Club for Growth Takes on #NeverTrump Lincoln Project ‘Grifters’ in Powerful New Video, Website
“The Lincoln Project has nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with lining the pockets of failed consultants by attacking conservatives,” Club for Growth said in a press release.
Mainstream media reporters are fond of lavishing praise on and treating with reverence any prominent Republican (or former Republican) who declares themselves to be a part of the #NeverTrump coalition. Words like “principled” and “courageous” are often tossed around when describing the work the #NeverTrump leaders in the “Lincoln Project” PAC are doing in allegedly exposing President Trump as an inauthentic conservative.
In reality, the story of the Lincoln Project PAC is far less noble and altruistic than the media makes it out to be. So much so that in the midst of the PAC’s recent blitz of tweets and ads showcasing their disdain for Trump and support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, the conservative Club for Growth Action group started a website focused on exposing the anti-Trump PAC columnist Miranda Devine dubbed “embittered former GOP grifters.”
Here’s what Club for Growth wrote in their announcement:
Club for Growth Action announced the launch of a television advertisement and website (TheRealLincolnProject.com) exposing The Lincoln Project as nothing more than a Democratic front group.
“The Lincoln Project has nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with lining the pockets of failed consultants by attacking conservatives,” said Club for Growth Action President, David McIntosh. “While the group is the darling of the liberal media, the fact is that it’s a Democrat front group and one of the least efficient ways for anti-Trumpers to spend their political dollars.”
[…]
Financial disclosures show that 90% of the Lincoln Project’s donations go directly into their own pockets.
The Lincoln Project has unsurprisingly made the jump from opposing President Trump to opposing conservatives and supporting liberals in key races across the country.
The powerful video they put together starts off with clips from Lincoln Project adviser Rick Wilson’s infamous January 2020 “boomer rube” segment on CNN that had anchor Don Lemon doubling over in laughter while Wilson denigrated and mocked average American conservatives, and goes from there. Watch below:
Wilson was also recently exposed as a hypocrite on the issue of prominent displays of the Confederate flag after images were discovered on his Instagram page that featured a “South will rise again” Confederate cooler. It brought a great deal of embarrassment to the Lincoln Project, who just a few weeks ago released an error-filled ad trying to shame President Trump for the people who fly Confederate flags at his rallies.
Club for Growth isn’t the only organization shining a brighter light on the inner workings of the George Conway-led Lincoln Project, either. The Center for Responsive Politics looked into their finances and spending in May and filed this report:
The Republican super PAC has amassed a substantial war chest, but it has come under scrutiny for funneling money to its advisory board members and spending relatively little airing political ads to influence voters. The group also hides some of its vendors by stealthily paying subcontractors, making it difficult to follow the money.
The Lincoln Project reported spending nearly $1.4 million through March. Almost all of that money went to the group’s board members and firms run by them. The super PAC spent nearly $1 million with Summit Strategic Communications, a firm run by Lincoln Project treasurer Reed Galen. Another $215,000 went to Tusk Digital, a company run by Lincoln Project adviser Ron Steslow. Both companies received little business from other federal committees since Trump’s inauguration.
That seven-figure spending, noted earlier by campaign finance expert Rob Pyers on Twitter, comes as the group spends relatively little on direct political activity. The super PAC shelled out $364,000 to Galen and Steslow’s companies to run independent expenditures opposing Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. But just 52 percent of that money went to buying and placing ads, with the rest spent on producing the ads themselves.
That’s an unusually high rate for production costs compared to most super PACs.
The Atlantic’s Andrew Ferguson also pointed out last month how the group has has gone far beyond being “never Trump” to being fully “never Republican” and pro-Democrat:
Coming from Republicans, their attacks may appear fresh, principled, and transpartisan, while remaining stale, unprincipled, and partisan. Like many unhappy former Republicans, the leaders of the project have crossed over from being “never Trump” to being “never Republican,” taking aim even at such GOP moderates as Cory Gardner and Susan Collins. Their most recent ad, called “How a President Leads,” is an unabashed valentine to Joe Biden.
Sounds to me as though in trying to prove Trump is not a real conservative, the Lincoln Project has instead shown themselves to be guilty of the charge.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Grifters is exactly what they are. There’s a sound principle behind “Never Trump”, but they don’t represent it. There are good reasons not to vote for Trump, especially in a state where the result is completely known in advance anyway, but there is no good reason to vote for Biden or any Democrat, or to support almost any Democrat for Congress.
Name a reason not to vote for Donald Trump and for joseph biden.
Don’t bother…this sentiment is a useful idiot’s mantra that thinks not voting or write-in voting is somehow a statement.
No one remembers who the non-voters would have voted for given the chance.
I have a reason – one I have heard from family members. They want a return to “normalcy” and have convinced themselves that putting Biden in the White House will suddenly and miraculously return the country to some mythical state of peace and plenty (I know that makes zero sense, but that is what they believe). None of them like Biden, but have convinced themselves that he can’t do too much damage and can be voted out (just wait until the Biden administration mandates nationwide ballot harvesting and voting by mail, steps guaranteed to to turn our nation into a Third World thugocracy).
That’s the delusion the left is selling. So are the scummy Republican.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil… Progressives, most liberals, and moderates sat on a wall adhere to the Pro-Choice religion, specifically political congruence (“=”) when their special and peculiar interests are affected.
Well, it’s probably true that he can’t do too much damage. Or much of anything. But even if he makes it as far as the election, and somehow wins it, I don’t expect him to become president. Or if he does, he won’t last long.
Oops, I hit submit too soon.
And his replacement will do a lot of damage. More damage than anyone can imagine.
Milhouse, wouldn’t the damage to our republic that Biden or his replacement would inflict be enough reason to vote for Trump? I don’t get your logic in these comments.
If you’re in a state where your vote cannot possibly affect the result, then the only function your vote has is symbolic. For instance John Bolton lives in Maryland; the only way Trump could come even close in MD is in a landslide of such proportions that he won’t need MD. So the only reason he would have to vote for Trump would be to give him moral support by boosting his percentage of the popular vote, which is purely symbolic. He’s decided, based on his personal interaction with Trump, that he cannot give him that moral support. But for the same reason he can’t give Biden that support either.
But the point is that if you live in such a state there are no negative consequences to not voting for Trump. If you live in a swing state then you do indeed have to consider such negative consequences, and that means holding your nose and voting for quite unsavory characters, such as McCain.
I live in NY, where the same considerations apply.
I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000, because I thought he’d be like his father. In 2004 I voted for him and Cheney to express support for the war against the Islamist terror network and Saddam Hussein.
I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 because I consider him an unfit person to hold public office, just like Hillary Clinton. Also I didn’t trust him to keep any of his promises including on judicial appointments. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how good a president he’s been, but I have no illusions that he actually believes in anything he’s doing; if it suited him he’d adopt the opposite policies in a New York minute. And if the Dems had played nice with him that might well have happened. I think the reason he has stuck harder and harder to conservative policies, and appointed so many good judges, is because the Dems have waged this insane campaign of hatred against him and thus driven him firmly into our hands.
And that campaign is the main reason why I will vote for Trump this year. The most important thing people need to do in this election is to reject the hatred and insanity and treason, and that means voting for Trump. Not just against the Dems but positively for Trump, no matter how bad a person he is. Because right now he’s the living symbol of sanity and patriotism and decency, and Biden is the avatar of the opposite.
I remember back in the fall of 2016, former NRO darling turned NPR darling, Johah Goldberg admitted that it’s easy for him to be a Never-Trumper because he lives in a district that votes 90% Democrat.
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The Dems are hoping those people who held their noses and pulled the handle for Trump in 2016 will either vote Biden or stay home. I think they are making a fatal wish here. My wife held her nose in 2016 and is a huge fan now. She has a broad group of highly educated suburban women friends who support Trump. The polls don’t think these folks exist so they don’t design questions that look for them.
Robert Novak (AKA “The Prince of Darkenss”) lived in DC and was registered as a Democrat because, if your not, you can’t vote in the primary, and whoever wins the primary always wins the general election. Its simple logic .. often repeated in major Republican districts, too.
But that is not a good reason to be a Never-Trumper.
You obviously didn’t even bother reading what I wrote before responding. I wrote that there are sound reasons not to vote for Trump, but none to vote for Biden. So how can you ask me to name a reason to vote for Biden?
It’s fairly ironic that these feckless, narcissistic, self-congratulatory and self-serving cuckservative imbeciles dutifully carry water for the totalitarian Dhimmi-crats and their agenda, while the Dhimmi-crat brownshirts are busy destroying statues of the group’s namesake.
What Trump voter will listen to Bushbots (or Gringo Jorge himself for that matter)? This will be as effective as National Review’s “true conservatives” were in 2016.
I thought Lincoln was a racist, or so the MSM/DNC axis keeps tells us. Why would conservatives who are trying to conserve conservatism name their organization after a racist? And shouldn’t journalists call out the Lincoln Project’s conservatives who are conserving conservatism for their racist support of the racist Lincoln? Shouldn’t Communists like Biden and Pelosi shun the racist support of conservatives who are conserving conservatism?
Or is this different because shut your misogyny hole you racist Trumpkin?
Miranda Divine and Pierre Delecto; a match made in Hades.
Tucker Carlson Begs Voters to demand change from the GOP
https://youtu.be/NS-bsetu01w
Those are not GOP but Democrats in dead elephant skins….
With millions of dollars in graft falling out of their pockets.
Starting with boehner. McConnell and his wife are still getting Chi Comm billions.
McConnell Family Fortune Connected To China:
https://conservativedailypost.com/book-outlines-mcconnell-family-fortune-connected-to-china/
There was a major purge of RINOs in 2018, more than 70%. We’ll see if that accomplished anything should they retake the House. The Senate is a disaster. I still believe that were the GOP to hold 100 Senate seats, they would still lose to the Democrats by one vote.
And we keep celebrating McConnell, Graham and their ilk when they throw us meaningless bones. It would take a major Senate-focused campaign to drain that swamp and I really don’t think we have the stomach for it. We keep rationalizing away the urgency by celebrating the meaningless pseudo victories like judge appointments when SCOTUS is apparently solid 6-3 left-wing on the most important constitutional issues.
Our team really sucks.
Edit:
“There was a major purge of RINOs in THE HOUSE in 2018…”
Yesterday, Mark “Slash” Levin again took aim at all of these former Bush operators and excoriated them. Levin is the ONLY “conservative” I know of who dares to specifically name the Bush crowd as a fundamental enemy of the people. I believe Hannity and Limbaugh have a “Rolodex” problem. Their personal relationships with Team Bush are getting in the way of completing a key aspect of the biggest story of all: the uniparty.
The Bush Family Empire still smells of Nazi.
How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
That’s BS from the Grauniad. Prescott Bush had a business partner (for whose actions he was not responsible) who supported the Nazi Party until Kristallnacht when it became clear what monsters they really were, whereupon he left them and fled the country. He was captured when Germany took over France, and landed in a concentration camp. And this was Prescott’s partner, not Prescott. So no, the whole thing is BS.
Remember that in early 1930s Germany there weren’t any good choices in politics, and to a lot of people the Nazi Party looked like it might be the least worst choice. And they hoped like mad that the crazier things Hitler was saying would remain crazy ideas and nobody would try acting on them.
I still don’t know what to make of Prescott but he always seemed to be on the wrong side of history, a family trait that continues to this day with the Bushes.
But in the 1930s, the big fear was the rise of communism in Russia. Hitler’s rise was largely funded by American industrialists who knew nothing about Nazis but because of how the Versailles Treaty had eviscerated any hope that Germany could keep the Russians in check, the only other option was to build up Hitler. It wasn’t just Chamberlain who was making naive deals with the devil. American industrialists were worse.
It was a tangled mess of amoral decisions that was made worse by the embrace of Nazism’s core beliefs by many prominent Americans too. I believe Prescott was among them. Eventually, most walked away when it became clear that Germany was as big a threat as was Russia but at the core, the “New World Order” crowd has never abandoned their efforts to beat communists to the big prize.
With good cause. And not just in Russia.
I don’t believe that at all. It sounds like Zinnist propaganda.
Chamberlain was not naive; he didn’t see an alternative to his deal. He believed the UK was not yet ready to fight a war so he did what he could to delay it. And I think the bit about American industrialists is straight out of Zinn. It’s one with the so-called “Business Plot”, in which Prescott Bush was also accused of participating, but which was never anything but Democrat propaganda.
Supporting the Nazis to oppose the Communists was not an amoral decision, any more than the USA’s later decision to support the USSR over Germany. There was no moral reason to choose one over the other, and had things played out a little differently the USA could have found itself on the other side. We ended up that way because Hitler decided to declare war on both of us. He didn’t have to; in particular he could have stayed neutral against the USA just as Japan stayed neutral against the USSR.
In the end all that mattered to us was that Germany was the immediate threat and the USSR was a long-term threat, so we allied with tomorrow’s enemy to defeat today’s. Just as we allied with the Afghan Mujahedin to defeat the Soviets, and again to defeat the Taliban; they were our enemies’ enemies, so they were our temporary friends. The Finns found themselves in the opposite position: the USSR was the deadly enemy, and Germany was offering badly needed assistance, so they made the right decision to ally themselves with Germany – and they did so while upholding their moral principles as well.
Of course as a Jew I’m glad it worked out that way, because had the USA found it in its interests to join Hitler against Stalin instead of the other way around things would have been very grim for us.
Again I don’t believe this. Even Henry Ford, who was a genuine antisemite, did not, as far as I know, embrace Nazism’s principles.
@milhouse: Straight out of Zinn? I think you’ve been in NY for too long. It is a fact that most (all?) of the big American industrialists (Ford, Rockefeller, etal…) were major financiers for the Nazis. You need to dig into your history a little deeper. It’s much more complicated than your superficial conclusions.
Regardless of the finer points, the two main points are 1) Hitler was backed largely by US money and 2) there was a lot of OPEN support for the Nazis in the US. The US was a hot bed of anti-Semitism and there was a lot of sympathy here for eugenics. Even Lindbergh believed himself to be a member of the master race.
Considering your propensity for posting nothing but declarative sentences, I concluded long ago that there is no discussing anything with you. You apparently know everything and are not open to the possibility that you don’t. History is much dirtier than you like to believe.
That makes no sense at all. NY is where people believe Zinn’s lies, where they take them for granted. If living here meant absorbing the views of those around me I’d be more willing, not less, to accept your “superficial conclusions” and “declarative sentences”. Maybe living here has given me a sensitive ear for anti-capitalist cant, which is what your position sounds like. This is the line the left has been pushing for decades, but it doesn’t become any truer over time.
These are not “finer points”. And your two assertions are not backed with facts. I don’t accept that “Hitler was backed largely by US money”, not without seeing facts from a non-leftist source. And sure there was some open support for nazis, but a lot less than there was for communists. But most of that support was not for the nazis’ principles, it was either ethnic pro-German sentiment (as in the German American Bund) or general admiration for the way fascism was allegedly solving economic problems in Europe and beating the communists. Hitler’s so-called “economic miracle”, and Mussolini’s alleged railway expertise, both of which were 100% fake news, just like Castro’s later alleged achievements in medicine and literacy.
And yes, there was a lot of antisemitism in America. There was a lot of antisemitism everywhere. It had not yet become unfashionable. America was not a “hotbed” of it. And eugenics still makes perfect sense, so long as you don’t do it by forcibly sterilizing people.
Somewhat off point, but isn’t it time for a new voice over guy? Not that this guy isn’t good, but is he the only one available?
I heard somebody from Lincoln Project on NPR last week. That’s the first I really was exposed to them and it was eye opening. From that conversation it is obviously that they are a marketing outfit with a sole goal of raising money. It’s like those charities that hire marketers that only pass through 10% of the money raised to the charities.
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The host asked if they really believe the things they say in their ads because they are so easy to prove false. He didn’t care. He admitted openly that after running an ad and appearing on CNN, they received $2 million in new contributions the next day.
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This is a scam, plain and simple.
Yes.
I put the following out to the nevertrumpers. No matter the party, no matter the candidate, I would NEVER vote for ANY candidate who doesn’t want America to thrive like Trump describes in this video.
https://www.facebook.com/senatorsez/videos/143412283619522/?t=0
People have asked me “How can you support a known liar?” (Meaning Trump.)
I respond,”Yes, Trump lies. Republicans lie. Democrats lie. All politicians lie. But while Trump lies, he actually does (or attempts to do) things that are good for the country. Democrats want to tear the country down. I don’t care if Democrats never lied – not lying is an insufficient reason to vote for someone, nor is lying a sufficient reason to deny someone a vote. I prefer to support those who act in America’s best interests, because America’s best interests are my best interests.”
I should also note that while the Left excoriates Trump for his lies, that’s not why they hate him. They hate him for the truth he speaks. I think that tells us everything we need to know about the Left.
Nicely said. I may use it elsewhere with attribution.
Yes, exactly.
What everyone is forgetting is that neither Trump nor Hillary got 50% of the popular vote. Hillary got 50%+ in a tiny number of states. Trump got a ton. About 5 million people, myself included, voted Libertarian. I suspect more of those votes were out of protest than because of some deeply held ideals to libertarianism. And the question becomes, where do those other voters swing? If the protest voters are okay with Trump, he wins in a landslide. If they hold their noses and vote communist, excuse me for Biden, then he wins.