When the pandemic worsened our housing crisis, national and local governments, and nonprofits, began to address the tent cities that were popping up. At that time, a term began to be thrown about: “the homeless industrial complex.” Using words borrowed from a critique of American military spending, it was meant to indicate that people were capitalizing off the crisis to create their own cottage industries, where homelessness would not be solved but merely managed in perpetuity.
That is a callous term that dehumanizes people and ignores the visceral struggles of poverty and housing affordability, but today there is a similar process of profiting from fear and dysfunction today in the world of elections. People are making money through carpetbagger tours of American cities — including those in Central Oregon — by sharing misinformation about voting and elections, whipping unsuspecting people into a frenzy about the integrity of our voting systems, the process of voter registration and more. Call it the “election misinformation industrial complex,” if you will — and this one has deep pockets.
Last month, a carpetbagger funded by the MyPillow founder Mike Lindell (the former gambler and cocaine addict who now profits mightily from his cleaned-up, evangelical image) rolled into Central Oregon, sharing his personal brand of hellfire-by-election-fraud misinformation. Like Lindell and others who can’t get over the results of the 2020 presidential election, Dr. Douglas Frank has created a cottage industry based on false information about the integrity of elections. It doesn’t matter that in the years since the 2020 election, everyone from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice to the Harvard Kennedy School — which brought together over 800 scholars to assess the 2020 election — debunked the notion that the election was steeped in fraud.
Frank, a physicist, wants you to believe the oft-debunked lies he’s peddling, over the hundreds of scholars who are trained in things like political theory and elections law. Tell us why we should believe the individual paid to peddle his brand of misinformation around the country over the people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of equal justice under the law.
Ensuring that our elections are free and fair is not a partisan issue, but it has become one. This is not about favoring Joe Biden or Donald Trump or any other new face who comes our way; it’s about getting the most people to vote in order to get the greatest representation, and ensuring our governments continue to be run for the people, by the people.
Elections will live beyond Donald Trump, and we can only hope that the checks and balances put in place so long ago will not be thoroughly dismantled by the time he, and those currently participating in the election misinformation complex, are done. For the time being, beware the hawkers trying to profit off the chaos.
This article appears in the Source August 6, 2026.
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There is no guarantee that free and fair elections will survive beyond Donald Trump. None. Media and politicians who keep assuring people of that are doing grave injustice as anti-democratic fascists within the Trump administration take advantage of this naive perspective. There are folks in the White House fully prepared to push their authoritarian ideology post-Trump and they are smarter than he ever was. Fortunately, there are media beyond the Source who understand this.