liars create the illusion of truth.
Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum").
The Democrats have to use every tried and true technique to influence people, and hopefully invent some new more persuasive wrinkles, to get a their message of what perhaps can be called The Big Truth across to the American people.
Sunday, Jan 17, 2021 · 4:04:39 AM +00:00 · HalBrown
"Following his meeting with President Trump on Friday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said in a Facebook interview with Right Side Broadcasting News today that he's praying that the military presence in Washington is part of Trump's plan to retain power," Tim Miller of The Bulwark reported Saturday. "In Lindell's interview—which has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook in just a few hours—he recounts the details of his meeting with the president and rattles off a series of unintelligible conspiracies in a Minnesota lilt."
Lindell believes he has "proof" of election fraud, pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that incited the fatal January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
"You know I've been looking down every hole for election fraud since November 4th and about eight or nine days ago this proof came out. One-hundred percent footprints from the machines of the machine fraud," Lindell said. "I wanted to get it to the president. This is it. This shows that Joe Biden lost: 79 million for Donald Trump and 68 million for Joe Biden."
"I said I talked to the guy. This is real. I said it's got the IP address of the computer that it came out of. It also has the latitude and longitude like over in China this went over there came back and it shows the number of votes flipped," Lindell argued.