A Dirty Campaign Trick in Virginia The Lincoln Project plays the race card in a false-flag operation.
Democrats routinely play the race card when they’re worried about losing an election, and that’s exactly what the operatives from the Lincoln Project did last week in staging a dirty campaign trick against surging GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin.
It started Friday when a reporter for a local NBC affiliate tweeted a photo of four men and one woman dressed in white shirts, khakis and sunglasses and holding tiki torches. They were standing in front of Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s bus during a campaign stop in Virginia.
“These men approached @GlennYoungkin’s bus as it pulled up saying what sounded like, ‘We’re all in for Glenn.” tweeted Elizabeth Holmes. The tiki torches were meant to tie Mr. Youngkin to the infamous torchlit, white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017.
Twitter exploded, with various people claiming to have identified people in the tiki-torch photo as Democrats. They hadn’t been positively ID’d by the time we went to press on Sunday.
But as evidence grew that this was a setup, the Lincoln Project finally fessed up. It presented its attempt to play the white supremacist card as an exercise in civic virtue, saying it was “our way of reminding Virginians” about Charlottesville, “the Republican Party’s embrace of those values,” and Mr. Youngkin’s “failure to condemn it.” This is a slur against Mr. Youngkin and the Virginia GOP.
Friday night on CNN, Lincoln Project founder Stuart Stevens parroted the same line as he defended the false-flag operation. Another woman, Lauren Windsor, described in a recent New York Times profile as “the liberal activist who targets Republicans with a MAGA masquerade,” later admitted she was also in on it.
At this point even Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe’s campaign felt obliged to distance itself from the dirty trick. McAuliffe campaign manager Chris Bolling called it “disgusting and distasteful,” and went on to say “the McAuliffe campaign condemns it in the strongest terms.”
Critics noted this condemnation didn’t come until after several members of the McAuliffe team had retweeted the original item as though it were real, with campaign communications staffer Jen Goodman calling the tiki-torch photo “disgusting and disqualifying.” McAuliffe spokesperson Christina Freundlich said “this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are.”
You might think there would be strong media interest in finding out who these tiki-torch posers are. Instead the press seems content to pretend this is all an intra-GOP squabble, with the Washington Post calling the Lincoln Project “an anti-Trump Republican group” and Reuters describing it as “a group of mostly Republican critics.”
The truth is that the Lincoln Project is by now a relentlessly anti-Republican outfit, and Mr. Stevens has written an entire book disavowing his long GOP career. As chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he does have a lot to answer for.
His group’s sleazy tiki-torch stunt has backfired and may harm rather than help Mr. McAuliffe at the polls. But we wonder if this dishonesty and race-baiting is what the Lincoln Project’s donors signed up for. If they keep donating, we’ll assume it is.
Comments are closed.
