The Tiki-Torch Hoax Should Not Be Blamed Only on the Lincoln Project’s Grifters

Jim commented on the Intercept story about Lauren Windsor and the Lincoln Project attempting to defend their role in the now-infamous tiki-torch stunt at a Glenn Youngkin rally by making the case that they planned it as an open satire — sort of like “Billionaires for Bush” — rather than intending it to be a hoax that people mistook for actual white nationalists. Jim’s conclusion: “The simple answer seems to be the accurate one. The folks at the Lincoln Project are just stupid. Really, really stupid.”

That’s true, but there are two additional, related points worth considering here about why the blame should not stop with the Lincoln Project. One is about the media coverage. The story went national starting with Elizabeth Holmes, a supposedly straight-news reporter from NBC29 in Charlottesville, who presented the fake white nationalists as if they were for real:

Holmes appears to have snapped her photo (at an angle that tried to foreground the three white males) while nobody from the Youngkin campaign was around, and it remains unclear who tipped her off to be there. Was she really that gullible? Did she bother to find out the truth, or did she not care? The Intercept allows Windsor and the Lincoln Project to complain that nobody else from the press got the story that these were satirists rather than hoaxers:

The operatives were instructed to reveal to any reporter who asked that they were there on behalf of the Lincoln Project. The problem for the actors: Nobody in the media approached them. They were likely scared off by the drizzle, said Pete Callahan, another Democratic operative. Windsor made clear in an email Sunday evening that the plan was to be transparent about who they were working for . . .

Democracy dies in a light drizzle, I guess.

Besides the campaign press, the other culprit here who must not get away without being roundly mocked is the McAuliffe campaign and the official Democratic Party. Adam Parkhomenko is a Democratic Party operative. Charlie Olafsson was the McAuliffe campaign’s social-media manager. Jen Goodman and Christina Freundlich were both official spokespeople for the McAuliffe campaign. And all of them pushed this story as if the tiki torchers were honest-to-goodness white nationalists whose support should be damaging to Youngkin:

This was not Glenn Youngkin’s closing argument. This was not who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters were. Were the staffers that desperate to throw anything at the wall, or had they actually talked themselves into such a blinkered view? Either way, these were people representing the official communications of the Virginia Democratic Party and/or the McAuliffe campaign, and they spread a totally implausible falsehood three days before the election. We should not let this election fade from view without noting that.