#1912: James "Ace" Lyons

James Aloysius “Ace” Lyons is retired admiral in the United States Navy, currently chief executive officer of LION Associates, and delusional wingnut and conspiracy theorist.

Lyons has claimed (during a National Press Club conference) that, under the Obama administration, the Muslim Brotherhood has succeeded in infiltrating every US security agency. He also stated that CIA director John Brennan is a Muslim convert and secret Saudi agent. (Presumably Lyons got the idea from John Guandolo; you don’t get to get your ideas from Guandolo and still count as reasonable.) As Lyons states, it is “interesting that no counterintelligence alarm was triggered at the time that this alleged conversion was occurring.” Which may, of course, be because it never happened, but Lyons’s mind doesn’t work in a manner that allows him to consider that possibility: “Most likely, that’s because at that time the sophisticated Islamic objectives driving the global jihad movement by the Muslim Brotherhood were not understood by those who witnessed his ‘conversion.’” According to Lyons, Brennan has a “track record of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood both domestically and abroad,” for instance allowing “the jihadist enemy access to the highest level of government,” such as in his meetings with “terrorists like Nihad Awad.” For the record, Awad is the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

And according to Lyons, Islam is not a real religion, but “a political movement masquerading as a religion,” and presumably as such completely unlike his brand of fundie Christianity. It means that you cannot even in principle be a Muslim without being a terrorist. Lyons, of course, has his own idea about how to deal with foreign policy issue, and has suggested that the only way to gain credibility and win “hearts and minds” in the Middle East is to “kill them into submission.”

And of course, the conspiracy goes all the way to the top. “Not only is Obama anti-American and anti-Western,” says Lyons (at the Iowa National Security Summit), but he is actively “pro-Islam, pro-Iranian, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood,” and to achieve the aims of the radical Islamists – imposing sharia law on the US – he has been colluding with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In his attempt to take down America, Obama used “sequestration” “as a vehicle for unilateral disarmament”. One suspects that Lyons does not know what “sequestration” and “unilateral disarmament means”. That’s actually the charitable interpretation of what he’s saying.

To top it all, Russia was likely blackmailing Obama. No, Lyons cites no evidence whatsoever. But Russia was blackmailing Obama because they know the truth that he wasn’t born in the United States.

He also argued that that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to start up a political party to influence American domestic politics, which is puzzling since he thinks they already control the Democratic party. Then again, Lyons’ most characteristic trait is not his acute cognitive faculties.

Moreover, Lyons has weighed in on Benghazi, and even been part of the wingnut Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi whose goal was to find the real truth (which they already know, of course – they just need to make the evidence fit). According to Lyons the GOP-led Benghazi Special Committee was aiding the Benghazi cover-up. The evidence for the committee being part of the conspiracy is that they found no conspiracy. So it goes.

Lyons is not fond of zeh gays either, saying that “the gay, lesbian, transgender lifestyle is nothing but a return to a pagan ethic … which has led to the downfall of previous civilizations.” And at the CPAC conference in 2010, Lyons’s said that “in the Navy in the late nineteen hundreds, homosexuality was rampant in the United States Navy. It was so bad that mothers would not let their sons enlist in the Navy until the Navy cleaned its act up. … On board ship the Navy found that there are three things unacceptable to good order and discipline and its impact on readiness. You cannot have a thief aboard, you cannot have a drug-user or a drug-pusher and we found out you could not have a homosexual.” He did not cite sources because he is a venerable retired admiral, and venerable retired admirals don’t need to cite sources.

He should not be confused with equally crazy conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist James Lyons-Weiler.

Diagnosis: Crazy dingbat yelling at clouds and accusing them of all sorts of ills that exist only in his own deranged mind. But wingnuts have nevertheless been sure to promote him to the many who don’t care about such things either – Trump proudly mentioned Lyons’s endorsement during his campaign, for instance.