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
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