OPINION:
A quote that’s often attributed to P.T. Barnum, whether or not he said it, is “There’s a sucker born every minute.” In the case of people who have willingly given their money to the grifters known as the Lincoln Project, I’m not sure that the term “sucker” goes deep enough.
Merely scratching the surface of the organization’s spending and the characters involved would make anyone — even the most ardent Trump hater — turn and run, yet somehow they still exist and make an extreme amount of money.
Many pundits and journalists have focused on the recently uncovered alleged actions of the Lincoln Project’s co-founder John Weaver, which include using his position of “power” to proposition young men for sex. That’s disturbing and gross all on its own, but the drum has been beaten on this grooming story so much that it’s not worth digging into. There are plenty of other issues that raise red flags with this organization and its self-serving staff.
The first issue that comes to mind is what anyone donating money to any organization should ask: Where’d it all go?
According to Jacobin magazine, a leftist rag that should be cheering on their actions, Lincoln’s primary political activity has been “lighting liberals’ money on fire.” Lincoln had total expenditures of $86 million dollars in the last election cycle, over $52 million of that money was funneled through firms controlled by Lincoln’s founders Reed Galen and Ron Steslow — a.k.a. they paid themselves incredibly well.
And when Lincoln spent money on a Democratic candidate in a key race, they lost, to the tune of $12 million.
When they’re not pocketing cash, they’re busy being some of the most blatant hypocrites in American politics. When founder Rick Wilson wasn’t busy being mislabeled as an accurate representation of a conservative on CNN and MSNBC, he spent most of his last year attacking President Trump and the GOP for ‘being racist.’ Unfortunately for the sloppy Mr. Wilson, he forgot to clean up piles of tweets disparaging Mexicans and Muslims — and pictures of his ‘South will rise again’ Confederate Flag cooler before going on his long-winded rants.
While we’re on the topic of Mr. Wilson, the donors who gave nearly $68 thousand to his GoFundMe for a documentary film, “on the disastrous 1st year of the Trump administration” are still waiting to see any results of their donations.
It’s interesting that the Lincoln Project would speak about how President Trump ‘behaved like a dictator’ — perhaps this was known from personal knowledge. Another of their executives, Stuart Stevens, had a long history of counseling autocratic regimes spanning from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Albania, where he worked for a former Stalinist apparatchik — going as far as to make direct phone calls to the opposition leadership of who he was working for to threaten to withhold U.S. aid.
Then there’s the laughable case of Steve Schmidt, who conveniently decided he hated President Trump after he had praised him and had interviewed and was turned down for a Trump campaign position. Mr. Trump even called him a “blathering idiot” and a “total loser.”
The question now becomes, where do these self-serving gentlemen now turn since Mr. Trump lost the election? And the answer is simply, cancel culture.
A successful grift has to move the goalposts on to the next big bogeymen in order to keep the money flowing in, and now that Joe Biden has become President, the Lincoln Project has shifted to canceling businesses and corporations who support Senate Republicans.
Suddenly, this group of MSNBC-friendly conservatives finds it offensive that corporate America has donated to Sens. Cruz, Hawley, Cotton and Paul after they objected to the certification of the election results. How dare these Republicans fulfill what they believed to be their constitutional duty by doing the exact same thing that Democrats have done in multiple presidential elections over the past few decades — and to take it further, how dare anyone — especially corporations — support them, right?
More importantly, it’s going to take millions more dollars in donations to stop these Republicans with ridiculous ads on Fox News that can be summarized as caricatures of the most ridiculous leftist tweets on any topic.
Luckily, it seems there are less and less rubes in America who are giving the Lincoln Project their hard-earned dollars, but who’s to say that a business competitor of one of the targeted corporations won’t drop a few extra dollars into their pockets to try to score some points in the market.
In the middle of the left removing President Abraham Lincoln’s name from schools because he’s no longer woke enough for them, perhaps they should consider forcing this group of bottom-feeding swamp creatures to change their name to something much more accurate — The Barnum Project.
• Tim Young is a political comedian and author of “I Hate Democrats/I Hate Republicans” (Post Hill Press).
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