People in this thread (and other TLP threads) brazenly claim they know about TLP's history, and are defending this anyway. Ignorance also isn't an excuse.
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The Racist, Homophobic, Sexist pasts of the Lincoln Project Founders "resurface" (Note: It was always there.)
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I'm not making an excuse. I agree with them insofar as I think ending Trump's presidency is mission #1, #2 and #3.
I'm only arguing that David Duke would never gain Rick Wilson's traction specifically because doors would be shut to him that were not shut to Rick Wilson. Due largely to the fact that nobody exactly knew Rick Wilson.
While I cannot prove a negative, I'm just going to hard disagree with the notion that a single, honest poster in this thread would "stan for David fucking Duke," former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, for putting out an anti-Trump ad.
It's quite frankly bullshit, and it speaks volumes that this is the point that some of you want to engage with and not the myriad other points of substance I've presented in this thread and countless other TLP threads.
There is a real discussion to be had here, but it doesn't begin with exaggerated fear-mongering.
That last phrase is blatant, low-quality bait, and I half expect someone to ignore the entire post, latch on to that, and spin it into a diatribe that I'm "staning" for TLP and the Republican party somehow and enabling their trash.
Why I Said I'd Have Shot Michael Brown in the Face
To be fair, I don't think the David Duke digression is anywhere close to the main conversation that needs to be had here, but I was just addressing your question. "Stan for" is maybe a bit strong. But I think people would absolutely share content created by him if it was in the vein of TLP stuff. No question.
The prize is real equality, not trading Trump for another, more intelligent monster. They've been taking a LOT of notes.
Fair enough. In your hypothetical, I wouldn't be surprised if it was shared in a morbidly fascinated "even David fucking Duke is dunking on Trump" sense. But that's altogether different than the exaggeration with which I was expressing frustration.
Their ultimate goal is attempting to re-legitimize the Republican Party. Why oh why would we want them legitimized again to do the exact same god-damn things Trump's administration wants to do with an added air of legitimacy, precisely?
The difference between Trump and any other Republican president is the overtness of his bigotry and his disrespect for conventions, procedure and decorum. That's it. Let's stop pretending to the contrary, K?
No one looking at the United States of America in the past several decades can actually take you seriously with that. Especially not marginalized folks.
You make it sound like someone being anti-Trump should be enough to consider them my fellow bannermen. And you'll forgive me if that absolute barest minimum of human decency is not what I would consider an achievement in any stretch of the imagination. It's not even the starting line.
When the ultimate goal of TLP is to re-legitimize the GOP, why on earth would I, or anyone else who's been grossly affected by GOP policy since the 1980s, be OK with that? Let them continue to be illegitimate and unfit for public office in public, let their stink make them repellant, don't aid the work of the people trying to make the GOP a "reasonable choice" for the white cishet majority, please and thank you. No one is doing any favours for them by making "never Trump" the only thing that matters.
I don't see how it's a "purity test" to not want the GOP legitimized so white cishet America can comfortably and shamelessly vote for them yet again. If you see it that way, congrats on your privilege, the rest of us under the heel of that boot are gonna keep talking about it while you pretend there's nothing wrong with that.
This is pretty naive. A highly successful campaign to keep the GOP legitimate that gains a (albeit conditionally) positive following of left-leaning people is apparently just going to blinker out into nothing because... reasons? No, they'll achieve their current goal and then move on to another with all those stacks of money they're getting. Since when has a Republican (or anyone for that matter) ever said "no thanks, I don't like money that I need in our current society to further my interests"?
At best, we're a loosely-assembled coalition with a single unified interest that should barely be considered an achievement. You're really over-selling it here.
.... I barely even know what to say to this, it's THAT historically ignorant. Iron Curtain, the Cold War that lasted 40 years, seriously NONE of that is ringing any bells?
The world is littered with examples of strange bedfellows going on to be the new monster. Stalin and all that followed him until Gorbachev is easily the most prominent example. Saddam Hussein is another.
It's just a really unfortunate thing that we have to keep re-learning this lesson ad infinitum.
Republicans don't have fucking principles, so performative gestures like the ones you describe that work to advance their ultimate goals of re-legitimizing the party is such an insignificant thing that it doesn't even warrant the rest of the GOP to actively forgive them for it.On the one hand, TLP's leadership absolutely have a history of racism and all kinds of awful statements and campaigns, no question. The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump are both led by disaffected neocons, people I very much do not want in our party -- what's next, neocon Dems saying how we need to bomb Iran? Not a good thought...
But on the other hand, their advertising this year shows a total about-face on exactly this issue.
To the point, here is an ad that the Lincoln Project uploaded yesterday. That Rick Wilson's Lincoln Project, with their ugly history of racism, made THIS, is kind of mind-blowing to say the least...
But there it is, an ad of a black man holding a sign that says "My Life Matters" walking past a row of white people with guns, with audio from Martin Luther King in the ad. It's hard to imagine a bigger change from that Confederate flag cooler to this. Even if you think that they don't actually mean it and are, internally actually still as racist as ever, which is possible, this ad is quite the opposite of that.
So as for them going right back to the Republicans, while that is possible, with how many bridges they have burned this year with ads like the one above and their ones that go right at Trump, unless Trumpism is actually fully expunged from that party, I can't see it happening anytime soon. They have made it clear that Trump's enablers need to go as well. They explicitly oppose the Republicans who have bowed down to Trump.
And so that returns to the start of my post -- is the end result of this the neocons becoming Democrats? In the short term I welcome any support in defeating our racist-fascist President, but in the long term that is certainly quite concerning if they start trying to push us into whatever foreign war they want next. So yes, definitely do not give them money.
But that is a problem for another day; for now we need to defeat Trump, and their ads are helping do that.
And again, problems for other days tend to not be a sustainable idea long term.
Oh, trust me, we're aware. The issue is that we're not sure you actually are when you discuss casting aside temporarily-useful bad actors you've enabled to fight alongside you, as if we as a world have a solid history of being able to do that without it blowing up in our faces.
I feel this mindset is zero-sum thinking about voters. There's 40% or more voters that aren't "new" by any stretch, they're a nebulous void that people dip in and out of voting all the time, given the right cicumstances and conditions.
And ignoring that fact ignores the most believable explanation: never-Trump Republicans would rather just dive into that nebulous void than give a vote to a Democrat, while a group of people from the void who are left of centre enough and that are sick of hearing about Trump all day every day are willing to vote just to stop hearing about him.
There are likely other ins and outs and many other groups to discuss from that rather LARGE bloc of lapsed voters who may be motivated to the polls, but one can't deny that "people who are just sick to death of the endless yammering about Trump" probably makes up a sizeable bloc of lapsed voters who are suddenly motivated to the polls by a desire to return to some sort of status quo in their periphery and creating a situation where they can go back to ignoring politics as usual.
So the conclusion being jumped to that never-Trump Republicans are some important voting bloc seems like the take one would have only if they consider that 40+% of non-voters to be some sort of static list of people and that the remaining voters are the only ones to consider. Which is... certainly a way of thinking. Not one I would subscribe to, clearly.
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Thing is, the numbers are kind of hard to parse any other way than that there actually are a lot of Republican defections in the suburbs. High R turnout but huge swings. I linked a Vox article going over it, but it certainly looks more like that than a huge activation of previous nonvoters.
There's so many allies to align oneself with for the fight against Trump that we really don't need to turn to the Lincoln fucking Project
Wow. He's really done a number on you, then. Apparently, he's convinced you that he is the source and not a symptom.
That article keeps mentioning what a tiny fraction of voters they are (they do so right from the very first paragraph), so... you might have to hit me with something better to make anyone think that they matter in anything but the tightest of margins, rather than being allegedly responsible for the substantial polling leads we're currently seeing.
Again, Occam's razor: more often than not, a disenchanted moderate Republican would rather not vote than vote for a Democrat.
And honestly, if that number not voting is smaller than the portion energized to vote Trump out on the left, that's all we or anyone else needs.
And besides, catering to those votes and ONLY those votes means concessions made on vital causes to appease them, so I'd rather a scenario where they just don't vote and we encourage another bloc of voters to the polls instead.
Wrong. I know full well he is a symptom...and I know full well the symptom needs to be remedied at any cost. Do you?
Please don't treat Trump like the end boss. He's a mid-boss that gets downgraded to a regular enemy from this point forward.
The people behind the Lincoln Project have been after people like me my entire life. Don't empower them by letting them in to the hashtag resistance
You can care about winning in November without inviting in wolves in sheep's clothing. If you've no problem with that it says a decent amount about you.
I take back what I said in a previous thread about TLP, which was that we should tolerate this evil to vanquish the greater evil. Turns out, it was all the same evil.
Oh, I think that there's been a miscommunication. I in no way shape or form think we should be working to appeal to never trump republicans on anything policywise, though I do think that they might've given us the suburbs in 2018. I just think they're numerous enough that the Lincoln project is probably targeting some of their ads at them.
(Though now that I think about it simple bias would probably mean that TLP probably thinks that they'd be a group worth targeting regardless of how many of them there are).
Of course. The political ideologies on the right that dehumanize, discriminate against, and kill marginalized people for a very brief start. AKA what TLP represents.
and dont forget capitalist! ;)
We are, and we should be doing it more often frankly.
I'm not doing that though? I'm trying to say that the Tea Party ghouls that wanted to shoot Michael Brown should be opposed.
So we should be doing everything we can to remove them from power. Glad we agree.
This site has an absolutely immense problem with this. It's very "Progressive". I cannot stand some of the types of posters these topics attract, it's upsetting.
When you give a voting bloc weight, whether they deserve it or not, it gives them power. By asserting that they could make or break the suburbs (which, again, your article suggests would only work in the tightest of district races), you and the media that repeats that notion gives them power. What do you believe they'll do with that, exactly?
And again, I disagree with the conclusion that they're a growing number as you seem to believe, and that article you presented really doesn't make the case for it as strongly as you think it does. It's certainly not the simplest answer, by any stretch.
My friend. We are apparently at a conversational impasse. I fully disagree that we should be courting strange bedfellows to solve an immediate problem when those bedfellows present a very real problem to our future, and that future involves all people. That's all. Surely you can see how a very well-funded organization who explicitly does NOT see it that way might seem problematic to real change?
If they're numerous enough to form a marginal voting bloc - as in, the margin between winning and not - then, uh, they already have weight. Acknowledging that does not give them more. And I think that the case is pretty clear - I'm really not seeing the uncertainty you're putting into the article. If R, I, and D turnout are all up, but the actual D vote margine also goes up, there must be some unexpectedly large number of typically conservative registered R or I voters who changed teams. Otherwise, they'd follow the previously expected pattern.
The decision to change the party platform to appeal to them is a separate call, which is going to weigh on a lot of factors. If we can get them on board without doing anything, as we seem to have done in 2018 and seem to be repeating in 2020, great. If that changes, I'd express a pretty strong preference towards not giving them a thing. The Republicans will be just as vile as ever. They can either vote for the only morally acceptable choice or expose themselves as everything they pretend they're not - because unlike others, they'd have no real excuse. This is, perhaps, not the world's most adroit political strategy, but I'm not a political strategist, just an observer.
I would agree that activating already liberal/progressive nonvoters would certainly be preferable to making concessions to conservatives, if that's what you're looking for?
Impossible to say, but people here have signal-boosted them, which in this day and age is kinda the same.
When you breathe, you put CO2 into the atmosphere, which in turn gets turned into oxygen by Lincoln Project houseplants, which in turn gives them life
Yup, I think Trump has broken so many people, so badly that people are so desperate to end his reign of terror they're willing to deal with the devil to end it. Even if it could be damaging in the long run. But can you blame them for doing so? Or blame Trump for pushing people and enabling such a group to exist? It's a complex and simple issue simultaneously.
Thanks for your contribution.
I get the desperation. And I understand the desire to latch on to any and everything that opposes Trump. I don't "blame" people, but I absolutely DO think we need to be checking TLP sooner than later even if it plays into the whole "the left will eat itself" narrative in the short term. If that means that fellow progressives have to deal with others sniping at them, so be it. There is no nice way out of this. Stakes are too high.
Having Liberals signal boost to their liberal bases TLP content seems like a weird way of converting Trump supporters. Hell ignoring them could make them more effective as I imagine a lot Trump supporters are calling them fake cause they see places like MSNBC talking about.
You think the only ones signal boosting TLP were white heterosexual men?
Yeah.. their cunts.They were cunts, they are cunts,they will be cunts next year at Biden's inauguration.
But we need them to keep attacking Trump.
But we need them to keep attacking Trump.
Do we?
Do we have data indicating these ads are actually working?
Biden is polling well ahead of Trump as is.
after 2016, should we be wholeheartedly trusting polls? We should hope all Trump's detractors continue to relentlessly attack him until Election day. After 2016 ...these last 4 years, it's like we've only just stormed the beaches of Normandy now.