I’ve seen this in a couple of places, and Professor Richardson provides the clearest description:

If there is any need to prove that Trump’s big lie is, indeed, a lie, there is plenty of proof in the fact that when the leader of the company Trump surrogates blamed for facilitating election fraud threatened to sue them, they backed down fast. The voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems was at the center of Trump supporters’ claims of a stolen election, and its owner has threatened to sue the conservative media network Newsmax for its personalities’ false statements. When the threat of a lawsuit first emerged, Newsmax issued an on-air disclaimer.

Today, even as Trump’s lawyers were reiterating his insistence that he really won the election, the issue came up again. When MyPillow founder Mike Lindell began to spout Trump’s big lie on a Newsmax show, the co-anchor tried repeatedly to cut him off. When he was unsuccessful, the producers muted Lindell while the co-anchor said, “We at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations…. We just want to let people know that there’s nothing substantive that we have seen.”

He read a legal disclaimer: “Newsmax accepts the [election] results as legal and final. The courts have also supported that view.” And then he stood up and left the set.

I would only add this: This is not cancel culture, the right’s favorite new talking point.

This is Consequences Culture.

As in, you’ve done something bad and now you’re going to suffer the consequences.

You know, what good parents do. Let their kids learn that doing something bad has consequences.

And, finally, I beg of my readers:

DO NO MORE BUSINESS WITH MyPillow UNTIL LINDELL CUTS ALL TIES WITH THE COMPANY.

Actions have consequences. To Lindell and all of his supporters, make sure your actions are just or risk having consequences that you don’t like.