Mrs. Rachel Vindman, the self-described natsec hobbyist, is married to the Tweedledee to the Tweedledum of the Vindman brothers. Her brother-in-law is running for Congress in Virginia’s 7th District, which encompasses Fredericksburg and Culpeper, from the Western side of the Northern Neck to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
These two were key figures in the NBC psychodrama of the Trump years, especially the impeachment effort over Trump’s threat to withhold aid to Ukraine. Both Vindmans are from Ukraine. However you may feel about the actual policy of sending aid there, the idea of naturalized foreigners being at the center of an impeachment over aid to the country they came from, a matter of policy not high crimes or misdemeanors, is the sort of thing that makes you sympathize with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Their career in American public service was capped by trying to extort the government for the country to which they still appear to bear true faith and allegiance. How about fuck off?
Now Mrs. Vindman is handling with her characteristic delicateness what looks to be the second attempted assassination of former President Trump.
For our sins, we’re going to have to hear from more of these figures in the coming weeks, including the sit-down between Hunter Biden and the disgusting toad-faced gangster Lev Parnas. NBC has perpetuated a contemptible fraud on their increasingly aged viewership by lionizing this man, who is and has always been totally crooked. Rachel Maddow’s documentary, “From Russia With Lev,” which premiered this weekend in San Francisco, featuring a teary get-together between Parnas and Hunter Biden, is simply fan fiction. Parnas is playing his part, calling Biden a hero, saying he left the cult, and so on, while NBC asks none of the relevant questions his mob links raise.
Never Trump Republicanism, of the kind that made for good Maddow guests, is more or less a means to keep neocon consultants in their baked potatoes and dirty martinis at Morton’s, which had to be done because nobody had the gumption to sentence these people to the galleys like they deserve. They wouldn’t know a scruple or principle if it flew in through the bedroom window and laid an egg on their pillows.
We’ve already been over some of the Russian and pederastic issues at the Lincoln Project. The other big ones are the two PACs, Defending Democracy Together and the Republican Accountability Project, both tied closely to the publisher of The Bulwark Sarah Longwell.
The mark for a lot of these—a man there’s a lot of blood to suck out of—is Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. He’s yet another philosopher turned tech baron, and flattering this guy’s ego must be very easy. None of this has actually moved the needle with Republican voters, at all, because the neocons involved with all this crap would have to admit they were wrong a lot, and being a neocon in DC means never having to do so. You just tickle Hoffman’s belly and money falls out.
A lot of the mystique around these groups, and the reason they’re beloved by the DC press, is because they give publishers money. The cult of ad-cutting, where journalists will report on “brutal” attack ads, is really about the money that the PACs hand to publishers and networks to broadcast them. Most of this is routed through Longwell’s firm.
Defending Democracy Together’s primary recipient of funds is Sarah Longwell’s firm, which made $3 million on this shit in 2022:
NBC, which gets to weave the story for the yogi grandmas at home, gets a sweet payout of nearly $400,000. You can see why the tech platforms would love it, too.
Here’s 2021:
Lamar Texas is a roadside billboard company.
In 2020 they claimed to have payed a whopping $7 million (!) to Facebook for ads, in addition to nearly $5 million for Longwell’s firm:
Here’s 2019:
And here’s 2018:
Berman is kind of an interesting choice for the first two years, since Rick Berman used to be a major target of Rachel Maddow, not to mention this stuff is kind of out of their wheelhouse. What they’re famous for is standing up fake think tanks for consumer freedom stuff, pro-smoking, pro-junk food, anti-PETA, that kind of thing.
As A.J. Delgado pointed out, Longwell’s firm also raked in another $3.7 million from the Republican Accountability Project in the last few years.
The problem is that most of the people associated with this stuff are utterly untrusted by any actual Republican voters, even if you agree with them, and it hasn’t moved the needle at all.