Farmfest is Minnesota's summertime farm industry convention, held in Redwood County, and it's where the state's farm economy goes to be heard.

On Wednesday, August 5, four candidates for governor sat on stage there: U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, House Speaker Lisa Demuth, businessman Kendall Qualls, and Mike Lindell. It was the first and last time Klobuchar shared a stage with all three Republicans. Republicans pick their nominee this coming Tuesday, August 11 — so this was the last chance any of them would get to make a closing argument to a room full of farmers before the votes are counted.

Each candidate got two minutes.

Klobuchar used hers on a rural plan — markets, hospitals, housing, workforce. Demuth used hers on her record as speaker of a tied Minnesota House. Qualls used his on how many candidate forums he'd won.

Lindell used his on a satanic statue and the 2020 election.

What he actually said

You can watch it on the full forum video. After a minute of biography — walking beans on his uncle's farm, church on Sundays, addiction, MyPillow — he pivoted:

"This is a spiritual battle of evil and good of biblical proportions. We have a governor that put a satanic statue in the … capitol. Put the satanic statue in there. All the evil and the horrific things that we've seen happen as we watch our state just crumble."

Then he turned to Klobuchar, sitting three seats away:

"Amy on this stage and we agreed, we agreed in 2020, and we came into a historical agreement on the election fraud. She went after the machines. She named them in the movie Kill Chain. She named them and she went after this fraud. But then she stopped after the 2020 election. What did Mike Lindell do since then? I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

And he closed with this:

"What did Amy do since then? Amy went to Washington, brings back $20 billion to our state, only to have it shipped off to Somalia. That's not a good steward of our money."

That was the whole thing. Two minutes, in front of farmers, five days before a primary. Not one word about tariffs, soybeans, input costs, land prices, or rural hospitals.

The satanic statue wasn't the governor's

Start with the easy one, because it's the kind of claim that sounds damning until you look it up.

In December 2024, a Minnesota satanist group put up a holiday display in the State Capitol — a phoenix with a pentagram — alongside the building's Christmas tree, nativity scene, and Hanukkah menorah. The permit came from the Minnesota Department of Administration, which handles all Capitol displays. A spokeswoman for that agency said a permit "does not imply an endorsement by the state."

Gov. Tim Walz had nothing to do with it. His office said so directly at the time:

"The governor does not agree with the display and did not approve it. But the First Amendment means that he does not police speech in the State Capitol. That's true whether it's a religious display, a political protest, or a Minnesotan advocating for a policy."

The group behind it says it doesn't worship Satan or believe he exists.

So the "governor put a satanic statue in the capitol" line has one accurate word in it: capitol. A candidate for governor either doesn't know how permits at his own future Capitol work, or knows and said it anyway.

The Kill Chain claim is false — and the irony is enormous

This is the part worth slowing down on, because Lindell told a room full of people that a sitting U.S. senator once agreed with him that the 2020 election was stolen. She didn't. And the movie he cited proves it.

"Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" is an HBO documentary. It premiered on March 26, 2020 — seven months before the 2020 election. HBO's own announcement describes it as arriving "in advance of the 2020 Presidential election" and taking "a deep dive into the weaknesses of today's election technology."

It is a film about preventing an attack that hadn't happened, not about proving one that did. Its argument is that America should use paper ballots and audits so results can be checked. HBO's announcement lists Klobuchar as one of four senators interviewed — alongside Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, plus Mark Warner and Ron Wyden. Sitting for a pre-election documentary about voting-machine security, next to a Republican, is not "a historical agreement on the election fraud." There was no agreement, historical or otherwise.

Now the irony. The film Lindell invoked as his own evidence follows one central figure: Finnish hacker and security researcher Harri Hursti, who travels the country demonstrating how voting equipment can be broken into.

In August 2021, CNN brought Harri Hursti to Lindell's Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls specifically to examine the data Lindell said would prove the election was hacked. Hursti looked at it and told the Washington Post the whole event was "a big fat nothing and a distraction." We wrote about that symposium three days ago — the promised proof never arrived, and the $5 million challenge Lindell built the event around ended with a federal judge ordering him to pay a Trump supporter who won it.

Lindell stood on a stage at Farmfest and named a documentary as his corroboration. The star of that documentary examined Lindell's evidence in person and called it nothing.

The $80 million he says he spent — while telling judges he's broke

"I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

Set aside that the number keeps growing — he told CNBC in 2021 it was $25 million. Take him at his word today and just ask what an $80 million election crusade bought, and who paid for it.

What it bought: a Denver jury finding that he defamed a former Dominion executive, and $2.3 million in damages. A federal judge in Minnesota ruling that he defamed Smartmatic with false claims about voting machines. A separate federal judge ordering him to pay $5 million to the software expert who debunked his data. Zero overturned results, in any state, ever.

Who paid for it: the people MyPillow owes. Creditors are chasing the company for more than $25 million in unpaid bills, including an $8.8 million judgment to FedEx. Lindell has spent years fighting the IRS over a $6 million tax debt that put a lien on his Texas house and garnished half his paycheck. "I have no assets," he said under oath in 2024. "There's nothing left." In 2025 he told a federal judge, "I'm in ruins."

Jim Furlong, his longtime friend and MyPillow's former president, tried to warn him at a 2016 board meeting. "I thought it was a terrible mistake," Furlong said in a 2024 deposition, of Lindell taking the company political. Lindell's answer, per Furlong: "Mike said he was going to do it, and if we didn't like it, that was just too bad."

The day before Farmfest, Lindell stepped down as MyPillow's CEO and dropped to a minority ownership stake. His replacement is Jim Furlong.

And one more thing about the man who says he spent $80 million on election integrity: until the third week of July — about two weeks before this forum — he wasn't registered to vote in Minnesota at all.

"$20 billion … shipped off to Somalia"

This is the line he chose to end on, and it's the one he backed with the least.

He didn't say what $20 billion. He didn't name a program, a bill, an appropriation, an audit, or a case. He didn't explain what Klobuchar had to do with it or who did the shipping. He said it, the crowd reacted, and the moderator called time.

Minnesota's fraud scandal is real, and it is genuinely enraging. Feeding Our Future was a scheme that stole from a federally funded child nutrition program by opening more than 250 fake meal sites and billing for meals never served. On May 22, 2026, the Justice Department announced that its ringleader, Aimee Bock, had been sentenced to 500 months in prison — over 41 years. The judge told her, "This was a fraud vortex and you were at the epicenter of it."

DOJ puts that scheme at $250 million. That is a quarter of a billion dollars of children's food money, and every Minnesotan has the right to be furious about it. It is also not $20 billion, it wasn't money Klobuchar "brought back," and Lindell offered nothing to bridge the gap between the number prosecutors use and the one he shouted at a farm show.

Earlier in the same forum, asked what he'd do about fraud, Lindell had called it "the biggest blessing our state's ever had, because it's opened our eyes to get rid of the current government we have."

That's a strange thing to call stolen food money.

What he skipped

Here's what the farmers in that room are actually living through, and what Lindell didn't spend a second of his two minutes on.

Trump's tariffs raised input costs and cost Minnesota its biggest customer — China booked no orders at all for the state's soybean harvest, sending growers to Washington to beg for a bailout. Soybeans are Minnesota's single biggest agricultural export. The war in Iran drove up fertilizer and fuel costs. Trump's approval among rural Americans fell from 60% to 50% between the start of his second term and June, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Klobuchar used part of her closing to name it directly: not one of the three Republicans on that stage had objected to the tariffs, or to the war in Iran, or to the megabill that cut Medicaid for rural hospitals. "We do not need a governor who is a rubber stamp of Donald Trump," she said.

None of them stood up to argue otherwise. Lindell went next, and talked about Satan.

Meanwhile the bill he's never criticized is still landing. Congressional Republicans let the Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, which raises premiums for a projected 89,000 Minnesotans — a lot of whom are farmers and ranchers buying insurance on the individual market, exactly the people sitting in that building.

The Rose Garden story, for the record

One small thing, since he brought it up himself. Lindell told the crowd he was at the Rose Garden "right before the pandemic," where he said a nation had turned its back on God.

He was at the Rose Garden on March 30, 2020. It was a White House coronavirus task force briefing, more than two weeks into the national emergency, and Lindell was there because MyPillow had retooled to make masks. He used his turn at the podium to tell Americans to read the Bible. Trump, standing behind him, said afterward: "I did not know he was going to do that."

That's the pattern, and it hasn't changed in six years. Give Mike Lindell a microphone at an event about something urgent and specific, and he'll use it for something else.

Minnesota Republicans vote Tuesday.

Source

Aaron Rupar posted the clip of Lindell's closing statement on Bluesky. Quotations here are transcribed from the full forum broadcast, linked above. Additional reporting from the Minnesota Reformer, also linked above. Photo of Lindell signing his book at Farmfest by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.