#2852: Allison Folmar

Allison Folmar, JD, is a Michigan-based lawyer who’s gained some notoriety – especially in antivaccine circles – for representing parents accused of medical neglect of their children. She is also a board member for Parental Rights, an organization that works to “preserve parental rights through a Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as through state and federal legislation that will protect children by empowering parents”, including health freedom and, of course, ‘vaccine freedom’ – indeed, their suggestion would (deliberately) make it almost impossible for states to protect children from medical abuse and neglect: children are, as the organization sees it, their parents’ property to do with as they see fit, regardless of the welfare of the child.

 

But if you wonder whether Folmar herself is antivaccine – she could after all just be deeply concerned with parents’ rights, couldn’t she? – she has also been an invited speaker at a number of anti-vaccine conferences, including the 2018 Vaccine Choice Empowerment Symposium and the 2015 issue of the autism quackfest known Autism One. At the latter, she even talked about one of her cases as involving a daughter having “exhibited autistic-like symptoms immediately after vaccinations”, and you get no points for guessing where that story would be going.

 

Folmar is apparently also a scientologist and has been caught pushing scientology’s views on psychiatry. As for the ParentalRights organization, its board consists of four people, three of whom we’ve already covered: William Estrada, Rick Green, Michael Farris, as well as one J. Michael Smith. Though health freedom seems to be part of it, their main goal is to promote home schooling and ensure that parents can prevent their children from being exposed to things like the theory of evolution or non-condemnatory information about women’s rights or homosexuality.

 

Diagnosis: Dangerous

#2851: Susan Folkman

 

Susan Kleppner Folkman is an American psychologist, author, and emerita professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She is – by far – most famous for her writings on psychological stress and coping, and we don’t pretend to have the expertise needed to evaluate those contributions. But Folkman has also, for a long time, been a major champion of medical woo and quackery. Folkman was the first full-time director of UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, which offers (among other things) acupuncture, herbal medicine, manual therapies and Ayurvedic medicine, and Osher Foundation Distinguished Professor of Integrative Medicine; and from 2006, she was the chair of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine and the North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. She is, in other words, a major figure in the relentless effort to give woo and quackery a sheen of scientific and academic legitimacy without having the scientific grounding to justify that status.

 

Given her positions, Folkman was also selected to serve on an Institute of Medicine committee to identify major scientific and policy issues in “complementary and alternative medicine” research, regulation, training, credentialing and “integration with conventional medicine” in 2003, and she’s been a firm defender of, say, the practices of NCCAM, employing the standard misdirection techniques of CAM advocates of rebranding conventional therapies as somehow “alternative” (to make CAM seem more popular and legitimate than it in fact is), appealing to the popularity of CAM to justify spending money on it, and pointing out that although trials of CAM tend to be (when properly carried out) disappointing, that’s the situation with science-based medicine, too (i.e. neglecting the importance of starting with plausible hypotheses or the issue of how you adjust your confidence in the hypotheses when they don't pan out).

 

Diagnosis: A significant and powerful promoter of bullshit, and although we haven’t assessed her contributions to psychology on their own terms, her penchant for bullshit and garbage thinking on other issues might leave one wary of errors and blind spots there, too. That said, Folkman is fortunately retired and probably won’t do much more harm, at least not directly.

#2850: Avery Foley

Avery Foley is a prolific writer for the young-Earth-creationist and general pseudoscience organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). As such, she has promoted most of the creationist nonsense talking points associated with young-Earth creationism, such as the silly creationist distinction between micro- and macro-evolution (complete with vague handwavings about ‘information’, which Foley predictably doesn’t attempt to define) and the mythical distinction between “observational and historical science” (where the former is legitimate and the latter is not; i.e. scientists do science when they restrict themselves to counting, weighing and measuring; testing hypotheses against predictions derived from those hypotheses is pseudoscience); indeed Foley, whose scientific background is a masters of arts in theological studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, has written pretty extensively and thoroughly confusedly about that putative distinction. Now, Foley is adamant that she and creationists in general “love science”, but that means real science, like engineering and accountancy (as long as those disciplines “seek to study and research to honor God and uphold the authority of his Word”) not those disciplines that deal in tests of hypotheses about things that aren’t directly observable, like astronomy or physics or medicine or – in particular – evolutionary biology or climate science. 

 

One somewhat curious contribution from Foley, together with one Frost Smith, is their 2015 defense (“Celebrate Einstein’s Birthday with Pi on 3.14.15”) of what creationists call ‘uniformitarianism’, the idea that the laws of science are constant, e.g. so that the future is in principle predictable. For such constancy (including the reliability of mathematics, which is not based on empirical testing, but Foley & Smith are not the kind of writers to notice such details) is only possible, as they see it, if it were created by God: “an orderly and consistent universe because there is a consistent God who upholds the universe”, whereas “in a naturalistic worldview” any assumption of such order has to be given up. Hence, evolution is false and the Bible is right and the Earth was created in six (literal) days and so forth.

 

The curious dimension to that argument is of course that AiG rejects uniformitarianism because uniformitarianism is thoroughly incompatible with young-Earth creationism – in their own words, “a uniformitarian worldview maintains that all things have continued at the same rate without any supernatural or catastrophic events to alter them. Namely, uniformitarianism excludes the Creation by God and the global Flood”. Indeed, Foley and Smith themselves, in ‘AIG: All Scientific Dating Methods Are Wrong’, maintain that “all the dating techniques used in geology, cosmology, and physics are wrong” – not because they are able to identify any errors or mistakes but because the dating techniques yield results they don’t like, such as the universe and the Earth being billions of years old – and their (desperate) argument is precisely that “the dating techniques are based on assumptions, and the main assumption is the constancy of the process rates used to calculate those ages” and “[a]ccording to God’s Word that assumption of constancy of process rates is wrong”. Of course – we conjecture here – Foley and Smith are free to point out that the obvious contradiction between their claims is a criticism only if we assume that consitency is a virtue, and that would probably be naturalism and Satan speaking. Who knows.

 

Foley has, in fact, written quite a bit on Noah’s flood, dealing e.g. with the rather obvious question of where did all the water go together with one Troy Lacey, apparently “correspondence representative”, whatever that means. Indeed, Foley’s writings cover a wide range of topics, with the common characteristic being that it is all astonishingly inane, that she (unsurprisingly) tends to see creation everywhere – e.g. in the taste of water – and a commitment to the delusion that creationists and scientists are equally sensitive to the evidence but come to different conclusions because they come in with different presuppositions; her commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible, which isn’t a presupposition anyways because the Bible the word of God and the word of God is true, then allows here to just reject that evidence). Here is Foley’s critique of Santa Claus; note that her problem isn’t just the traditional one that children, upon discoverying that Santa isn’t real, could end up questioning the reality of other figures whose reality they shouldn’t question, but that Santa Claus’s behavior and characteristics are unchristian and contrary to scripture. And here is Foley working herself into weird knots trying to explain miracles, which she tries to claim don’t violate the laws of nature, in which case they would, of course, not be miracles.

 

Together with Ken Ham himself and Bodie Hodge, Foley is also the editor of the AiG book The Gender and Marriage War, which we haven’t looked at and neither should you.

 

Diagnosis: As inane as they come. That there may actually be people who think the laughable results of Avery Foley’s quixotic attempts to challenge science, reality, reason and consistency contain some insights to cherish is a damning indictment of Western structures of education.

#2849: Edward 'Ted' Fogarty

And back to the anti-vaccine activists! Ted Fogarty is a radiologist – indeed, he is former Chairman of Radiology at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Assistant Professor at the Heart of America Medical Center – who has deluded himself and perhaps some fellow anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists into thinking that he understands and knows something about vaccines, all to the embarrassment of his profession. And it doesn’t help that he is vocal about expressing his misunderstandings, too, having for instance composed a silly antivaccine rant, posted to the website of the anti-vaccine organization Informed Choice Washington (yet another corollary of Badger’s Law; they do want choice but are excruciatingly resistant to the informed part) in the format of an open letter to the Washington State legislature. And the letter, Philosophical Exemptions as Behavioral Economic Signals of Fraud: An Open Letter is a textbook pseudoscience rant in which Fogarty for instance

 

-       highlights radiologists’ role in diagnosing ASIA, which is a fake disease invented by anti-vaccine activist Yehuda Schoenfield that Fogarty characterizes as a “well described” vaccine injury that he, as a radiologist, is well positioned to diagnose.

-       not only characterizes influenza vaccines as “covert biological warfare” due to what he wrongly perceives as “lack of any safety studies”, but the flu vaccine program as something that can be used to covertly spread slow viruses or prions in the population.

-       posits that many cases of traumatic brain injury are really due to aluminum from vaccines; Fogarty has no evidence for his false claim, but does have Gish gallops, technobabble and findings that have nothing to do with his hypothesis but may sound like they do if you don’t look closely.

 

Fogarty has also tried to argue that mRNA vaccines are “manipulating genomics at a ribosomal level,” which anyone passingly familiar with molecular biology will immediately recognize as meaningless but which his target audience (not people with passing familiarity with molecular biology) will not.

 

As for background, Fogarty has an autistic son whose autism he has wrongly convinced himself is a vaccine injury; more specifically, his son “has an epigenetic risk of neuroimmunologic and neurodevelopmental problems related to metals handling in his body due to Methylene Tetrahydrofolate Reductase genes.” And yes, that is MTHFR pseudoscience in its most crackpot fashion.

 

Nevertheless, Fogarty has, because he does have credentials that might initially sound relevant to those not in the know, been a somewhat sought-after figure in antivaxx circles. He has apparently been able to serve as expert witness for parents bringing action for “vaccine injury”, and serves on the editorial board of James Lyons-Weiler’s antivaccine pseudojournal Science, Public Health Policy & the Law.

 

And of course, Fogarty’s pseudoscience and denialism doesn’t limit itself to vaccines. Fogarty has long been familiar in alternative health circles for his advocacy of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for more or less any condition, including Alzheimer’s and advanced COVID-19, at his business, MoPlatte Hyperbarics. He is also anti-mask, of course.

 

Diagnosis: More antivaxx brainrot, and unlike what Fogarty claims, hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn’t help. But Fogarty is far from a no-one in antivaccine conspiray circles insofar as he has, in addition to a penchant for conspiracy thinking and not being afraid to proclaim loudly on issues he doesn’t understand, has some largely irrelevant credentials.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2848: Michael Flynn

Michael Thomas Flynn is a retired US Army Lieutenant General, advisor for Trump during his 2016 campaign (tasked with improving relations with Russia), National Security Advisor under Trump for some three weeks in 2017 (a disaster), and subsequently an unofficial leader and herald of virtually every conspiracy theory and delusion promoted by the MAGA crowd. Flynn’s involvement with Russian and Turkish agents – and subsequent legal problems (he was ultimately pardoned by Trump) – are discussed here; we’ll set that topic aside for now.

 

Even the Trump administration should have seen the disaster coming (and perhaps they did and that was precisely why they recruited him): Flynn had previously been fired by the DIA in 2014 because he was “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc.” and because he was rather sanguine about facts: apparently, his subortinates would use the label “Flynn facts” to refer to Flynn’s constant stream of dubious assertions.

 

During the 2016 election campaign, Flynn repeatedly led crowds in “Lock her up!” chants and called for Clinton to withdraw from the race, claiming that “if I did a tenth -a tenth- of what she did, I would be in jail today”. Flynn had, at that point, done significantly more than Clinton. During the campaign, Flynn also posted links to numerous pieces of fake news and conspiracy theories about Clinton, including Pizzagate material. Other fake news retweeted by Flynn included:

 

-       that the NYPD had found evidence on Anthony Weiner’s laptop “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life”

-       that the non-binding UN Agenda 21 (yes, of course Flynn would swallow that conspiracy theory hook and sinker) would create a one world church where Christianity was prohibited, and that choosing nationalism was the only way to stop Clinton from implementing it.

-       that a 2009 picture showing Clinton visiting a mosque in Pakistan as a diplomatic courtesy showed Clinton “wearing hijab in solidarity with islamic terrorists.” Commented Flynn: “This is not showing respect. This is showing disrespect for American Values and Principles.”

-       That Florida Democratic senators not only planned but had already voted to impose Islamic Sharia in Florida.

 

He also urged his followers to follow Mike Cernovich, tweeting “Follow Mike @Cernovich He has a terrific book, Gorilla Mindset. Well worth the read.” Whatever Gorilla Mindset is, it is not terrific. Flynn also retweeted the rantings of over anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Jared Wyland.

 

Flynn continued to push fake news during his brief stint as National Security Advisor – much of it proto-QAnon conspiracy theories – claiming for instance that Hillary Clinton “secretly waged war”, that President Obama was a “jihadi” who “laundered” money for Muslim terrorists in Iran, that Joe Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, took part in occult rituals involving bodily fluids and that Clinton’s emails contained information on “Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc”, asking readers to “decide” for themselves based on a “MUST READ” article by the famous fake news site True Pundit.

 

Meanwhile, his son Michael jr., who was apparently Flynn’s chief of staff during the 2016 transition, was also an avid promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory: “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story,” Flynn jr. claimed: “The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it”; the story was of course ‘proven false’ from the start, but Flynn jr., as conspiracy theorists are wont to, has his own standards for ‘proven false’: When certified moron Edgar Maddison Welch showed up at Comet Ping Pong with a gun to free the trapped children, Flynn jr. promptly concluded the gunman was an actor carrying out a “false flag” operation on behalf of the US government. So it goes.

 

Involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election

Flynn is a relatively major figure in most branches of the Stop the Steal movement. On December 18, 2020, after the Electoral College had certified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, Flynn was among the gaggle of lunatics (with Patrick Byrne, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani) who showed up at and were admitted to the White House to quarrel with administrators and lawyers about how to proceed, by various connivances, to overturn the 2020 election; the administrators and lawyers were not particularly impressed by the group’s nonsense ramblings but Trump himself was swayed, promptly tweeting his famous “be there, will be wild” tweet referring to the upcoming January 6 Congressional certification of President Biden to his fans.

 

Also in December, Flynn spoke at a Stop the Steal rally inD.C., where he proclaimed “a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of this country” that would end with Trump’s victory and likened the protesters to the biblical soldiers and priests breaching the walls of Jericho, echoing the rally organizers’ call for “Jericho Marches” to overturn the election result; after the meeting, the largest Three Percenters group announced that they were “ready to enter into battle with General Flynn leading the charge”.

 

Flynn also suggested on Newsmax that Trump should declare martial law and force a “redo” of the election, which Trump lost – indeed, Flynn suggested, just as well, that Trump should “exercise the Extraordinary Powers of his office and declare limited Martial Law to temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections in order to have the military implement a national re-vote that reflects the true will of the people” (perhaps sensing that his recommendations didn’t stay within the confines of the law, Flynn encouraged the crowd to “fight back” and not rely on the courts – “courts aren’t gonna decide who the next president of the United States is gonna be”). The basis for the idea was presumably Phil Waldron’s elaborate conspiracy theory, which Flynn has also explicitly endorsed, that China and Venezuela had taken control of the 2020 voting machines and that Trump should therefore immediately declare a national security emergency to delay the January 6 certification of electors, reject all ballots cast by machine, and have paper ballots secured by U.S. marshals and National Guard troops to conduct a recount. Flynn did at least spend part of the December 2020 speech ranting about voting machines: “Why not look inside these machines? Why? Why not? What are they afraid of? What are they hiding from? They are hiding from something!” Flynn also promoted the conspiracy theories and incoherent ramblings of conspiracy theorists Ivan Raiklin, a long-term associate, and Seth Keshel). He was, of course, also among the speakers at the January 5 Freedom Plaza rallies.

 

When The Congressional January 6 Committee attempted to interview him, Flynn pleaded the Fifth Amendment to every question (including “Do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified morally?”)

 

Indeed, not only was the election stolen, according to Flynn; the conspiracy went as deep as you could possibly imagine. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, was fabricated to distract from the 2020 election – that it was a global thing and started a year before notwithstanding: “Why? Because everything, everything, and this is my truth [note the delectable touch of postmodernist relativism], what I believe, everything is a distraction to what happened on November 3. Everything we hear about Covid, and how Covid started before November 3, it is all meant to control, it is all meant to gain control of a society to be able to force decisions on society, instead of allowing ‘we the people’ to make decisions.” And once you’ve inserted yourself so deeply into the rabbit hole, you might just as well go all the way; Flynn also tried to push conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine, falsely suggesting it was required to get an identification card or to travel, and ultimately plumped for claiming that George Soros, Bill Gates and a couple of others had created COVID-19 to “steal an election” and “rule the world.” (He also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, of course.)

 

And he never gave up. In mid-2024, Flynn was still working hard to consolidate various conspiracy groups, wingnuts and religious fundamentalists (election deniers, anti-mask activists, anti-vaxxers, insurrectionists, the Proud Boys). His organization The America Project advocates for what it characterizes as “election integrity” by poll watching and voter challenges, and e.g. funds the organization One More Mission, which for instance recruited wingnut military veterans and police officers to work at polls for the 2022 United States elections.

 

QAnon

Flynn is a core figure in the QAnon movement and has promoted QAnon messages and ideas consistently since his National Security Advisor days (indeed, several QAnon adherents have speculated that Flynn himself is Q, though Flynn has also sued people accusing him of instigating QAnon). Indeed, Flynn (like Trump himself) endorsed the QAnon movement before it became mainstream and possibly from the start. It was Flynn who, in 2016, introduced and trademarked the ‘digital soldiers’ phrase that would later become a rallying cry for QAnon, as illustrated for instance by the purpose of the 2019 QAnon-organized ‘Digital Soldiers Conference’, where Flynn was a scheduled speaker and whose stated purpose was to prepare “patriotic social media warriors” for the upcoming “digital civil war” (moreover, according to the conference website, the “majority of proceeds from the Digital Soldiers Conference will go to benefit The Mike Flynn Defense Fund”). On Independence Day 2020, Flynn tweeted a video of himself leading others in the oath to QAnon – yes, the “Where we go one, we go all” (also widely known as ‘The Oath of the Digital Soldier’), which, we repeat, is an astonishingly strange declaration for people who accuse others of being ‘sheeple’ and thus really an excellent symbol of the cognitive wherewithal of the idiots who recite it).

 

Flynn subsequently created – together with QAnon mainstay Tracy Diaz – a Digital Soldiers media company that would supposedly be a home for an “insurgency” of “thousands of fellow digital soldiers … [who] have stepped up to fill the void where real journalism once stood” and sell various pieces of QAnon merchandise, and which has later evolved into a sprawling constellation of conspiracy websites and enterprises. The ever-imminent civil war is not supposed to be merely digital, however: In 2021, Flynn warned his audience (and New Hampshire Republican Senate nominee and conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc, who apparently paid for Flynn’s endorsement) that “we’re being marched” to Nazi death camps but asserted that, unlike Holocaust victims, he “would never get on that train.” (He also, of course, repeated his false core belief that “the presidency of the United States of America was stolen. This nation, our nation, experienced a coup”). And in 2022, Flynn apparently teamed up with John Guandolo for Guandolo’s Understanding The Threat training events aimed at law enforcement agencies to “organize communities into operational forces” that can take over their towns, arrest their mayors, and destroy the lives of anyone who objects; by 2024, Flynn had teamed up with domestic terrorist Matt Shea and others to prepare for the election in case it didn’t yield the desired results.

 

During his legal troubles (just a little bit of treason), Flynn and his siblings Joseph and Barbara Redgate set up a defense fund that actively courted various wingnut conspiracy theorists, in particular anti-vaccine activists and Oath Keepers; in his addresses to these fans, Flynn would predictably (following an American tradition among lunatic criminials going back at least to Ike Clanton) portray himself as the victim of injustice and “deep state” plots and as a martyr for whatever conspiracy theory plot his audiences had in mind. After his legal troubles ended with the Trump pardon in 2020, Flynn used leftover funds donated through his website to found, with Patrick Byrne and his brother Joseph, his organization The America Project, which employed a number of Flynn’s family members and which subsequently – to raise further funds – began devoting itself to what it claimed to be protecting children from sexual abuse and trafficking through promoting the QAnon-associated conspiracy theory that a global cabal of pedophiles controls the media and politics. (Money was of course also being used for various attempts to overthrow the 2020 election as well as to fund initiatives like the America First Secretary of State Coalition (AFSOSC), an organization working to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections). We are somewhat unclear about how the America Project is related to Flynn’s organization America’s Future, which has e.g. arranged screenings of QAnon conspiracy films at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and which at least counts leading QAnon influencers and pizzagate conspiracy theorists Liz Crokin, Mike Smith and Lara Logan as prominent members (the board of directors includes e.g. Ivan Raiklin).

 

The following year, Flynn frenziedly toured various QAnon shows – sometimes wearing a wristband with the QAnon logo – repeating much of the same nonsense, for instance:

 

-       In his first post-pardon interview in 2020, with Brannon Howse’s fringe conspiracy show Worldview Weekend, Flynn repeated his baseless claims of election fraud (“probably the greatest fraud our country has experienced in our history”) and insisted that Trump actually won “by a massive landslide and he’ll be inaugurated this January”

-       In an appearance on the QAnon-affiliated podcast Bards of War, hosted Scott Kesterson, a QAnon influencer who has admitted to stealing thousands of dollars from a woman dying of cancer and her family, Flynn stated, again (and again without a shred of evidence), that Trump had easily won the election, and committed himself to the easily debunked conspiracy theory that “there’s more dead voters in Pennsylvania than soldiers buried on the hallowed grounds in Gettysburg”.

-       At a QAnon youtube show in 2021, Flynn falsely (and unsurprisingly) claimed that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag type operation.”

 

During a QAnon conference in Dallas in May 2021 (“For God & Country: Patriot Roundup”), Flynn received some attention for apparently supporting a Myanmar-style (“Minamar”) coup in the US; and although he tried to backpedal from that one, he later expressed similar sympathies to using violent means to replace Biden (due to voter fraud, “you reinstate the guy [Trump] and you get rid of the guy [Biden] that’s there”) on QAnon supporter Ann Vandersteel’s show. He also reaffirmed his commitment to the nonsense idea that “Trump won. He won the popular vote, and he won the Electoral College vote” in the 2020 election, of course, and reappeared, with the roster of QAnon inluencers and sympathetic lawmakers and candidates like Sonny Borrelli and Jim Marchant, at various follow-up events.

 

There’s a detailed account of the early years of Flynn’s QAnon involvement here (another good source is the one discussed here).

 

And like many QAnon adherents, Flynn has veered into anti-semitism. In March 2023, he endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory video claiming that President John F. Kennedy had warned about a “Khazarian mafia” that secretly controls the world. In August 2023, he received some well-deserved criticism for suggesting that Jewish parents willingly surrendered their children to the Nazis during the Holocaust.

 

Though he is usually a steadfast promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, Flynn has also said – in a private exchange with Lin Wood – that QAnon was “a set up and a disinformation campaign to make people look like a bunch of kooks” (well, it certainly hits the stated mark), and he accused “the Left” or the CIA (whatever) of being behind the campaign.

 

Members of his family also appear to be “enmeshed” in QAnon and have been caught swearing the “digital soldier oath”.

 

ReAwaken America

Flynn’s recent efforts have been directed toward spreading the gospel of Christian nationalism and preparing his followers to wage spiritual warfare (and presumably other, more tangible types of warfare), starting by taking over local politics. In practice, Flynn has managed to tap into the recent reactionary, dominionist evangelical turn in American religious life (prophets, demons and spiritual warfare) to integrate it with Groyper-style wingnuttery and QAnon (and all other sorts of) conspiracy theories. Flynn is, possibly somewhat unwittingly (his is no great intellect), one of the primary architects of contemporary American Christian nationalism.

 

An important vehicle for those unification efforts has been the deranged sideshow the ReAwaken America Tour, which was launched by Flynn and Clay Clark after the 2021 coup attempt, which is sponsored by Charisma News (a proponent of New Apostolic Reformation) and which is dedicated to promoting Trump’s Big Lie, Christian Nationalism, anti-semitism and brazenly pro-Hitler propaganda, incitements to violence, and virtually any conspiracy theory and delusion promoted by any wingnut alive today, in particular anti-vaccine conspiracy theories but also paranoia about e.g. technologically advanced “mermaids and water people”. The tour events, held mostly at churches, would mix wingnut politics and conspiracy theories with revivalist-style religious fervor, and would provide a microphone to virtually every loosely MAGA-affiliated conspiracy theorist, fanatic and dingbat of any significance, from Donald Trump, jr. and Ken Paxton to Mike Lindell, Alex Jones, Greg Locke, Liz Crokin, Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, jr. And Flynn seems to endorse it all; in 2022, Flynn was quick to join the chorus of deranged wingnut shitposters who tried to deny that there was even a war going on in Ukraine instead of some sort of elaborate fake ploy staged by the Biden administration – or perhaps Obama, who according to Flynn is “the second coming of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong combined” (there is some details missing on how exactly the comparisons are supposed to work) and whop is probably pulling the puppet threads holding it all up.

 

Flynn himself used the Reawaken podium to endorse a dominionist brand of Christian nationalism and reject religious liberty: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God,” said Flynn. Flynn appears to think the sentiment reflects the Constitution, but then Flynn has obviously never read the Constituion but rather adopted an idea about what it says based on his own imagination (“the word ‘Creator’ is in the Constitution four times”, says Flynn) and nonsense derived from David Barton.

 

Flynn’s relationship with Alex Jones, by the way, is apparently one of mutual respect, starting with Flynn noting that “That guy’s absolutely right on the money” when Jones (back in 2008 or so) asserted that government-aligned groups are “going to stage false flags – unless we expose them and stop them – to blame us and trigger this. And they’re going to make moves that they believe will elicit a civil war. This isn’t coming. It’s here. They are going to try this.”

 

And yes, he’s a heavy promoter of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Indeed, Flynn is a “founding member” and president of the advisory board for 4thPURE, a dating and community site for anti-vaxxers or, according to itself, an “online community where health-conscious individuals who have rejected the COVID-19 vaccine can connect and find everything they need – friendships, dating, curated news [!], service providers, doctors [!], blood donors, fertility options, jobs, shopping, events, etc.” and whose explicit goal is “preserving the gene pool”.

 

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helena, Flynn was an influential promoter of conspiracy theories to the effect that “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for the hurricane’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

 

That said, Flynn’s current power over and influence in the fringier circles of the rigthwing circus is hard to overstate. Despite being a symbolic military leader for deranged QAnon extremists who believe they are controlled by aliens and that China put Satanic microchips in vaccines, he retained his close ties to both Trump and powerful political figures, and his endorsement is apparently considered invaluable by wingnut and QAnon-adjacent political candidates, such as Amanda Chase and Mark Finchem. He also seems to take a prominent part in more or less any wingnut movement or organization that gets at all off the ground; he is for instance a key ally of Moms For Liberty and chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Sarasota, Florida.

 

The movie

The movie Flynn – about and starring Flynn himself – was released in April 2024. Even fundie-oriented outlets characterized it as hagiographic, pointing out that “the film’s goal seems to be to rewrite history and bolster Flynn's credibility as a spiritual leader” and portray Flynn as a victim of ‘the deep state’ (“I’m surprised they haven’t killed me,” says Flynn), and that it “mythologizes its subject as a renegade who perseveres against all odds [“He’s the only person who could have withstood this type of evil, this unfathomable domestic evil, and beat it, too,” Flynn’s sister, Clare Flynn Eckert, says in the film] standing up to malevolent forces in defense of ‘the truth.’ ” The movie has been promoted by the usual roster of fundie wingnuts and conspiracy theorists, such as Eric Metaxas. Flynn himself declared that the movie is “timeless” and should be taught in law schools.

 

Miscellaneous

In December 2023, the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame nominated Flynn for induction in 2024. Several Hall of Fame board members quickly resigned in protest.

 

His 2022 book The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare (coauthored with one Boone Cutler), reviewed here, is an updated take on the classic “paranoid style in American politics” and paranoia about a one-world government fomenting a Communist revolution. The book claims for instance that social media platforms are powerful weapons that are being used against the public by state and non-state actors as “a global PSYOP agenda to consolidate power using digital platforms to affect everyone on macro and micro levels”. (Yes, there are justified and serious worries about aspects of social media, but Flynn predictably misses the mark completely to launch into incoherent conspiracy drivel instead).

 

Ironically (he would never recognize the irony, of course), Flynn is not above using legal thuggery to try to silence his critics.

 

There is a fair but incomplete Michael Flynn resource here.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most influential people in the US today when it comes to briding the gap between incoherently lunatic conspiracy theories and real political power, Michael Flynn wields influence with people in power and is simultaneously viewed as some sort of military general and Messiah by QAnon crowds, a crowd whose core beliefs he genuinely seems to share. It’s hard to imagine a more serious threat to civilization than him.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2847: Bill Flores

Yes, wingnuts in Congress, and although Bill Flores –  the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 17th congressional district from 2011 to 2021 – is out, he still deserves a mention (he is currently the Vice Chair of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)).

 

In most ways, Flores was your typical fundie wingnut. A champion of the oil and gas industry (a significant contributor to his campaigns), he has for instance submitted bills that would prevent the Interior Department from issuing any new regulations on the fracking industry, and he has been a consistent opponent of gay marriage: at a 2015 meeting with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Flores for instance suggested that gay marriage will, through some undisclosed mechanism, lead to a breakdown of the family model and an increased number of single-parent-led households, which would again contribute to poverty and then to the breakdown of America through unrest and riots like the Baltimore riots. Then he said, falsely, that 80% of Americans at the time opposed gay marriage. In other words, when he isn’t grasping at imaginary straws, he’s just baldfacedly lying.

 

Flores subsequently participated in a Capitol prayer service warning that God would punish America for legalizing same-sex marriage, with Flores complaining that “we are truly a troubled nation” in which Christians are being ridiculed and persecuted for defending the family and their faith – ‘persecuted’ meaning of course other people being allowed to marry people I don’t want them to marry.

 

Flores was of course also one of the members of the House to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, the filing at SCOTUS to challenge the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Texas on the grounds that the signatories didn’t fancy the Pennsylvania election results (and which was, of course, thrown out because Texas lacked standing), something that on its own is sufficient to earn him an entry here.

 

Diagnosis: Oh, well: He’s completely mainstream. And that his incoherently insane nonsense is, in fact, mainstream is absolutely terrifying.

 

#2846: Aaron Fleszar

This is a relatively minor one, but Aaron Fleszar is an internet conspiracy theorist who has, for a while, been haunting various comment sections and webpages with incoherent rants about global conspiracies. As Fleszar sees it, there is an organized and secret conspiracy consisting of a cabal of the world’s richest people lurking behind the world’s official governments, and whose goal it is to implement a New World Order. Interpreted slightly allegorically, that suggestion (perhaps minus the ‘secret’ part) might not be too far off, but according to Fleszar, it “appears their goal is to implement socialism, monopolize their industries, and collapse the dollar in an effort to create a one world currency. It sounds like science fiction, but from what I discovered, they came close to achieving it with the election of Obama.” You might wonder why those rich people would try to implement socialism; the answer, of course, is that Fleszar is paranoid and has entertains some vague negative associations with the word ‘socialism’ – so socialism it must be.

 

Then, when it comes to the means for carrying out the operation, things take a somewhat surprising turn: “There is an enormous organization online behind an endless number of work-at-home opportunities, affiliate marketing, and get-rich-quick schemes. This group is positioned to cash in with a tanking economy.” So to make the dots connect, Fleszar trawls various websites, looking at photos and identifying random people (in particular online marketers) in pictures of what he deems to be relevant businesses (“These online marketers operating in code are masters at deception and search engine optimization. Like they do for their products, it appears they controlled the conversation, the feedback, the headlines, and the finance of the last presidential election”) with famous politicians, CEOs and media moguls that the people in the pictures do not really resemble. And then he identifies them with people on FBI Wanted Terrorist list (so the FBI must be among the few good guys left?). In other words: If you think there are plenty of different people in the pictures you find all over the internet, you are wrong: There are only a few – and they are internet marketing consultants, CEOs, politicians, stock photo models and terrorists all at the same time – and they are in a conspiracy to oppress you! Give Fleszar a random picture of people, and he’ll find you Soros and most of the Al-Qaeda leadership.

 

And then there are the obvious clues, such as this one from a decade back: “In my strongest opinion, Osama Bin Laden isn’t only a name, it’s a code, a riddle. I believe that Osama represents Obama and Biden (Bi)n la(den.)” (what exactly he means by the word ‘represents’ is unclear). As a curiosity, Fleszar’s conspiracy theory surrounding Osama’s death in 2011 does in fact have a disconcertingly perceptive slant: the whole announcement that Osama had been killed was apparently a desperate ploy to “interrupt Celebrity Apprentice” because “[c]learly, Trump is a danger to the Republican establishment”.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he’s bought it all. No matter what silly idea you come up with, as long as it has a paranoid conspiracy angle, Fleszar will bite. His influence is probably limited, however.