The Lincoln Project: Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

Thousands of Several people have stopped by recently to tell me that The New York Times just expended several thousand words reporting on the various woes and scandals of The Lincoln Lads.

Here's the link if you are interested.  It repackages a lot of material that anyone who has been following  the story probably already knows, and adds some new reporting that may be of interest to the deep divers.

And then there's this, which looks like the digital equivalent of someone skipping a stone across all the stuff your host has written about The Lincoln Lads, the Never Trumpers and their media enablers since Day One:

Hi! here is your unroll: 🧵THREAD🧵 Today we learned more about how awful @ProjectLincoln is. If… https://t.co/LlUSkRPTkT Enjoy :) 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) March 9, 2021

Not exactly super thrilled that a bylined National Review/Federalist typist is the one pulling the trigger of this Twitter Gatling gun, but back when I was posting Dire Warnings about The Lincoln Lads, among the Never Trumpers and their media enablers --

-- there was not only absolutely zero interest in that angle in the "friendly" media --

-- but I took endless shit from my savvy "allies" who told me in dozens of different ways to just sit down and shut up.

Remarkably like the way my savvy "allies" came at me when I began saying things about Glenn Greenwald that they did not want to hear.  

What I have learned from such experiences is that, for the Believers, no argument is ever going to be enough.

Like Republicans during the collapse of the Bush Administration or Both Siderists during the rise of Trump, Believers will go right on angrily defending the pillars of their faith against heretics like me long past the point when that pillar has become indefensible, and the worse their cognitive dissonance becomes, the more they come to hate the heretics who tried to warn them.

Eventually, once the torque between the observable world and their cherished doctrine becomes unsustainable, something changes.  Some Believers break one way -- following Greenwald all the way down the rabbit hole and onto Fox News or building golden idols to Donald Trump.   Others break a different way -- Republicans putting on tricorn hats and pretending they'd never heard of George Bush or Matthew Dowd pretending his past never happened and suddenly becoming an anti-Both Siderist evangel.  

But in virtually every case, none of these people ever forgive the heretic for being right.  That's just human nature:

And I have every reason to believe suspect that deification of the Lincoln Lads will stumble to the same end.  

At the moment, no argument is sufficient put a dent in the faith of the Lincoln Lads' savvy Liberal supporters.  Not the Weaver scandal or the subsequent coverup. Not the obvious grifting. Not the founders extremely problematic pasts. Not the fact that they have always been professional mercenaries -- hired guns -- not patriots. Not even the mathematical fact that they failed pretty spectacularly to meet every one of their own benchmarks. 

And since none of that matters, this puts the Lincoln Lads in the position that every con man dreams of.  Their marks have now sunk so much money and faith and reputational currency into the Lincoln Project frammis that they are not only no longer psychologically capable of seeing the scam for what it is, but are peddling excuse after excuse on behalf of the grifters, offering themselves as human shields to protect the scam.  

Which, as one heretic recently put it, is not helpful:

Well now we all get to brace ourselves for a long round of stabbings (which have already begun) by Fox News, PowerLine, Brietbart, OANN, Newsmax, every loyal member of the House of Trump and on and on and on using the Lincoln Project sword that Liberal teevee and all my fair-weather Liberal allies forged for them.

So however the Lincoln Lads' sound and fury eventually shambles to a close, I can predict at least one outcome with near-certainty:  none of the Lincoln Lads' righteous supporters are ever going to forgive the heretics for being right all along.  

 

No Half Measures