{"id":1382598,"date":"2022-03-15T18:06:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T22:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1382598"},"modified":"2022-03-15T18:06:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-15T22:06:29","slug":"lincoln-project-schlub-compares-self-to-courageous-russian-anti-war-activist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/lincoln-project-schlub-compares-self-to-courageous-russian-anti-war-activist\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln Project Schlub Compares Self to Courageous Russian Anti-War Activist"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Flincoln-project-schlub-compares-self-to-courageous-russian-anti-war-activist%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1382598&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"article-category\"><a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/\">Politics<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"article-excerpt\">ANALYSIS: Trolling Trump on Twitter not the same as risking life to challenge Putin<\/p>\n<figure class=\"post-thumbnail-container relative lg:mr-24 w-full my-4 mb-8\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n<p>\t\t\t<span class=\"text-gray text-xs md:text-lg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/author\/andrew-stiles\/\" title=\"Posts by Andrew Stiles\" class=\"author url fn text-red-700\" rel=\"author\">Andrew Stiles<\/a> \u2022 March 15, 2022 5:50 pm<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Rick Wilson, cofounder of the scandal-plagued <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/lincoln-project-defunct\/\">Lincoln Project<\/a>, subtly compared his decision to leave the Republican Party to the courageous actions of Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who protested the invasion of Ukraine during a live television broadcast.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have a few thoughts [about courage],&#8221; Wilson wrote on Twitter, as if speaking from personal experience. &#8220;First, it&#8217;s very, very hard to walk away from the tribal campfire. You lose friends. You lose work. You lose connection with a culture in which you were at home.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Wilson&#8217;s decision to &#8220;walk away from the tribal campfire&#8221; of the GOP resulted in immense personal wealth. The Lincoln Project <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/lincoln-project-enemies-list\/\">raised<\/a> almost $100 million from left-wing billionaires and activist groups, among others, during the 2020 election cycle. Investigative reporting from the <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/03\/08\/us\/politics\/lincoln-project-weaver.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">suggests<\/a> Wilson and his fellow cofounders funneled a significant portion of that money to themselves.\u00a0In 2021, Wilson <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/lincoln-project-founder-paid-off-mortgage-days-after-nyt-reported-on-weaver-scandal\/\">paid off<\/a> a $200,000 mortgage and finally <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/rick-wilton-taxes\/\">settled<\/a> a $400,000 overdue tax bill.<\/p>\n<p>Ovsyannikova&#8217;s public protest, in which she interrupted one of the most-watched news programs on Russia&#8217;s state-controlled Channel 1 while holding a sign reading\u00a0&#8220;No war, stop the war, don&#8217;t believe the propaganda, they are lying to you here,&#8221;\u00a0resulted in her being detained and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-europe-60749279\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">interrogated<\/a>\u00a0by Russian police for 14 hours. She was photographed appearing in court with her lawyer, though many fear she could be prosecuted under a new law that makes it a criminal offense to criticize Russia&#8217;s actions in Ukraine. Dozens of Russian journalists have been <a href=\"https:\/\/cpj.org\/data\/killed\/europe\/russia\/?status=Killed&#038;motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&#038;type%5B%5D=Journalist&#038;cc_fips%5B%5D=RS&#038;start_year=1992&#038;end_year=2022&#038;group_by=location\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">murdered<\/a> by Vladimir Putin&#8217;s regime.<\/p>\n<p>A <em>Washington Free Beacon<\/em> analysis determined that Wilson and Ovsyannikova\u00a0are not very similar. Chasing &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/lincoln-project-fred-wellman-son\/\">generational wealth<\/a>&#8221; by trolling Donald Trump on social media\u2014Wilson has tweeted more than 70 times per day on average since 2009\u2014is not the same as Ovsyannikova risking her life and freedom, as well as the life and freedom of her entire family, to criticize an authoritarian despot with a long history of hunting down and killing his opponents.<\/p>\n<p>It is not the first time a Lincoln Project cofounder has compared running an anti-Trump super PAC to an act of true heroism and self-sacrifice. Wilson&#8217;s colleague Steve Schmidt, for example, <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/lincoln-project-steve-schmidt\/\">likened<\/a> the Lincoln Project schlubs to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy and the civil rights leaders who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Politics ANALYSIS: Trolling Trump on Twitter not the same as risking life to challenge Putin  Andrew Stiles \u2022 March 15, 2022 5:50 pm Rick Wilson, cofounder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}