American Monster — Mike Flynn

Sixth in a series on US criminals accelerating global fascism

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“The question that should be posed to the Secretary of Defense — ‘What are you doing about this renegade retired lt. general, that is a great mystery to all of us.’ Mr. Flynn should be brought back on active duty and given a trial for offenses that I believe he has committed.”—Retired four-star General Paul D. Eaton, on Vice TV’s ‘The Search for Q’, Season Two

In Season Two of the Vice TV special, ‘The Search for Q’, General Paul D. Eaton tells the producers that “Mike Flynn at one time was a very respected General officer…” and then he is asked if there is a chance that Flynn has been psyoped.

“He sat down to break bread with Vladimir Putin so there were plenty of opportunities,” he said.

He also explained how psychological operations occur and said that Flynn’s ‘Reawaken Tour’ is ‘dangerous.’

“When you’re talking about a reinforcing function of a big tent revival — ‘reawaken’ — call it what you will, that is an reindoctrinating event. When you talk about Flynn generating a digital army, every one of those people is a foot soldier available to General ex-Flynn — that’s the scary part of all,” he said.

On the Frontline PBS special, ‘Flynn’s Holy War’, which shows how Flynn — the former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump — went from being an “elite solider overseas to waging a spiritual war” in America, there’s a moment where he is asked by an AP reporter about his brother Charles Flynn. Rather than answer the reporter’s question, he flew into a rage on camera and vowed never to talk to another AP reporter again.

Gen. Charles Flynn received his fourth star the same day Trump pardoned Michael T. Flynn, who was convicted for the federal crime of lying to the FBI about his contact with a Russian ambassador in the week’s leading up to Trump’s inauguration. Flynn served less than a month as Trump’s national security adviser before resigning in disgrace. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI investigators about his communications with the Russian ambo.

Flynn, who previously served as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, was the first US officer to visit Russian military intelligence’s (GRU) headquarters. He was forced out of the DIA in 2014, and by 2015, he was paid to attend a gala for the Russian propaganda outlet RT, where he dined with Putin.

In my Byline Supplement article with Vatnik Soup creator Pekka Kallioniemi, I asked him why “QAnon”, “Mike Flynn”, and “Marjorie Taylor Greene” ended up grouped together in back to back Twitter threads, and he said that happened when he was researching the “Grayzone”.

“I see this infamous 2015 dinner, which was attended by several people from the United States, including Michael Flynn, and Jill Stein, and it’s kind of suspicious to see influential American people dining with Vladimir Putin after the annexation of Crimea,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. I thought, how is this happening?”

That research led to him reporting on the former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s Russian and Turkish ties, but Kallioniemi said he also discovered Marjorie Taylor Greene’s QAnon-spouting video clips, before she was elected to Congress from Georgia.

“The MAGA gang seems to be involved in a lot of conspiratorial stuff,” he said. “And, of course, now they're trying to erase it, because it might look bad if you're a representative in the Senate or Congress.

Or hoping to be president, some day.

‘Lying on Purpose’ - Exposing a ‘Vatnik Soup’

By 2016, Flynn joined the Trump campaign, where he infamously led supporters in a ‘Lock Her Up’ chant directed at Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention.

It is worth noting, Charles Flynn — who currently commands 90,000 troops in the US Army Pacific — was the subject of congressional testimony from Gen. William Walker, who said Flynn and Gen. Walter Piatt delayed the uniformed guards’ response to quell the violence of the January 6 Insurrection due to “optics”.

Curiously, Charles Flynn has not publicly expressed concern about the optics of his brother taking money from Russia — which he was forced to return — to celebrate the Kremlin’s lie factory RT’s 10th anniversary beside Putin; tweeting Russian propaganda from Prigozhin’s troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, which attacked the 2016 election; posting anti-Semitic tweets and conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate — a lie about Hillary Clinton and high-ranking democrats running a child sex ring, during the Trump campaign; and working on behalf of Turkey leaders to delegitimize and potentially kidnap a US-based Turkish cleric, who was a rival of Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn was paid to represent Turkey’s interests during the Trump campaign, and his partner in the Flynn Intel Group Bijan Rafiekian was convicted in 2019 for conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent, a judge later overturned the jury’s conviction.

The Frontline special follows Flynn as he spreads “Christian nationalism.”

The most important reporting on Mike Flynn is being done by my podcast partner Jim Stewartson, who is being sued by Mike Flynn for defamation. Jim found a video of Flynn performing a cultic prayer in a Christian church, and when he posted his findings, Flynn was rejected by many Christian faith leaders. The prayer was written by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who was a cult leader in the ‘80s. Here is that video…

As OSINT investigative researcher Brent Allpress wrote, “Jim Stewartson outed Mike Flynn as a PsyOps plagiarist using second-hand cult content. Heresy doesn’t win the Conservative Christian vote. Bad faith by Flynn the False Prophet.”

Jim also found video of Flynn being awarded a semi-automatic weapon in Yuba City, California — the Church of Glad Tidings — and upon being handed the weapon, Flynn said, “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, DC.” On RadPod, Jeff Sharlet told us that the church where that event occurred no longer displays the cross and instead displays swords on the altar. 🥺

Most recently, legal scholar Laurence Tribe, four star US Army General Ret. Barry R. McCaffrey, and the Auschwitz Memorial Museum quote-tweeted Jim’s work reporting on Mike Flynn blaming Jewish people for being exterminated in WWII because there were “thousands of them and not many guards.”

Jim’s reporting garnered him international coverage, including in the Jerusalem Post, which wrote:

Michael Flynn's history of Holocaust distortion and antisemitism

This is not the first time Flynn has sparked backlash for both Holocaust distortion and perceived antisemitism. 

In 2022, Flynn compared supporters of the US far-right with the victims of the Holocaust and also said that the Jews should have resisted more against being sent on the trains to Auschwitz. 

At a 2021 rally, Flynn came under fire after calling for the US to have just one religion.

‘Lock Her Up’

As I reported in American Monster 1, much of the Trump campaign was deploying recycled slogans and tropes Paul Manafort used to get Yanukovych installed for Putin.

Recall, the words Flynn spoke at the 2016 RNC:

“We do not need a reckless president who believes she is above the law… lock her up, that’s right, lock her up… If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today… Crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now.”

Within 12 months of that speech, Flynn would be accused of planning a kidnapping, secretly working for a foreign government, and found guilty of lying to the FBI.

So how did a disgraced, fired lt. general — convicted for lying to the FBI — become what thousands of Christians are warning is a “false prophet”?…

Russia, Russia, Russia.

Flynn was a Democrat, who grew up in a large family in Rhode Island and became a military maverick. As Gen. Eaton noted, he had been decorated and celebrated. After his firing, he formed Flynn Intel Group and among his first clients was the Russian-based cyber security firm, Kaspersky Lab — banned in multiple Western governments due to concerns it may have been used to infiltrate computer systems for the Kremlin. Flynn began lobbying for the firm after he was fired.

He also began promoting Russian talking points, suggesting the US should work with Russia to fight ISIS.

The RT event, where he was paid $45,000 and seated to the right of Putin, was two months before he joined the Trump campaign. And while on the Trump campaign, he began lobbying for Turkey.

At a meeting between Trump and President Obama, Obama warned Trump not to hire Mike Flynn. Trump disregarded that advice, and Flynn began working with Trump’s transition team, while holding meetings with Russians.

It’s worth recalling that President Obama placed sanctions on Russian oligarchs to retaliate for hacking the 2016 election.

While Trump tweeted fawning notes to Putin, Flynn — soon to be national security advisor — was offering promises of sanctions relief after being paid by Russia, according to court documents.

When Flynn’s phone calls to the Russian ambo Sergey Kislyak were revealed publicly, Mike Pence denied the calls. Flynn made the grave mistake of lying to the FBI, who knew he was lying because they had intercepted the calls.

Flynn had been operating out of the White House as an unregistered foreign agent, who took money from multiple foreign adversaries, before cutting a deal with the FBI, pleading guilty and offering to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

‘General Flynn Was Compromised’

In her testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said Flynn was “neutering” American sanctions and undermining the Obama administration sanctions after Russia's attack on the 2016 election.

“We believed Gen. Flynn was compromised in respect to the Russians,” said Yates, who said she warned the White House. “That created a compromised situation — a situation where the national security advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.”

The potential for blackmail — whether it be demands for the names of spies or forcing the lifting of sanctions — created a national security risk and Yates said the warnings went unheeded.

Then she was fired for not enforcing the Muslim ban, it would still be a few weeks before Flynn was forced to resign — and it was only after the Washington Post leaked evidence of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak.

Just days after he was pardoned, Flynn tweeted that Trump should declare Marshall Law, and a day before the January 6 Insurrection, Flynn was quoted at the hotel across the street from the White House stating, "People are willing to die".

It’s worth noting, Flynn was protected there along with his cohort in extremism Roger Stone (aka American Monster 2) by Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, whose leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

As my podcast partner Jim Stewartson says, “Who were they conspiring with?”

In the years between his firings, calling for Martial Law, and promoting anti-Semitism and Pizzagate, Flynn has been connected to the QAnon operation to radicalize people to believe lies about democrats — CNN even published a video of Flynn and his family appearing to take the QAnon oath.

Each weekend, he can be found holding big tent revivals with QAnon followers, Christian nationalists, anti-vaxxers, election deniers, and recently, promoting the film ‘Sound of Freedom’ — an indoctrination event that is mainstreaming QAnon, according to radicalization expert Dr. Mia Bloom.

Although I am saddened by the fall of Mike Flynn, I am also aware of the dangers of desperate men. Flynn’s brother Joe, in tweeting for my arrest, triggered an onslaught of death threats and psychological terrorism that now exist in a case file I have turned over to the FBI.

American Tragedy

I often think about the series of events that could prompt someone to turn away from democracy, and at what point they could have said ‘no.’

This series is titled American Monster, but I think of Flynn more as an American Tragedy.

As someone who claims a belief in God, I think how pleased God would be if Flynn would unburden his soul and offer the Justice Department a full accounting of his actions of the past decade, a truth and reconciliation of sorts.

Instead, he refuses to even answer such basic patriotic questions as ‘do you believe in the peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America’ and ‘do you believe the violence of January 6 was justified” when Liz Cheney questioned him as part of the January 6 Committee Hearings.

As he sues the US government, the DOJ, the FBI, and the government branch of Jim Stewartson — while continuing to radicalize Americans into Christian Nationalism, which prominent Christian leaders continue to warn against, I often think of a French war movie I watched a few months ago, Weekend At Dunkirk.

In the film, actor Jean-Paul Belmondo is transporting a casualty of war. His friend says, ‘Don’t worry, you get used to it.’ Belmondo says, ‘I never want to get used to to it.’

He says he doesn’t want to be like the soldiers who get used to war and start to like it.

At 64, Flynn is waging a holy war — using tactics he learned about in previous wars.

“Fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root.”-Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

We must acknowledge that these radicalization efforts and indoctrination events led by Flynn — where conspiracy theories are fanned in the name of God and Country — are to kill truth, create chaos, destabilization, fear, dehumanization, disruptions, and ultimately, violence — accelerating global authoritarianism to overthrow the post-World War II liberal world order.

Conspiracy theories are weapons of war…

QAnon lies created a cult to be weaponized to violence. We saw that cult on January 6.

Just days after Flynn ranted about drag queen hour at an event titled the Election Crime Bureau, I learned about a 27-year-old who murdered a mother of nine in Lake Arrowhead, Ca, for displaying a pride flag — one of more than 350 anti-LGBTQ+ attacks across the country this year, according to GLAAD. Ginning up violent rhetoric against the gay community is a fascist trope — it was done one hundred years ago in the lead up to Hitler seizing power.

“We have about 14 months before the election… and I can’t tell you we’re gonna have an election. I’m not… The possibilities are no election, national emergency, or declaration of some other pandemic.”—Mike Flynn

“I am tired of Putin threatening my country using Mike Flynn’s mouth.”—Jim Stewartson, #ArrestMikeFlynn

I write about monsters who are accelerating global fascism, but I also write about heroes — those committed to doing the labor of democracy.

I believe the living monsters in this series are about to get some karmic shock.

In the end, the evil people always devour each other.

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(Above, Flynn pleading the Fifth in response to Liz Cheney’s questioning for the January 6 Committee hearings)

To read the previous American Monster reports, here is a link to American Monster 5:

And here is a link to American Monster 1 - 4:

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